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)

Should history be compulsory to 16?

 

Medieval but not European for a change: the world famous examination system of imperial China under the Song Dynasty (960 - 1279)

So in a previous post, I explored what the History Curriculum for Key Stage 3 (11 - 14 year olds) is like in mainstream UK schools. There I argued that despite the way that politicians and the media often caricature it, its a lot broader, diverse and more enriching than just a narrow fixation on Henry VIII and Hitler. That's not to say that history teaching in lower secondary school (what folks across the Pond would call Middle School) does not have its problems, but its not in the state of general decay that a lot of people think it is.

But when we get to the teaching of history at Key Stage 4 (14 - 16 years old), when pupils are being prepared for the standardised exams known as GCSEs that they take at the end of Key Stage 4 when they are 15 - 16, we encounter problems of a different kind. Indeed, I think its here that those who complain about the curriculum being all about sixteenth century England and the Second World War are slightly more justified in their criticisms.

Now I may need to remind my North American and Continental European readers that, highly unusually among first world countries, in the UK any kind of formal study of history stops being compulsory at the age of 14. In England, about 47% of 15 - 16 year olds sit GCSE history exams in June every year. That's still a very large number, indeed significantly larger than was the case 20 years ago, but that still means that GCSE history is a course that less than half of British children take. Thus for a lot of people, including politicians, journalists, academic historians, educationalists and, last but not least, a minority of secondary school history teachers, the biggest problem with GCSE history is that its optional.

Here I must say where I stand on this. I do not support making GCSE history compulsory. This may seem odd for some of you. I am after all an lifelong obsessive enthusiast for the subject, who studied history at GCSE, A Level, undergraduate degree level and master's degree level. I am also a trainee history teacher and a paid-up member of the Historical Association. And to state the obvious, I am writing these words on my very own history blog. So why should I be arguing for something that's surely going against my professional interests? Arguably, in the eyes of some, this would make me a traitor to my subject, worthy of being tarred and feathered.

The reasons why are as follows. The first is that we all need to show a little self-awareness. I am all too aware from teaching children in two mainstream, non-selective schools that most children are not at all like I was when I was their age. The people who are clamouring from the rooftops for history to be compulsory till 16, if not 18, are people like myself and need to realise this. And the fact that most teenagers don't have wide-ranging knowledge and intellectual curiosity for the past can't simply be blamed on the quality of history teaching or that they can drop it at the age of 14. 

We've got to remember that factors outside of schools contribute so much too. To go from my own experience, I was reading about historical subjects as wide ranging as Alexander the Great, the Romans, Feudal Japan, the Aztecs and Incas, the British Empire and the World Wars from the age of 8. I obsessively looked at the globe in my room and at books of maps, finding out where everything was and who controlled which countries at any given time. I was also taken to ancient sites, castles, palaces and museums by my parents. Whether my passion for the past is innate, a product of my middle class upbringing or the result of something else entirely I don't know. Though I am pretty sure its not a result of the the history teaching I've received. While I remember it was always very good, from primary school through to degree level, I'd never say it was ever the main reason why I loved the subject. And most of my substantive knowledge of history does not come from formal study of any kind, but from reading for pleasure. Disciplinary knowledge (use of evidence, source analysis, reasoning with historical concepts) has been where good teaching has really made the difference for me. I'm sure many professional historians could say similar. Indeed, there are a few who admit to having found school history boring. This isn't to cast doubt on the ability of good teachers at secondary level to inspire a passion for the past in pupils - after all, that's part of the reason why I'm in the job.

Now this part of the discussion is perhaps completely missing the point. I don't think anyone is arguing for a compulsory history GCSE because we need more historians. Let's not forget that there are proponents of every other non-core subject (geography, music, art, PE, drama etc) who would love to see their numbers bolstered. And if the real aim of the game were to inspire a passion for history among the youth, then surely history GCSE would not need to eb made compulsory anyway?

The reasons why people support compulsory history at GCSE really are twofold:

1. It provides invaluable transferrable skills to help the younger generation in the world of further study, work and adult life.
2. A more historically-informed public makes for better citizens.

The transferrable skills is the one I have the least time for. Don't get me wrong. I think that actual historical reasoning is an invaluable thing to have learned, and not just if you want to become a professional historian, a history teacher or anyone professionally involved with history in any way. Being able to weigh up different testamentary accounts of what happened is of course invaluable to the lawyer, and thinking about how multiple causes and factors can lead to an event makes for good journalism. And just generally, historical thinking allows you to look at contemporary society in a more critical, long term perspective. It also enables you to understand how interpretations of the past, which we encounter all the time in politics and the media, come about and how to look at them with a critical eye too. At the same time, historical thinking is a huge challenge to teach and learn, and as any history teacher knows, even more challenging to assess using standardised testing rubrics. Furthermore, all the elements of historical reasoning are encountered through the Key Stage 3 curriculum, when history is still compulsory.

Then we come to the generic skills that are easiest to learn, easiest to assess and most desirable to employers of all shapes and sizes. Stuff like coming up with a structured argument, analysing evidence, evaluation etc. These have very little to do specifically with history. Evaluating views is something you have to do if you take any humanities subject at GCSE, like Geography or Religious Studies. Likewise, questions that require you to analyse evidence are sure to come up on any Biology, Physics or Chemistry paper. And essay-writing is fundamental to English Language and Literature, which are the core, compulsory subjects par excellence. If the case for studying history were to be reduced to these, then we would be doing a massive disservice to the subject. Reducing secondary education, especially but by no means exclusively in the humanities, to the acquisition of generic, transferrable skills for work and future study is of course a huge problem that I don't have the space to tackle here. Fortunately others have already done so. Indeed, Michael Fordham, a veteran history teacher and tutor at Cambridge's Institute for Continuing Education, has made it his mission to fight against genericism in the world of secondary education. 

The latter reason is where the case for complusory history to the age of 16 might appear stronger, but its also where it gets most politically-charged. There's the argument, going back to Cicero in the first century BC, that the study of history is essential to being a good citizen. Indeed, that's one of the reasons why the history is a  compulsory subject from the ages of 5 - 14 (Key Stages 1, 2, 3) in the UK. It is also for that reason that many people end up asking the question "why stop there, then?" They argue that surely the children of today will be better adult citizens tomorrow if they continue to study history till at least the age of 16, or indeed to the very end of their secondary schooling. 

Yet when it comes to the exact purpose of this, there are essentially two different views on this. 

One is an essentially nationalistic view. Children need to study history because they need to learn how great the UK is and why they should cherish their British citizenship. This is essentially the argument Michael Gove put forward back in the early 2010s, when he set out his master plan for root and branch reform of the history curriculum. Gove believed, and presumably still does today, that children need to know about the UK's ancient and unique traditions of parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, religious tolerance and individual liberty. History in schools, according to him, "ought to celebrate the distinguished role of these islands in the history of the world" and portray Britain as "a beacon of liberty for others to emulate." Gove's main attention was focused on history at Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3 (7 - 14 years old), where he resolutely failed to implement his vision and ended up with a curriculum fundamentally similar to the one before. He was also supportive of the idea of compulsory history at GCSE, lamenting in one of his keynote speeches that pupils get to drop the subject at 14. Gove neither succeeded in radically reforming the GCSE nor making it compulsory either, though he did succeed in boosting the numbers taking it through the English Baccalaureate scheme. Under this, schools were given ratings according to how many pupils were taking GCSEs in academic subjects, namely English Language and Literature, Mathematics, Combined or Triple Science, a Foreign Language (Ancient or Modern), and a Humanity (History or Geography). In practice, this has meant that in all English state schools hoping to be rated "Good" or "Outstanding" by OFSTED (the government inspectorate for schools), the top 90% of pupils have been told they have to choose either History or Geography at GCSE. On this account, Michael Gove maybe deserves some credit for the currently very high number of pupil studying history at GCSE. In 2019, 47% of 15 - 16 year olds in England sat History GCSE exams, compared to less than a third in 2011. As a history teacher, I generally think this is one of the better things to come out of Gove's bungled reforms, though it does highlight a lot of the problems that would arise should history become compulsory. 

The second variant is a more progressive, left-wing one. Under this perspective, pupils need to study history until the end of their compulsory schooling in order to understand the roots of modern day injustices and try and fight for change. A key moment here was Black Lives Matter, especially the toppling of the seventeenth century slave trader Edward Colston's statue in Bristol on 7th June 2020. This generated a public debate over the UK's imperial history and how it should be remembered in the twenty-first century. Many people saw the school history curriculum as being at the heart of the solution to the current ignorance and amnesia. For example, Sam Freedman, an expert on educational policy, tweeted in response to Colston's fall "days like today are why I think history should be a compulsory subject to 16. You can't participate in the present if you don't understand the past." Indeed, before Colston's bronze likeness was taken for a swim in the Bristol Channel and just a week after the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd catalysed it all, an online petition was presented to Parliament. It demanded that history be made compulsory at GCSE, and that the history of Britain's involvement in slavery, colonialism and racism be taught. Needless to say, it was rejected.  

Ultimately, as I've said before with the closely related issue of what should be on the Key Stage 3 curriculum, I'm in agreement with neither. To allow either side of the political spectrum to tightly prescribe the content of the history curriculum to any age group, based on their own ideological version of British history seems highly dangerous. R.A Butler, the Minister for Education under the National Government during WW2, who essentially created secondary education in England and Wales as we know it today with the Education Act of 1944, had the foresight to see the dangers in this. Winston Churchill wanted the central government to prescribe the curriculum for history and other subjects - "tell the children that Wolfe won Quebec" is what he said to Butler. Michael Gove and his fellow travellers would applaud Churchill for this today. But Butler successfully resisted this, and it was only after the 1988 Educational Reform Act that a National Curriculum for history began to be developed. And as I've said before, in practice this has given English state schools a lot of autonomy over what history content their pupils learn at Key Stages 1, 2 and 3 and long may that continue. 

And reforming the content that pupils learn at GCSE/ Key Stage 4 is much less straight forward that people might think anyway. In practice, what actual historical content pupils study for their history GCSEs is dictated by what periods and topics the four exam boards (Edexcel, AQA, OCR and Eduqas) offer. Edexcel is a for-profit organisation (owned by the publishing company Pearson), while AQA, OCR and Edquas are private charities under the law. All four are in competition with each other and are essentially driven by market forces. Thus they offer whatever content secondary school history departments across England are most comfortable teaching, not what Westminster and Whitehall dictate. While some people want to the government to stop the outsourcing of GCSE exams to private companies and would like to see a single public-funded examboard, until this happens it effectively puts the dampers on any kind of radical reform of GCSE curricula. And that, by extension, removes part of the impetus for a compulsory history GCSE, as what's currently on offer from the main examboards is not the historical content that any of supporters of a compulsory history GCSE on the right or the left would want to see. More about that another time.

Now I'm going to stop waffling and really cut to the chase. I simply don't think compulsory history to 16 is right on the principle of freedom of choice. Obviously pupils need GCSEs in English, Maths and Science if they're going to be at all employable, but beyond that they should have freedom to choose which subjects they like. But more importantly, even if complusory history to 16 was the right idea in the abstract, I don't think its at all feasible in practice. 

I have not been a teacher for very long at all (two school terms as a trainee). But already from teaching in two very good but very normal London state schools, I know that compulsory history would be detrimental for many pupils. In my Key Stage 3 classes (11 - 14 years old), when history is still compulsory, I've taught pupils with the reading age of an 8 year old, refugees who can barely speak English and pupils with all kinds of other complex learning needs. For these pupils, being in mainstream education is itself an immense challenge. What matters for them is that they can get 5 grades 9 - 4 (A* - C in the old parlance) at GCSE, including English and Maths, so that they can succeed in adult life. Everything else for them really is an added bonus at best. Forcing them to do history at GCSE could very well be a nightmare for them. Alternatively, you could say that since even the core subjects they have to take already (especially English) place such huge demands on their literacy as is, perhaps having a humanity in the mix is a good thing as it helps build and reinforce those cross-curricular literacy skills. Indeed they might find it more interesting and fun writing essays about the Harrying of the North or the Cuban Missiles Crisis than "Macbeth" or "Pride and Prejudice." But alternatively, that subject that lights the spark of their interest and helps them build their literacy skills might be volcanoes and earthquakes, comparing Christianity and Islam or Greek mythology. Once again, while I can totally agree that studying a humanity (besides English Literature if we're counting it as one) is invaluable and something at all GCSE students should do, it shouldn't have to be history. Geography, Religious Studies and (where it is offered) Classical Civilisation are just as worthwhile. Indeed, and really I ought to have made this argument before, if we make history compulsory at GCSE why not just make all mainstream humanities subjects compulsory, as indeed they are in those countries where history is compulsory till school leaving age.  

Now for the vast majority of pupils in mainstream secondary education, there's no doubt that they could get a decent pass under the current GCSE history exam specifications if they had the motivation to. And here motivation is the key word. If pupils get to choose their subjects, they're a great deal more enthusiastic than if they're forced to them, by the same logic that volunteers make better fighters than conscripts. And for the subjects they are forced to do, namely English, Maths and Science, they at least have a powerful form of negative motivation there - if they fail them, they'll be virtually unemployable. I know this from experience, as I hated GCSE Maths but I knew I had to do well at it, and in the end I did. That kind of negative motivation can't exist for non-core subjects like history, which aren't seen as essential by most employers. What that then makes for when a non-core subject like history is made compulsory is one hell of a lot of disaffected learners. Anyone who has taught any academic subject at Key Stage 3, when they're all still compulsory, knows how pupil disaffection manifests itself - poor effort and poor behaviour in the classroom. On a bad day with a particularly difficult Key Stage 3 class in a non-academically selective school, a significant portion of lesson time can be taken up with the teacher managing pupil behaviour. But at least at Key Stage 3, disrupted lessons can be written off as the pupils don't have to pass external exams, only internal assessments set by the school/ subject departmental leadership. Whereas at GCSE, every bit of curriculum time is precious, especially in a subject like history. It is thus really important that your pupils are with you, almost from the moment they enter the classroom, so you can maximise on you actually teaching and them actually learning content. 

Linking to all this talk of motivation and subject content is the final reason why history should not be compulsory at GCSE, and that is a simple logistical one. There simply aren't enough trained history teachers for every 14 - 16 year old in the country to be studying it, especially in the current teacher recruitment crisis in England. This hasn't hit history nearly as badly as some other subjects high in demand, like physics, computing or design and technology. But it demonstrably has all the same. What this means is that, already at Key Stage 3, many schools are getting non-specialists, whose actual subject specialism may be Geography, Religious Studies, Sociology, Psychology, Business Studies etc, to teach history. This situation really isn't ideal, but its just about workable at Key Stage 3 with the right kind of subject leadership, staff training and resources. However, if GCSE History were to be taught by non-specialists, it would be letting the pupils down, plain and simple. In order for pupils to be motivated and do well at GCSE, they need teachers who possess good knowledge both of the content of the periods they're studying and of history as a discipline. 

Indeed as Kristian Shanks, a history teacher and deputy head of a secondary school has pointed out in an article arguing for exactly the same position I am now, we've seen the horrors this can bring with another subject - Religious Studies. Lots of state schools used to make Religious Studies compulsory at GCSE, in order to meet their statutory requirement of providing for the Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural development of 14 - 16 year olds. What this led to was a dumbed down course in which pupils could receive as little as one lesson a fortnight, taught by non-specialist teachers and with lots of disaffection and poor behaviour. Indeed, as someone who took Religious Studies for GCSE at a private school where it wasn't a compulsory subject and was given much more curriculum time, we were able to cover all the content we needed to get As and A*s in just two terms. For the whole of year 10 and some of year 11, we spent our Religious Studies lessons discussing Kierkegaard and Batman, or watching movies like "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" or "Kingdom of Heaven." Indeed, when the EBacc was created, the government couldn't countenance making Religious Studies eligible for the humanities component - it just wasn't intellectually stimulating or challenging enough. The same cannot be allowed to happen to history!

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).