Janet L. Nelson
Patrick Wormald will ever be remembered as, above all, a bravura solo performer of originality and power: an academic Barenboim. His many writings, particularly in the genre of learned papers, were each and all sole-authored productions of distinctive and enduring value;1 and in The Making of English Law, he produced a scholarly master-work. But there was more to Patrick’s distinction than that. He was a wonderfully inspiring teacher, whose influence and intellectual generosity extended far beyond his own students. He was engaged in literally hundreds of scholarly exchanges, in speech and in writing and latterly email, to the huge benefit of his partners in dialogue. He enjoyed the collaborative work of symposia, nowhere more so than with colleagues in the Bucknell Group.2 International contacts, in North America and, increasingly, in Continental Europe, evoked new applications of his extraordinary mental energy.3 He thrived on the buzz of conferences, and always gave as much as (sometimes as good as) he got. All this, well known as it is to students and practitioners of early medieval history, is worth repeating, and celebrating.
Less well known, but worth adding here, is Patrick’s less-often practised quality as a skilled conductor working from the keyboard: another Barenboim. Patrick could bring colleagues together, and help their combined product to be more than the sum of its parts. He did this, for instance, in his editorial work on the Festschrift for Michael Wallace-Hadrill.4 He did something akin in seminars, whereof he was so often the life and soul. He did it again in organising a series of sessions at two successive meetings of the annual International Conference on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA in 1999 and 2000. Here he deployed all the gifts just mentioned: he invited apt contributors from among former students and present colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic; he chaired and commented sessions con brio, so that then, and later, he enhanced every speaker’s contribution; above all, he chose a theme dear to his own heart which, like so many of Patrick’s enthusiasms, once applied to early medieval scholarship worked like yeast in dough – or, to use a more contemporary metaphor, proved to be absolutely at the cutting edge. It was, more or less, the theme of the present book: the Lay Intellectual in the Carolingian World.
Behind that formulation – which caused (and may still cause)5 some jibbing at its deliberately provocative anachronism – was an agenda that had been bubbling away in Patrick’s mind for well over twenty years. In the mid-1970s, he began to grapple with three problems fundamental to any understanding of the early medieval West: first and foremost, the nature of its law, new or old, Roman or German, authoritative or customary, royal or consensual; second, the impact of Christianity on aristocratic values and conduct, contradictory or complementary, destructive or adaptive; third, the significance of literacy, instrument of power or collective medium, clerical monopoly or tool of secular elites, learned or popular.6 Not only was Patrick prescient and exemplary in insisting on British as distinct from merely English history, inspired by Michael Wallace-Hadrill, his vision always extended beyond these Isles7. His early published work showed him deeply well informed on Continental law and politics, and he had important new insights to offer on the Lombards as well as the Franks.8 He was always interested in contact, and comparison. In the 1990s, as he toiled on the big synthesis, Patrick pondered ever more deeply on the Carolingian Renaissance. Here he saw Christianity impacting in new and lasting ways on politics and polities, communities and social structures. Equally interested in ideals and realities, he saw that impact both in normative texts and in the charters that embodied legal practice.9 The Carolingian period was the transformative moment when law, no longer thought of as secular, a thing (only) of this world, came to be understood and used as the means to secure the collective good of the Christian people. That good was expressed by the one word ‘justice’ – the watchword of Carolingian government, a word loaded with religious and this-wordly values.10 Law-making was an activity engaged in co-operatively by clergy and secular men. In the Carolingian regime, the delivery of law, through the holding of courts, and the imposing, and recording, of legal judgments, necessarily entailed such collective action. Normative decrees and case records needed to be brought together in a single field of vision. Having once grasped these essentials, Patrick could read in and from records of dispute settlement the implementation of Carolingian justice; and having grasped the inspirational significance of Carolingian justice for Anglo-Saxon rulers and elites from the ninth century onwards, Patrick could set early medieval legal ideals and realities on both sides of the Channel within a single frame.11
For Patrick, as for the scholar whose work most inspired and challenged him, F. W. Maitland,12 to think about medieval law was always to engage with medieval men making and using law. In this scholarly exercise, history, not law, had priority. A thorough knowledge of legal texts and legal practice was crucial. The object, though, was not historic law but legal history – which in turn was part of social history, or as historians tend to say nowadays, emphasising the importance of representations and meanings for the people we study, cultural history. Finding what is the law, enunciating that, and giving it social force, can be, and in many parts of Western Europe in the early Middle Ages, before professional lawyers, was, a field of collective action involving a wide swathe of people.13 Learning in the academic sense is necessarily something confined to a caste or very restricted elite – both because, historically, it has been a scarce resource and source of social power and because, especially in our own democratic age of mass values and mass media, it is not everyone’s cup of tea. But learning can take applied forms: as with the law. Thus, though in the early Middle Ages, law was instrumentalised by the powerful, often aided and abetted by the learnèd themselves, it could at the same time empower the less powerful, even the powerless and the unlearnèd, by embodying and protecting the rights of individuals and groups.14
In a similar way, religious knowledge, while it most certainly empowered the clergy, and in the early Middle Ages legitimised that new elite, was power qualified in several important ways. The clergy themselves were divided by yawning chasms of wealth and rank: poor rural priests were among the powerless. As for bishops and abbots, powerful as well as learned they might be, but their churches’ institutional wealth depended for security and protection on rulers and the secular elite. Further, before the growth of papal government run by professional canon lawyers, religious knowledge and status could be claimed by more non-specialists – whether soi-disant holy men and women or do-it-yourself practitioners of beneficent magic. The early medieval world, deeply unequal as it was, offered access to Faith – a universal empowerer. The Carolingian Church preached the duties as well as the claims of that accessibility, in imposing such religious obligations as tithe payment and Sunday observance at the same time as it affirmed the entitlement of all the faithful to the clergy’s services (in both senses).15 Secular men were now to think of themselves as faithful men; and non-clerical persons of either gender were encouraged to think of themselves as lay.
Patrick saw that Christianity confronted barbarian elites with new demands and new tensions; but what struck him most forcefully in the end was the way potential clash yielded to mutual accommodation.16 The Carolingian age saw a transformation of lay values, and, on the ecclesiastical side, a re-evaluation of lay action in the world. Alcuin in Virtues and Vices affirmed that lay status did not exclude any person, man or woman, from heaven: on the contrary, the lay person could work toward their own salvation through good works.17 Even at court, Alcuin thought, the busy lay aristocrat could engage in daily prayer, and understand its religious significance. By implication, away from court, and in a less busy life, prayer was easier to accommodate. The Carolingian Church is very clearly on record as legitimising the powers that were. It also made demands on them. The responses of a few kings, above all, as well as a tiny number of high aristocrats, have survived, directly or indirectly, in the evidence.18 Intellectuals, in the early Middle Ages as in later ages, necessarily constituted a small elite, just as they by definition sought an audience. The scientia cultivated by prayer and righteous action was amongst the things that that elite aimed to diffuse. In practice it may have been limited to those with enough Latin to recite psalms; but if so, the constituency of the knowledgeable was probably already wider than the high aristocracy. This was learning of a kind: learning sufficient to permit active participation in Christian observance, and acknowledgement of Christian duties, and – crucially in the present context – to respond to the moral messages emanating from social superiors. For if Charlemagne asked all household heads to share responsibility for pushing forward the project of Christian education, he asked a fortiori those heads of magnate households who were fully enrolled at court as exemplars of the project.19 Aristocrats, and they included women, whom the patriarchal Carolingian world had ways of accommodating and deploying,20 pushed out the project’s frontiers in the provinces, in ecclesiastical and secular houses, halls and meeting-places. They, along with the rulers who enlisted them, were among the lay intellectuals with whom Patrick wished his enlisted team to be concerned. Few such people left much individual trace in the written record, as authors, patrons or educators. Those few who did, all of them of the highest social rank, must stand for however many others wrote works that have perished, or taught by the spoken word. Those few are the subjects of the various chapters that follow.
Given that cluster of Patrick’s concerns, and the consistency of the textual raw material, the theme of his Kalamazoo conference sessions, and of this book, has brought its own benefits of focus and coherence. What Patrick wanted to suggest in making Lay Intellectuals the subject, and in presenting them thus in this book’s title, was that they were imbued with Christian learning, worked with their minds as well as their spears or distaffs, were self-consciously committed to a moral project of social transformation, and sought and addressed a public.21 If we make all due allowance for the specifics of early medieval conditions, the label ‘intellectuals’ fits well enough.22 They saw themselves, too, as lay intellectuals: needing ecclesiastical guidance and reassurance, yet active indispensable members and leaders of God’s people. This was, as Alcuin put it in a letter to Charlemagne, the age of the laity.23
Richard Abels ends our book with some cautionary words: ‘How wide-spread the appeal of learning, of pursuing holy wisdom, actually was among the lay elites of Carolingian Francia and Anglo-Saxon England must remain an open question.’24 This contributor respects his caution. Nevertheless, she ends these reflections, in what she hopes is the spirit of Patrick’s original project, with a surmise not wild but warranted: warranted, that is, by much evidence presented in the chapters below. To return to one of Patrick’s original questions, the surmise is this, that the Carolingian Renaissance, far from inhibiting the laity, gave them a new agenda, a new ‘ministry’.25 In the courts and court-connected places of the early medieval world where wisdom was taught, and ‘bought’,26 not only did kings, counsellors, churchmen, patrons and parents intend that lay persons commit themselves to wisdom’s pursuit, but unnumbered individual quests fulfilled, however imperfectly, that high intent. Recovering the traces of those quests and that intent was what, I will dare to say, drew Patrick to the subject of this book.
Thomas F. X. Noble
Towards the end of the eighth century a Bavarian count expressed the hope that one of his sons would succeed him ‘if any should be found worthy to do so’.1 This chapter seeks to explore what that count might have had in mind when musing about his son’s worthiness. Put a little differently, the following pages constitute an attempt to discern some aspects of the ethos of the Carolingian nobility. For reasons that will be explained in due course, I call this ethos ‘Secular sanctity’, and I will show that this label comes close to actual Carolingian usage.2 But it must be acknowledged at the outset that it is easier to find sources in which certain ideals were urged upon the Carolingian lay elite than to find such laymen speaking in their own voices. It might be objected that the ‘Secular Sanctity’ sketched here is only normative, prescriptive, aspirational. I must admit that such an objection cannot be destroyed. But, I insist, it can be met, worried and weakened. Accordingly, after a brief recitation of the relevant sources and a presentation of secular sanctity’s key components, I turn to the persons to whom this ethos was addressed and ask a series of questions: Who were the members of the Carolingian elite? Where was the ethos formulated and might laymen have had a hand in its elaboration? In so far as the ethos is now found in Latin texts, how might laymen have gained access to those texts or to the ideas contained in them? In what ways might the ethos have been attractive to Carolingian laymen? What place did this ethos hold within the broader spectrum of Carolingian culture?
A wide array of sources provide insights into the noble ethos of the Carolingian age. Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne and the Lives of Louis the Pious are full of examples and exhortations.3 Capitularies often spell out parts of an ethos. Those capitularies also explicitly extended to nobles a royal ministerium which is itself delineated in a group of specula principum (mirrors for princes) addressed to Charlemagne, Louis the Pious, Pippin of Aquitaine and Charles the Bald.4 Numerous hortatory epistles were written to noblemen by, among others, Agobard of Lyons, Alcuin, Hrabanus Maurus, Lupus of Ferrières, Ermoldus Nigellus and Jonas of Orléans.5 Hrabanus Maurus preached at least six sermons on the virtues and vices.6 Most important of all, however, are the ethical treatises written by Ambrosius Autpertus, Paulinus of Aquileia, Alcuin, Jonas of Orléans, Hincmar of Rheims and Rather of Verona.7 Nor should we overlook the remarkable Liber Manualis of the noblewoman Dhuoda.8 The Life of Gerald of Aurillac is especially revealing too.9
What, then, do these sources say? Virtually all of the sources with which I am dealing here stress both a private and a public dimension of the life that nobles will lead. Both Alcuin and Jonas say that they were asked to explain how busy, powerful laymen could discharge their duties in the world and meet the requirements of the Christian faith. The authors stress that the goal of life is salvation and go on to admit that the life of a public man, or of a soldier, might not be conducive to heavenly rewards. Thus our texts encourage men to do the corporal works of mercy, to pray constantly, to read the Bible, to listen to the clergy, to attend mass and the sacraments.10
In addition to these exhortations, the texts provide guidance in the form of lists of vices, usually versions of the capital sins, to which are opposed the beatitudes, the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit (wisdom, understanding, justice, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord), the Christian virtues (Faith, Hope, Love), the cardinal virtues (Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude), or the Ten Commandments.11 These remedies for vice are