Like Bede, these men
compiled
from earlier authors.
Cambridge Medieval History - v3 - Germany and the Western Empire
“Ireland, despising the dangers of the sea, is migrating
almost en masse with her crowd of philosophers to our shores, and all
the most learned doom themselves to voluntary exile to attend the
bidding of Solomon the wise. ” But this was not the sole or even the
chief reason.
As the rhetoricians of Gaul had been driven into Ireland
by one set of invasions, so now the Irish were driven out of it by
another, that of the Scandinavian pirates who had already done so much
mischief in England. We cannot doubt that lamentable destruction of
books took place in Ireland too, but we know little or nothing about
established libraries there.
We first hear of John the Scot at the court of Charles the Bald in
845, and his first continental writing was on predestination against
Gottschalk (851). Not very long after, in 858–860, he made his first
important translation from Greek, of the works called of Dionysius the
Areopagite. The copy he used was most likely one which in 827 the
Greek Emperor, Michael, had given to the Abbey of St Denis'. Hilduin,
Abbot of that house, had done his best to establish the identity of the
patron of the Abbey with the Areopagite, and the identification was
commonly accepted throughout the medieval period.
It is generally agreed that John knew Greek before he left Ireland.
This would make it natural to commit to him the task of rendering the
very difficult language and matter of Dionysius into Latin. But the
1 Now at Paris (B. N. Gr. 437).
## p. 525 (#571) ############################################
Sedulius Scottus
525
a
contents were such as were certain to attract him. He was a philosopher
born, and the blend of Neo-Platonism and Christianity in these writings was
exactly suited to his temperament. He performed his work in a way
that excited the wonder of a very competent scholar at Rome: for in
860 the translation was sent to Pope Nicholas, and he referred it for an
opinion to his librarian Anastasius, who had done much work of the
kind. Anastasius marvels how a man from a remote and barbarous land
could have attained such mastery of Greek ; Irish learning was evidently
an unknown thing to him.
In his dedications of his version to the Emperor, and also in a good
many of his occasional poems, John ventures upon original Greek verse
composition : here he is at his weakest, both as poet and as prosodist;
the scansion is surprisingly bad. The Dionysius was followed by the
Ambigua of Maximus (άπορα εις Γρηγόριον περί φύσεων), also a difficult
text to translate and not one of much importance. Most likely no other
philosophical text (if we except the Solutiones of Priscianus Lydus, as to
which there is doubt) came into John's hands. He made no other trans-
lations, but turned to the composition of his last and greatest work, to
which he gave a Greek title, tepi duoen peplo moù (867). Little copied,
for it soon became suspect of pantheism, it is the most original piece of
speculative thought which these centuries have to shew. Nothing so
remarkable probably was put forth until Anselm came.
Other works by John to which no precise date has been assigned are
his excerpts from Macrobius on the verb, which preserve all we have of
a very valuable book, a fragmentary commentary on St John's Gospel
in which he makes use of the Greek text, and commentaries on Martianus
Capella and Boethius. We still await a critical edition of the whole of
the works of this very marked scholar and thinker. It is unfair to judge
of his personality from silence, but the fact remains that there is no
written tribute to any but his intellectual gifts.
Sedulius Scottus is found at Liège about 848, and after a lapse of ten
years becomes untraceable. In him we have no original thinker, but a
writer of some skill, a most industrious compiler and transcriber, and
a lover of ancient literature. His book De rectoribus Christianis addressed
to Lothar II, interspersed with pieces of verse in many metres (after
the fashion of Boethius) and with copious quotations from the Proverbia
Graecorum (see p. 504), is his best original composition. There are, too,
many fugitive pieces of verse, some addressed to his patrons, one or two
to his Irish companions, others descriptive of works of art, for example,
a silken pall embroidered with a long series of scenes from the life of
St Peter. Under the head of compilations we reckon his collections on
St Matthew and on the Pauline Epistles (the former as yet unprinted)
and his Commentaries on grammatical works, Priscian, Donatus, Eutychius.
In the last-named, which was very likely written in Ireland, he uses that
tract of Macrobius on the verb, of which John has been the chief preserver.
CH. XX.
## p. 526 (#572) ############################################
526
Glossaries
There is also in the library of the hospital of Cues (Cusa) near Trèves
a manuscript of a commonplace book of his of very remarkable character.
It has supplied us with pieces of Cicero's orations against Piso and for
Fonteius which are wanting in our other copies, and of Vegetius, Porphyrio,
and Lactantius. Partly perhaps because of the many Greek passages in
his works, Lactantius was little read or copied between the ninth and
the fifteenth century. To Sedulius however these were no deterrent; he
collects some of them at the end of a Greek psalter which we have of
his transcribing. A remark of Traube's will be in place here: “I hazard
the guess," he says, “that wherever Greek passages survive in Latin
works, they are to be referred to Irish influence. "
The manuscripts transcribed by Sedulius and his circle remain to be
noticed. Those which are most confidently ascribed to his hand are the
Psalter just mentioned, which is signed by him (it is now in the Arsenal
Library at Paris, and was once at St Nicholas's Abbey at Verdun), and
a Graeco-Latin copy of the Pauline Epistles at Dresden, of which the
Codex Augiensis at Trinity College, Cambridge, is a transcript. There
are besides at St Gall a Priscian, perhaps brought from Ireland, and a
Gospels in Greek and Latin (known as A), and there is a famous book
at Berne (363) containing our oldest copy of Horace's Odes. In these we
find, scribbled on margins, Irish names, and names of others, such as
Hartgar of Tongres, Gunther of Cologne, Hilduin, Hincmar, etc. , whom
we know to have been connected with Sedulius. His own name also
occurs not unfrequently.
Of the less distinguished members of the band of Irish scholars,
Dunchad or Duncant has been asserted and also denied to be the author
of a Comment on Martianus Capella (not printed). Common to this,
and to John the Scot's comment on the same author, is a fragment of
the lost Peplus of Theophrastus, which is also copied in a Laon manu-
script (444) written by an Irish teacher, Martin of Laon (1875). This
book contains a Graeco-Latin glossary, and, inter alia, Greek verses
by Martin himself, no better and no worse than those of John.
νυν ληγε νεανισκε λεγειν, δος δεσματα χιλσιν (χείλεσιν)
is the last line, and a fair sample.
Room must be found here for a word about glossaries. They were
the indispensable tool of any who aspired to a knowledge of Greek, and
were used by others who had no real grasp of the language but desired
to be thought Greek scholars. The two chief Graeco-Latin glossaries
go by the names of Cyrillus and Philoxenus respectively. The prime
authority for the text of Cyrillus is an ancient manuscript in the Harleian
collection (5792) which came from the hospital of Cues. We now know
that Laon 444, written by Martin, is a copy of it, and this means that
in the ninth century it was at or near Laon. It was not, however,
written in France, but most likely in Italy: its archetype is conjectured
## p. 527 (#573) ############################################
The Irish circle; mythographers
527
to have been a papyrus book. Philoxenus depends upon a ninth century
manuscript at Paris, and this too is referred to the neighbourhood of
Laon, or at least to the north of France.
Fergus was another of the Irish circle; he was the writer of part of
the St Gall Gospels (A). Yet another, of whom we know little more
than the name, was Elias, a connecting link between the Irish and their
most distinguished continental pupil, Heiric of Auxerre.
Heiric learned what Greek he knew from an Irish teacher or teachers
at Laon; he also sat under Lupus of Ferrières, and at his lectures took
down excerpts from Valerius Maximus and Suetonius. Elias supplied him
with the text of two collections of apophthegms, one current under the
name of Caecilius Balbus. A manuscript now at the abbey of Melk in
Austria preserves (with autograph notes by Heiric) another set of extracts
which is particularly interesting as including some from Petronius. The
copy from which these were taken is now divided between the libraries
of Berne and Paris.
His own works are not epoch-making: commentaries on some of the
poets, which supplied material to his pupil Remigius, and a long life of
St Germanus of Auxerre in verse. In this he makes considerable parade
of his Greek, intercalating into his dedications many words which he got
from the works of Dionysius the Areopagite. He makes such experiments
in lyric metres as shew him to have been a student of the Odes and
Epodes of Horace, and he is credited with being the first of his time to
pay much attention to these poems, which were always far less popular
than the Satires and Epistles.
Those who have studied the commentaries of Heiric award to them
higher praise for real soundness of learning than to those of Remigius.
But the name of the latter lived on, and Heiric's did not. Remigius
learnt of Dunchad as well as of Heiric, and taught at Rheims for Arch-
bishop Fulk, and at Paris. He lived on into the tenth century, and, it
is said, had Odo of Cluny among his pupils. The tale of his writings is a
long one, consisting almost entirely of commentaries upon grammarians,
poets, and books of the Bible. A tract on the Mass and a glossary of
proper names in the Bible, both ascribed to him, went on being copied
down to the end of the Middle Ages. Few of the many Bibles of the
thirteenth century are without the Interpretationes Nominum.
This is perhaps the place to mention the mythographers. Two anony
mous collections of stories of the ancient gods and heroes, very baldly
told, were printed by Mai from Vatican manuscripts of the tenth and
eleventh centuries, along with a later one which does not concern us.
The second of these mythographers copies a good deal of matter from
the first, and has been, not quite certainly, identified with Remigius.
The first quotes authors as late as Orosius, and mingles tales from
Roman history with his mythology. Neither attained a wide circulation,
but they deserve a word in virtue of their attempts to hand on the
a
CH. XX.
## p. 528 (#574) ############################################
528
Anastasius the Librarian
ancient legends and throw light on the allusions to them in classical
literature.
By the end of the ninth century, it is probably true to say that the
Irish stimulus had worked itself out. Had a steady supply of Greek
texts been available, one cannot doubt that men would have been found
to make use of them, but, it must be repeated, no new material was
coming in. Byzantium despised the West and did not care to enlighten
it. The Greek monasteries of Southern Italy seem never to have attracted
any attention in the north. The chief scholar at Rome, Anastasius
Bibliothecarius, died in 897 and left no successor. Something more needs
to be said of what he had accomplished. Nearly all his translations,
which are not few, were made at the request of friends or of the Pope.
He revised John's Dionysius and provided it with scholia rendered from
Greek. He put into Latin the Acts of two Councils, that of 787 and
that in which Photius was deposed and Ignatius restored to the patri-
archate. For John the Deacon, who was designing a large Church history,
he translated the Chronography of Nicephorus and copied extracts
from the chronicles of George the Syncellus and of Theophanes, the
three together forming what was known as the Chronographia tri-
partita, not to be confused with the Historia tripartita that was made
for Cassiodorus. It is an imposing list, and there is more than this to his
credit.
The excursions made into Greek literature in the tenth century are
almost negligible. In the middle of it Leo of Naples produced a version
of an Alexander-romance for Duke John of Naples from a manuscript he
had brought from Constantinople. It marks a stage in the spread of
that most influential romance. Later on we encounter another type of
Greek scholar, the man thoroughly familiar with the spoken language,
in Liudprand of Cremona, diplomat and historian.
It is not pretended that what has been said here of the study and
influence of Greek in these centuries is a complete survey. The gaps will
be obvious to experts. The province of liturgy, for instance, has not
been touched, and there is much in early tropers and other service books
which goes to shew that forms were borrowed from the Byzantines,
That the litanies of the Saints first appeared in Greek, transmitted
from Rome late in the seventh century to England by a Greek-speaking
Pope, is a proposition recently maintained by that great scholar Edmund
Bishop. Hagiography, again, would easily fill a chapter of its own. We
do not yet know all that was done by eastern monks, driven westward
by the Iconoclastic troubles, in the way of translation of Acts of Saints,
or more generally in the diffusion of their language. Further—a small
matter, this, perhaps—it would be worth while to collect the instances
in which western scribes have employed the Greek alphabet for their
titles and colophons; it is mainly a piece of harmless parade, but
is not wholly insignificant. Irishmen, Bretons, and Spaniards were
a
## p. 529 (#575) ############################################
Gottschalk
529
a
a
fondest of the practice, though it is not confined to them. Yet another
class of documents in which the use of rare Greek words became a
fashion are the charters of the tenth century, especially those made in
England.
This love of a bizarre vocabulary, which we have noticed before, crops
up again and again almost to the end of our period. About 830 we have
the strange poem of Lios Monocus, a Breton, who uses the Hisperica
Famina. About 896, Abbo of St Germain appends to his two books
of verse on the siege of Paris by the Northmen a third which is nothing
but a series of conundrums, unintelligible from the first without a gloss,
A hundred years later our English chronicler Fabius Aethelweard puts
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle into a very crabbed Latin with tags of verse
and sesquipedal compounds of his own devising.
It is a relief to turn from these oddities to some writings which have
an appreciable value as literature. Gottschalk or Godescalcus, monk of
Orbais (805-869), fills an enormous space in the dogmatic history of his
time. He paid dear enough to Hincmar of Rheims for the errors of his
doctrine, and his tragic story has been remembered by many who forget
how grim was his view of election and reprobation: Christ did not die
to save all men, but only the elect.
Only in somewhat recent times have certain lyrics of his been brought
to light which make him a more sympathetic character. There is a light-
ness about them not very common; lightness, not of tone, for they are
plaintive, but of touch :
Ut quid iubes pasiole
filiole
carmen dulce
cum sim longe exul valde
intra mare ?
O cur iubes canere ?
Yet more recently Gottschalk has been accepted as the author of a
poem very famous for six or seven centuries after him, the Eclogue of
Theodulus. (Theodulus is no more than Gottschalk, God's slave, turned
into Greek. ) This Eclogue is a colloquy between Truth (Alithia) and
Falsehood (Pseustis) with Reason (Phronesis) for umpire. Falsehood cites
a number of incidents from pagan mythology, giving a quatrain to each.
Truth caps every one with a contrast from the scriptures. The verdict
is a foregone conclusion. In length and subject the poem was admirably
fitted to be a school-book, and as a school-book it survived well into the
Renaissance period.
In 874 died Hathumoda, first Abbess of Gandersheim. Agius her
friend, a monk of Corvey (? ), wrote a long prose life of her, and also a
dialogue in elegiac verse between himself and her nuns. Rather exalted
language has been used about the beauty of this poem, but its ease and
simplicity and truth of feeling do mark it out among the productions of
quare mandas
me cantare
a
C. MEI). H. VOL. III. CH. XX.
34
## p. 530 (#576) ############################################
530
Notker; school of St Gall
:
its time. It is not however distinguished for originality of thought or
excellence of technique.
Mathias et Barnabas, Timothēus, Apollo
Silvanus, Titus, Theophilus, Gaïus
is not a good couplet, but
Te iam portus habet: nos adhuc iactat abyssus:
Te lux vera tenet: nos tenebrae retinent:
Tu cum virginibus comitans, quocunque eat Agnus
Lilia cum violis colligis atque rosas
are better lines, and typical of what has been praised in the poem.
Opinion is still unsettled as to whether Agius and a writer known as
Poeta Saxo are identical. Agius would not gain greatly were his claim
established: the poem is nothing but a versification of prose sources
(Annals and Einhard) on the life of Charlemagne.
The community of St Gall, as may be guessed from the frequent
mention of it in these pages, has a wonderful record for the preservation
of ancient literature. It is scarcely less remarkable for its own literary
productions. Two of its writers shall have special notice now.
The first is Notker Balbulus, the Stammerer (840-912). Several
other Notkers of St Gall followed him, the most famous of whom was
Notker Labeo (+ 1022), translator into German of Boethius and much
else. But this first Notker is considerably more important, principally
on two grounds. One was the development of a form of church poetry
known as the Sequence. The essence of it was this. It had become the
fashion to prolong to an exaggerated extent the singing of the word
Alleluia where it occurred at the end of antiphons. The melodies of
such Alleluias were fixed, but were exceedingly hard to remember.
Taking the hint from a Jumièges service-book that had been brought
to St Gall, Notker fitted the Alleluias with words appropriate to the
Church season or feast, putting as a rule a syllable to each note of the
long wandering melody. Thus there grew up a new form of poem, non-
metrical at the outset, which in later years became bound by stricter
rules, and which exercised a great influence upon secular poetry. In
Notker's hands it was wholly conditioned by the tune to which it was
set. The one example of it that is widely known in this country is the
funeral sequence, Media in vita, “ In the midst of life,” whether that is
truly Notker's work or not.
He is also famous as the author of the book of reminiscences of
Charlemagne called Gesta Karoli and long current simply as the work of
the “Monk of St Gall. ” It is now recognised as Notker's. Alas! we
possess only a part of it, but what we have is one of the few books of
the period which can really be read with pleasure. There is not much
plan in it; it is in the main Notker’s recollections of stories told to him
in his youth by an old warrior Adalbert who had fought for the Emperor,
and by Adalbert's son Werinbert, a cleric, and also by a third informant
## p. 531 (#577) ############################################
Ekkehard; Gesta Berengarii
531
of
a
whose name has been lost with the preface and the third book of the
Gesta. It was written down at the request of Charles the Fat, who when
staying at St Gall in 883 had been greatly delighted with Notker's tales
of his great-grandfather and his father. Almost all the picturesque
anecdotes that we have of Charlemagne come from this book; tales of
war and peace, of embassies from the East and what they brought, of the
Emperor's dealings with his clergy, behaviour in church, dress, are to be
found here, many doubtless true, others shewing the beginning of a
Charlemagne mythology. The loss of the third book is particularly
exasperating, for in it were promised recollections of the hero's every-day
conversation.
Much more might be said of Notker, of his letters, his poems, his
humour, his treatise on the study of the Fathers (a parallel to the Insti-
tutions of Cassiodorus), but proportion must be observed, and we must
bid farewell to a man both gifted and amiable.
Our second St Gall author is Ekkehard, the first of five persons
that name who are prominent in the Abbey's annals. He died in 973.
Early in life he began the work by which he has deserved to be remem-
bered, the short epic of Waltharius. It is a heroic tale, a single episode
in a warrior's career. Waltharius escapes with his love from the Hun-
garian court in which both he and she were kept as hostages, is pursued
and successfully defends himself against great odds. The story ends
happily, and none of the Latin poems of all this age is better worth
reading. There is little of the flavour of a school exercise about it, and
there is a great deal of the freshness of the best romances in the vernacular.
With the exception of the Gesta Karoli, most of the writings we have
touched upon recently have been in verse. We will give a few paragraphs
to some of the remaining poets. John the Deacon, a Roman, writing in
875, gives us a curious versification of a curious old piece called the
Caena Cypriani, and mingles it with personal satire. The whole thing
is a jeu d'esprit, written, as Lapôtre has shewn, on the occasion of the
coronation of Charles the Bald at Rome, and was recited at a banquet
where were present various notabilities (Anastasius the Librarian among
them) who are smartly hit off.
Hucbald of St Amand's Eclogue in praise of baldness, produced about
885, must be passed with averted eye. Every word of its 146 lines begins
with the letter C.
The early part of the tenth century gives us two anonymous books
of some slight celebrity, the Gesta Berengarii, a panegyric on that
Emperor by an Italian who knew some Greek, and the Ecbasis captivi
by a monk of Toul, “ the oldest beast-epic of the Middle Ages. ” Animals
are the actors, and tales in which they figure are woven together not
without spirit. But more famous in respect of the sex of the writer and
of the vehicle she has employed are the works of Hrotsvitha, a nun of
Gandersheim who wrote about 960. They are collected into three books
CH, XX,
34-2
## p. 532 (#578) ############################################
532
Hrotsvitha; Libri Carolini
whereof the first consists of poems on the lives of the Virgin and certain
other saints (the grotesque legend of Gengulphus of Toul is among them),
the second of six so-called comedies, the third of a short epic on Otto I:
another, on the origins of Gandersheim, is preserved separately. The
comedies are the unusual feature. They are written in no strict metre
but in a rhythmical prose, and treat of episodes from saints' lives. They
are avowedly intended to extol chastity, as a counterblast to the mis-
chievous writings of Terence. We have here the earliest of Christian
dramas (dramatic only in form, for Hrotsvitha would never have sanctioned
the acting of them) and as such they would in any case be interesting;
but they are not without merit. Short and easily read, their plots are
not ill-chosen, and the dialogue moves quickly. There is even a touch
of humour here and there, as when, in Dulcitius, the Roman persecutor
makes love to the pots and pans in the kitchen, under the illusion of their
being Christian girls, and gets covered with soot.
In one or two cases the sources employed are interesting. The first
poem of the first book deals with the life of the Virgin and the Infancy
of Christ, and is drawn from an apocryphal Gospel, in a text usually
fathered upon Matthew, but here upon James the Lord's brother. The
second, on the Ascension, is from an unidentified Greek text translated
by a bishop John. One of the plays is an episode from the Acts of
St John the Evangelist.
It must be said once again that this chapter is not a text-book or a
history, but a survey, of the literature of two centuries. So far it has
been mainly occupied with what by a stretch of language might be called
belles lettres : but these form only a small fraction of the whole bulk of
writings which have come to us from the years 800 to 1000. To leave
the rest unglanced at would be outrageous. Five headings seem to com-
prise the greatest part of what it is really essential to notice: Theology,
Hagiography leading over to History, the Sciences and Arts, and books
in vernacular languages.
In the enormous department of Theology we find two great categories,
Commentaries on the Scriptures and controversial writings. Liturgy and
Homiletics we must leave untouched. From the commentators we have
a huge bulk of material, but with very few exceptions, it is wholly un-
original.
Like Bede, these men compiled from earlier authors. The
Glossa Ordinaria, already noticed, is typical. Angelomus of Luxeuil,
Haymo of Halberstadt, Raban Maur, are compilers of this class. For
anything like originality we must look to John the Scot and to Christianus
“Druthmarus” of Stavelot, who wrote (in 865) on St Matthew's Gospel :
but even he is distinguished rather by good sense than by brilliancy.
Five principal controversies occupied the minds and pens of the church
writers. At the beginning of our period we have two: the Adoptionist,
in which Elipandus and Alcuin were the foremost figures, and the Icono-
clastic. The latter produced a remarkable group of books. The Icono-
## p. 533 (#579) ############################################
Radbert and Ratramn; Hagiography
533
clastic cause met much opposition, but also some support, in the West.
The Libri Carolini against images, written at the Emperor's order (whether
or no Alcuin had a hand in them is not settled), are the work of a well-
read man who draws interesting illustrations from pagan mythology and
contemporary works of art. Claudius, Bishop of Turin, was also a hot
Iconoclast in deed and in word. We have only extracts from the treatise
he wrote, but we have replies to it from an Irishman, Dungal, and from
Jonas of Orleans. Dungal, who quotes the Christian poets very largely,
especially Paulinus of Nola, prefixes to his books some fragments from
Claudius, and says that the whole work was one-third as long again as
the Psalter: he seems to think that this aggravates the offence.
The middle of the ninth century saw two more great disputes. One
is that on Predestination, in which the monk Gottschalk, who took the
most rigid view, was forcibly silenced, scourged, and imprisoned by
Hincmar of Rheims, and written against by John the Scot and Paschasius
Radbert of Corbie, to name only two of a large group. Radbert was a
man of very wide reading and had one of the best libraries of the time
at his command. He is one of the very few who quote Irenaeus Against
Heresies. The other dispute concerned the Eucharist. Radbert is here
again to the fore, in defence of the view which, developed, is the faith of
Rome. Ratramn, also of Corbie, wrote in a strain which made the
Reformers of the sixteenth century claim him as an early champion on
their side.
We have other interesting matter from Ratramn's pen; a treatise
against the errors of the Greeks, and a letter to one Rimbert, who had in-
quired what was the proper view to take of the race of Cynocephali, tribes
of dog-headed men believed to inhabit parts of Africa. St Christopher,
it is not generally realised, was of this race, and the conversion of one of
them is also related in the eastern Acts of SS. Andrew and Bartholomew.
Ratramn, who does not cite these examples, answers Rimbert with good
If what is reported of the Cynocephali is borne out by facts,
they must be looked upon as reasonable and redeemable beings.
The controversy with the Greeks is the fifth and last of these to be
mentioned here. Besides Ratramn's book, there is an important con-
tribution to it by Aeneas of Paris.
To Hagiography the Carolingian Renaissance gave an immense
stimulus. The founding of a multitude of abbeys and the building of
great churches and the stocking of them with relics of ancient martyrs,
begged, bought or stolen from Rome, were operative causes. Einhard's
story of the translation of SS. Marcellinus and Peter is one classic to
which relic-hunting gave birth, Rudolf of Fulda's about St Alexander is
another, this last because passages from the Germania of Tacitus are
embodied in it. There was, besides, the natural wish to possess a readable
life of many a patron saint whose doings had been forgotten or else
were only chronicled in barbarous Latin of the seventh century. Lives
sense.
CH. XX.
## p. 534 (#580) ############################################
534
History
and by
invented or rewritten in response to this wish bulk very large in the Acta
Sanctorum. Not unimportant are the versified Passions and Lives which
perhaps begin with Prudentius and Paulinus of Nola and are carried on
by Fortunatus (St Martin), Bede (St Cuthbert), Heiric (St Germanus),
Notker (St Gall) and a whole host of anonymi. All these, fiction or fact,
have their interest, but are of course much inferior to the rare con-
temporary biographies such as those of St Boniface by Willibrord and
of St Anschar by Rimbert.
The mention of these leads naturally to the single biographies of
uncanonised persons. Charlemagne, we have seen, is the subject of the
two best. Those of Louis the Pious by the “ Astronomus
Thegan have nothing of the charm and skill of Einhard and Notker.
Nearest to them is a British writing, the first to be mentioned after a
long interval of silence, Asser's life of Alfred.
Of others, that of Eigil by Candidus, a Fulda production of about
840, and that of John of Gorze by Abbot John of Metz have distinct
interest. Agnellus's collections on the Archbishops of Ravenna, full of
archaeological lore (839), and some of the lives of Popes in the Liber
Pontificalis, perhaps due to the pen of Anastasius the Librarian, supply
us with many facts we are glad to have, but do not pretend to be artistic
biographies.
History writing takes three other principal forms. There is the
world-chronicle, of which Freculphus of Lisieux and Regino of Prüm
(near Trèves) and, later, Marianus Scotus, give examples; there are the
annals, commonly connected with a religious establishment, such as those
of Lorsch; and there is the episodic, telling of some particular campaign
or the rise of some great church. To this last class belongs Nithardus
(† 844); natural son of Angilbert by Charlemagne's daughter Bertha,
and successor (ultimately) to his father as lay-abbot of St Riquier. He
writes four short books in clear and simple prose, on Louis the Pious and
the quarrels of Lothar, Charles the Bald, and Louis the German-a
strictly contemporary record. Incidentally he has preserved, by tran-
scribing the terms of the Oath of Strasbourg, the oldest piece of French
and one of the oldest pieces of German which we have. The church
of Rheims had two historians. Flodoard (also author of some immense
poems) begins in the mists of antiquity and carries the story down to
about 966. Richer, whose book is extant (at Bamberg) in the author's
autograph, dedicates his history to Gerbert; he devotes small space to
early history and much to his own time: his narrative ends in 995.
Widukind of Corvey is another name that cannot be passed over : his
Gesta Saxonum in four books run to the year 973, but by the 16th
chapter of the first book he has reached 880, so that his also must rank
as a history of his own time. Of all these chroniclers and observers
Liudprand of Cremona is by far the smartest. His spiteful pictures of
the Byzantine court are not easily to be paralleled : he has a real turn
a
## p. 535 (#581) ############################################
Geography and science
535
for satire and for vivid description, and the gaps in his text are very
much to be deplored.
Of those who treat of the Arts and Sciences the grammarians are
probably the most numerous. I have renounced the idea of noticing
each Irishman or Frank who has left us an Ars, but I would find a place
here for mention of two Epistles, separated in time by a full century,
which are largely grammatical in subject and epistolary only in form.
They serve mainly as displays of their authors' reading. One is by
Ermenrich of Ellwangen to Grimald of St Gall (854), the other by
Gunzo of Novara to the monks of Reichenau (965) à propos of a monk
a
of St Gall who had rashly criticised his Latin. They are tedious com-
positions, but have their importance.
The ers on Geography are few. Dicuil, an Irishman (825), draws
lar upon ancient sources, but adds something about Iceland and the
Faroe Islands that depends upon the observations of compatriots who had
been there. The famous voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, inserted by
Alfred into his Orosius, though they are in the vernacular, must find
mention under this head. Other quasi-geographers are the translators
of Alexander's letter to Aristotle, and other matter on the Marvels of the
East. They probably fall within our period, but the best copies we have
of them-Anglo-Saxon versions illustrated with pictures—may be of the
eleventh century.
Medicine meant chiefly materia medica, collections of recipes, and
spells. The Latin version of Dioscorides, and the recipes and charms
current under the names of Apuleius and Sextus Placidus, were prime
authorities. Little new work was produced.
No idea of the progress made in Music can be given, but by a
specialist : it must suffice here to name Notker, Hoger, and Hucbald of
St Amand as the leading exponents.
Astronomy and Mathematics remain. Both were ancillary to church
purposes, the settling of the Calendar and especially the determination
of Easter. Bede's were the text-books which were perhaps found most
useful generally, and that of Helperic of Auxerre (c. 850) had a wide
circulation. But we may neglect every name that appears in connexion
with Mathematics in favour of that of Gerbert of Aurillac, who died as
Pope Sylvester II in 1003. He is the last really outstanding figure.
Everything that he wrote and did has distinction, and he demands a
somewhat extended notice. Born at Aurillac (Cantal) he spent the years
967–970 in Spain with Hatto, Archbishop of Vich. From 970 to 972
he was with the Emperor: for the next ten years (972–982) he was
master of the cathedral school at Rheims, and Richer devotes many pages
to telling us what he taught there. In 982 he was made Abbot of
Bobbio, the literary treasures of which were no doubt a great attraction
to him : in 991 he became Archbishop of Rheims, in 998 of Ravenna.
In the following year he passed to the Chair of Peter. His political
CH, XX.
## p. 536 (#582) ############################################
536
Gerbert (Sylvester II)
activities, which were great, we will pass over, and deal only with his
literary interests, as they are revealed in his letters and in other sources.
The letters most instructive from this point of view are mostly written
from Bobbio. To Archbishop Adalbero of Rheims he says (Ep. 8),
“Procure me the history of Julius Caesar from Adso, Abbot of Montièr-
ender, to be copied, if you want me to furnish you with what I have,
viz. the eight books of Boethius on Astrology and some splendid geo-
metrical diagrams. ” To Abbot Gisalbert (Ep. 9): “The philosopher
Demosthenes wrote a book on the diseases and treatment of the eyes,
called Ophthalmicus. I want the beginning of it, if you have it, and also
the end of Cicero pro rege Deiotaro. " Rainard, a monk, is asked for
M. Manlius De astrologia (who is thought by Havet not to be the poet
Manilius, but Boethius) and for some other books. Stephen, a Roman
deacon, is to send Suetonius and Symmachus. “The art of persuasive
oratory (Ep. 44) is of the greatest practical utility. With a view to it
I am hard at work collecting a library, and have spent very large sums
at Rome and in other parts of Italy, and in Germany and the Belgian
country, on scribes and on copies of books. " To a monk of Trèves
(Ep. 134): “I am too busy to send you the sphere you ask for: your
best chance of getting it is to send me a good copy of the Achilleis of
Statius. ” The monk sent the poem, but the sphere was again withheld.
Such extracts shew the catholicity of Gerbert's tastes. Richer tells the
same tale; he runs through the Seven Liberal Arts, and shews what
methods and books Gerbert used in teaching each of them. In Mathe-
matics his chief innovation seems to have been the revival of the use of
the abacus for calculations, and the employment, in connexion with it,
of an early form of the “ Arabic" (really Indian) numerals from 1 to 9,
without the zero. He also wrote on mathematical subjects, though,
perhaps, no signal discovery stands to his credit. Besides all this he was
a practical workman. William of Malmesbury describes in rather vague
terms an organ made by him which was to all appearance actuated by
steam. To the same excellent author and to Walter Map we owe all the
best of the many legends that have gathered about Gerbert; of the
treasure he found at Rome, guided to it by the statue whose forehead
was inscribed “Strike here,” of the fairy whom he met in the forest near
Rheims, and of his death. He, like Henry IV of England, was not to
,
die but in Jerusalem. His Jerusalem was the basilica of Sta Croce in
Gerusalemme at Rome. It may be worth while to end this sketch of
him with a correction. We are commonly told that the sixth or seventh
century uncial manuscript of the Scriptores Gromatici, the Roman writers
on land-measurement, which is now at Wolfenbüttel, and is known as the
Codex Arcerianus, was Gerbert's. This is denied by his latest editor,
Boubnov, though he allows that the book was at Bobbio in the tenth
century.
Our last topic is that of books in vernacular. For practical purposes
## p. 537 (#583) ############################################
Books in vernacular
537
this unscientific expression means the Celtic and Teutonic families of
speech ; our period has nothing to shew for the Romance languages.
Most of what it seemed needful to say about Celtic literature in connexion
with learning has found a place in the chapter preceding this. It must
be borne in mind that the evolution of fresh native literatures independent
of learning transmitted by books is foreign to our subject; the fact that
the really native product is in itself the best worth reading is irrelevant
here. Famous poems such as the Tain Bo Cuailnge and Beowulf, and
the Dream of the Rood, therefore have to be passed over, and such parts
of the old Northern corpus of poetry as critics allow to be anterior to
the year 1000.
Infinitely the largest place in these two centuries is occupied by the
Anglo-Saxon writings. A certain number of poems assigned to the latter
part of the eighth century are on themes derived from books. The
Andreas of the Vercelli manuscript is from a text which is only forth-
coming in scanty fragments of Latin, though we have it in Greek: there
was also once a poem on the adventures of St Thomas in India, but it
has disappeared; it was too fabulous for Aelfric to use as the basis of his
Homily on the Apostle. Other Acts of Saints are drawn upon in the
poems called Elene and Juliana. We have not the original that lies
behind the Dialogue of Salomon and Saturn, but there was one, pre-
sumably in Latin, and a strange book it must have been. The Phoenix
is in part at least a rendering of a poem attributed to Lactantius. One
of the Genesis-poems-that which is called Genesis B, and has been said
to be anglicised from Old Saxon-is held to be under obligations to the
poems of Alcimus Avitus. The ninth century Homilies of the Vercelli
and Blickling manuscripts, as has been said, present versions of and
allusions to the Apocalypse of Thomas. The source oftenest employed
for sermons is not unnaturally the homily-book of Gregory the Great, to
whom Christian England owed so much.
The end of the same century sees King Alfred's work: he puts into
the hands of his clergy and people Gregory, Orosius, Bede, and Boethius,
and infuses into Orosius and Boethius something of his own great spirit.
He did not seek to make his people or his priests erudite, but to fit them
for the common duties of their lives: we find little curious learning in
what he wrote or ordered to be written. And in the work of Aelfric, nearly
a hundred years later, I seem to see an equally sober and practical, yet not
prosaic, mind. His sermons, whether he is paraphrasing Gregory on the
Sunday Gospels, or is telling the story of a saint from his Acts, appear
to be exactly fitted to their purpose of leading simple men in the right
way: skill in narrative, beauty of thought, goodness of soul, are there.
Whatever Aelfric it was who composed the Colloquy for schoolboys,
he, too, was gifted with sympathy and freshness. It gives some pictures
of ordinary life and manners which have long been popular, and with
good reason.
CH. XX.
## p. 538 (#584) ############################################
538
Destruction of libraries
Of some books and fragments which concern matters not theological,
it is hard to say whether they fall just within or just outside our period.
Such are the medical receipts, the leechdoms and the descriptions of
Eastern marvels already alluded to; such too the dream-books, the
weather prognostics, the version of the story of Apollonius of Tyre.
Byrhtferth of Ramsey, almost the only author of this class whose name
has survived, wrote partly in Latin and partly in the vernacular upon
“computus,” Calendarial science, shortly before the year 1000, when he
anticipates the loosing of Satan.
There was a time when it would have been proper to say that important
remains of Welsh poetry far older than A. D. 1000 were in existence.
That time is past, and it is recognised that the poems of Taliesin and
the rest are not of the first age. Glosses and small fragments of verse
are the oldest things we have in Welsh. Ireland has more, but the
documents—so far as they have not been noticed already—which bear on
learning, a great many can only be dated by the linguistic experts, and
unanimity is no more the rule among the scholars than among the
politicians of the Celts.
There are, it has been said, Irish versions of the Aethiopica of Helio-
dorus, of the Thebaid of Statius and of the Odyssey. To the first no
date is assigned; it is not in print, and for all one can tell it may have
been made from a printed edition: the second appears to be a medieval
abstract in prose: the only published text that represents the third is a
short prose tale. It has some traits (as of the dog of Odysseus recognising
him) which are not derivable from Latin sources, and read like distorted
recollections of the Greek; but the main course of the story is wholly
un-Homeric. Nor is it claimed as falling within our period. I cite this
as a specimen of exaggerations that are current. They are wholly uncalled
for. Nobody doubts the reality of the ancient learning of Ireland. It is
safe to predict that sober and critical research will not lessen but increase
our sense of the debt which the modern world owes, first to Ireland and
after her to Britain, as the preservers and transmitters of the wisdom of
old time.
I end this chapter, as I began it, with these islands; and as I write,
just such a storm hangs over them as that which, breaking, drove Alcuin
from their shores eleven centuries ago; and just such destruction is being
wrought in the old homes of learning, Corbie, and St Riquier, Laon and
Rheims, as the Vikings wrought then. But the destroyers of to-day are
no Vikings. They are, and the more is the pity, men of a race which has
done a vast deal for learning; that has brought to light things new and
old. They are undoing their own work now: they have robbed the world
of beauties and delights that never can be given back. It will be long
before any of the nations can forgive Germany; longer still, I earnestly
hope, before she can forgive herself.
:
## p. 539 (#585) ############################################
539
CHAPTER XXI.
BYZANTINE AND ROMANESQUE ARTS.
When Constantine rebuilt the city which we still call Constantinople
as a new Rome in the East, doubtless mixed methods in architecture
were resorted to. The more important buildings of his official architects
must have been in the current Roman manner. Secondary buildings
and ordinary dwellings would, however, have been constructed according
to local customs, and a modified style must soon have resulted here, as
earlier had been the case in Alexandria, and in other Greek and Roman
cities of the East. The later Roman architecture became more and more
changed through these contacts with the East, not only in structure but
in the decorations and the underlying ideals which governed both. It
is this mixed product which formed the Byzantine architecture, and
has been so named by modern students from the old name of the new
capital of the Empire.
As through recent explorations we come to know more of the building
modes practised in Egypt, North Africa, Syria, Asia Minor and Mesopo-
tamia, that is, throughout eastern Christendom, it becomes increasingly
difficult to cover them all with the one narrow word Byzantine. In
Syria, for instance, the builders had much fine stone at command, but
little or no brick or timber, and here, in consequence, everything archi-
tectural tended to be turned to stone. In Constantinople the common
stone was a good, easily cutting, white marble, and this was liberally
used in association with excellent burnt bricks of thin flat shape. In
Egypt there was a little fine limestone and much mud for bricks, which
were frequently, for secondary purposes, used in an unburnt condition.
The term Byzantine properly applies to the style of building
developed in the new imperial capital, but some such word as Byzan-
tesque seems to be required to describe inclusively those many varieties of
building practised in the Christian East, which were yet more or less the
members of a common tradition.
In the fourth century, when the new capital was built, the style was
still Roman and the point of view was mainly pagan. Byzantine archi-
tecture developed step by step as the Empire became Christianised ; and
two hundred years later, during the reign of Justinian, the Byzantine
style was fully established. We may put the emergence of the style
CH. XXI.
## p. 540 (#586) ############################################
540
Early building
about the middle of the fifth century, that is half-way between the reigns
of Constantine and Justinian.
In the East from a very early time ordinary building works were for
the most part done with sun-dried mud bricks. In hot, dry countries this
forms a fairly good material. Besides this use of crude bricks there had
come down a still simpler way of building by aggregations of clay. The
mud, even when subdivided into crude bricks, adhered so thoroughly when
put together in a mass with liquid mud in the joints, that a type of struc-
ture was developed which was homogeneous; the roofs and floors being of
the same materials as the walls, and continuous with them. The chambers,
large or small, were cells in a mass-material. Such a method of building
was common to the valleys of the Nile and the great rivers of Western
Asia. Burnt bricks were in turn developed from mud bricks by an exten-
sion of the method found so successful in making pottery. Such bricks
were often used for special purposes in combination with the crude bricks
from an early time. The building forms made use of in typical Byzan-
tine architecture largely depended on the use of brick, which may be
regarded as the bringing together of small units well cemented so as
to form continuous walls and vaults. Burnt bricks were usually set in
so much mortar, the bricks being thin and the joints thick, that the
whole became a sort of built concrete. The mortar in a wall, in fact,
must frequently have been much more in quantity than the bricks.
Arising doubtless out of primitive ways of forming mud roofs, it
became customary later to construct vaults of mud bricks, and then of burnt
bricks, by leaning the courses against an end wall so that the vault was
gradually drawn forward from the end of a given chamber in inclined
layers. Each layer was thus supported by the part already done and no
centring was required. Domes came to be erected in a somewhat similar
way. A rod or a cord being attached to the centre so as to be readily
turned in any direction, a dome was reared on its circular base, a course
at a time, the curvature being determined by the length of the rod or
cord. About 1670 Dr Covel described this method of procedure, and it
is still practised in the East, although skilled dome builders are now but
few.
If a dome is not set over a circle, but over an octagon or a square, a
troublesome question arises in regard to the angles. Where the chamber
is small, and especially in the case of the octagonal form, the work can
easily be jutted out in the angles so as roughly to conform to the circular
base required for the dome. When, however, a square area is large,
some regular solution becomes necessary. The angles of the square may
be cut off by diagonal arches so as to form an octagon. If such arches
are so built as to continue back into the angles forming little vaults,
on a triangular base, they are called squinches. In such cases as these the
base of the dome is governed by the width across the chamber, but it is
possible to plan a dome on the diagonal dimensions of the area to be
а
## p. 541 (#587) ############################################
Domes
541
a
а
covered so as to spring out of the angles. In this case it is clear that
the dome as seen from within gradually expands from the four lowest
points and spreads on the walls as it grows upward, forming concave
triangles having curved lines against the four walls.
almost en masse with her crowd of philosophers to our shores, and all
the most learned doom themselves to voluntary exile to attend the
bidding of Solomon the wise. ” But this was not the sole or even the
chief reason.
As the rhetoricians of Gaul had been driven into Ireland
by one set of invasions, so now the Irish were driven out of it by
another, that of the Scandinavian pirates who had already done so much
mischief in England. We cannot doubt that lamentable destruction of
books took place in Ireland too, but we know little or nothing about
established libraries there.
We first hear of John the Scot at the court of Charles the Bald in
845, and his first continental writing was on predestination against
Gottschalk (851). Not very long after, in 858–860, he made his first
important translation from Greek, of the works called of Dionysius the
Areopagite. The copy he used was most likely one which in 827 the
Greek Emperor, Michael, had given to the Abbey of St Denis'. Hilduin,
Abbot of that house, had done his best to establish the identity of the
patron of the Abbey with the Areopagite, and the identification was
commonly accepted throughout the medieval period.
It is generally agreed that John knew Greek before he left Ireland.
This would make it natural to commit to him the task of rendering the
very difficult language and matter of Dionysius into Latin. But the
1 Now at Paris (B. N. Gr. 437).
## p. 525 (#571) ############################################
Sedulius Scottus
525
a
contents were such as were certain to attract him. He was a philosopher
born, and the blend of Neo-Platonism and Christianity in these writings was
exactly suited to his temperament. He performed his work in a way
that excited the wonder of a very competent scholar at Rome: for in
860 the translation was sent to Pope Nicholas, and he referred it for an
opinion to his librarian Anastasius, who had done much work of the
kind. Anastasius marvels how a man from a remote and barbarous land
could have attained such mastery of Greek ; Irish learning was evidently
an unknown thing to him.
In his dedications of his version to the Emperor, and also in a good
many of his occasional poems, John ventures upon original Greek verse
composition : here he is at his weakest, both as poet and as prosodist;
the scansion is surprisingly bad. The Dionysius was followed by the
Ambigua of Maximus (άπορα εις Γρηγόριον περί φύσεων), also a difficult
text to translate and not one of much importance. Most likely no other
philosophical text (if we except the Solutiones of Priscianus Lydus, as to
which there is doubt) came into John's hands. He made no other trans-
lations, but turned to the composition of his last and greatest work, to
which he gave a Greek title, tepi duoen peplo moù (867). Little copied,
for it soon became suspect of pantheism, it is the most original piece of
speculative thought which these centuries have to shew. Nothing so
remarkable probably was put forth until Anselm came.
Other works by John to which no precise date has been assigned are
his excerpts from Macrobius on the verb, which preserve all we have of
a very valuable book, a fragmentary commentary on St John's Gospel
in which he makes use of the Greek text, and commentaries on Martianus
Capella and Boethius. We still await a critical edition of the whole of
the works of this very marked scholar and thinker. It is unfair to judge
of his personality from silence, but the fact remains that there is no
written tribute to any but his intellectual gifts.
Sedulius Scottus is found at Liège about 848, and after a lapse of ten
years becomes untraceable. In him we have no original thinker, but a
writer of some skill, a most industrious compiler and transcriber, and
a lover of ancient literature. His book De rectoribus Christianis addressed
to Lothar II, interspersed with pieces of verse in many metres (after
the fashion of Boethius) and with copious quotations from the Proverbia
Graecorum (see p. 504), is his best original composition. There are, too,
many fugitive pieces of verse, some addressed to his patrons, one or two
to his Irish companions, others descriptive of works of art, for example,
a silken pall embroidered with a long series of scenes from the life of
St Peter. Under the head of compilations we reckon his collections on
St Matthew and on the Pauline Epistles (the former as yet unprinted)
and his Commentaries on grammatical works, Priscian, Donatus, Eutychius.
In the last-named, which was very likely written in Ireland, he uses that
tract of Macrobius on the verb, of which John has been the chief preserver.
CH. XX.
## p. 526 (#572) ############################################
526
Glossaries
There is also in the library of the hospital of Cues (Cusa) near Trèves
a manuscript of a commonplace book of his of very remarkable character.
It has supplied us with pieces of Cicero's orations against Piso and for
Fonteius which are wanting in our other copies, and of Vegetius, Porphyrio,
and Lactantius. Partly perhaps because of the many Greek passages in
his works, Lactantius was little read or copied between the ninth and
the fifteenth century. To Sedulius however these were no deterrent; he
collects some of them at the end of a Greek psalter which we have of
his transcribing. A remark of Traube's will be in place here: “I hazard
the guess," he says, “that wherever Greek passages survive in Latin
works, they are to be referred to Irish influence. "
The manuscripts transcribed by Sedulius and his circle remain to be
noticed. Those which are most confidently ascribed to his hand are the
Psalter just mentioned, which is signed by him (it is now in the Arsenal
Library at Paris, and was once at St Nicholas's Abbey at Verdun), and
a Graeco-Latin copy of the Pauline Epistles at Dresden, of which the
Codex Augiensis at Trinity College, Cambridge, is a transcript. There
are besides at St Gall a Priscian, perhaps brought from Ireland, and a
Gospels in Greek and Latin (known as A), and there is a famous book
at Berne (363) containing our oldest copy of Horace's Odes. In these we
find, scribbled on margins, Irish names, and names of others, such as
Hartgar of Tongres, Gunther of Cologne, Hilduin, Hincmar, etc. , whom
we know to have been connected with Sedulius. His own name also
occurs not unfrequently.
Of the less distinguished members of the band of Irish scholars,
Dunchad or Duncant has been asserted and also denied to be the author
of a Comment on Martianus Capella (not printed). Common to this,
and to John the Scot's comment on the same author, is a fragment of
the lost Peplus of Theophrastus, which is also copied in a Laon manu-
script (444) written by an Irish teacher, Martin of Laon (1875). This
book contains a Graeco-Latin glossary, and, inter alia, Greek verses
by Martin himself, no better and no worse than those of John.
νυν ληγε νεανισκε λεγειν, δος δεσματα χιλσιν (χείλεσιν)
is the last line, and a fair sample.
Room must be found here for a word about glossaries. They were
the indispensable tool of any who aspired to a knowledge of Greek, and
were used by others who had no real grasp of the language but desired
to be thought Greek scholars. The two chief Graeco-Latin glossaries
go by the names of Cyrillus and Philoxenus respectively. The prime
authority for the text of Cyrillus is an ancient manuscript in the Harleian
collection (5792) which came from the hospital of Cues. We now know
that Laon 444, written by Martin, is a copy of it, and this means that
in the ninth century it was at or near Laon. It was not, however,
written in France, but most likely in Italy: its archetype is conjectured
## p. 527 (#573) ############################################
The Irish circle; mythographers
527
to have been a papyrus book. Philoxenus depends upon a ninth century
manuscript at Paris, and this too is referred to the neighbourhood of
Laon, or at least to the north of France.
Fergus was another of the Irish circle; he was the writer of part of
the St Gall Gospels (A). Yet another, of whom we know little more
than the name, was Elias, a connecting link between the Irish and their
most distinguished continental pupil, Heiric of Auxerre.
Heiric learned what Greek he knew from an Irish teacher or teachers
at Laon; he also sat under Lupus of Ferrières, and at his lectures took
down excerpts from Valerius Maximus and Suetonius. Elias supplied him
with the text of two collections of apophthegms, one current under the
name of Caecilius Balbus. A manuscript now at the abbey of Melk in
Austria preserves (with autograph notes by Heiric) another set of extracts
which is particularly interesting as including some from Petronius. The
copy from which these were taken is now divided between the libraries
of Berne and Paris.
His own works are not epoch-making: commentaries on some of the
poets, which supplied material to his pupil Remigius, and a long life of
St Germanus of Auxerre in verse. In this he makes considerable parade
of his Greek, intercalating into his dedications many words which he got
from the works of Dionysius the Areopagite. He makes such experiments
in lyric metres as shew him to have been a student of the Odes and
Epodes of Horace, and he is credited with being the first of his time to
pay much attention to these poems, which were always far less popular
than the Satires and Epistles.
Those who have studied the commentaries of Heiric award to them
higher praise for real soundness of learning than to those of Remigius.
But the name of the latter lived on, and Heiric's did not. Remigius
learnt of Dunchad as well as of Heiric, and taught at Rheims for Arch-
bishop Fulk, and at Paris. He lived on into the tenth century, and, it
is said, had Odo of Cluny among his pupils. The tale of his writings is a
long one, consisting almost entirely of commentaries upon grammarians,
poets, and books of the Bible. A tract on the Mass and a glossary of
proper names in the Bible, both ascribed to him, went on being copied
down to the end of the Middle Ages. Few of the many Bibles of the
thirteenth century are without the Interpretationes Nominum.
This is perhaps the place to mention the mythographers. Two anony
mous collections of stories of the ancient gods and heroes, very baldly
told, were printed by Mai from Vatican manuscripts of the tenth and
eleventh centuries, along with a later one which does not concern us.
The second of these mythographers copies a good deal of matter from
the first, and has been, not quite certainly, identified with Remigius.
The first quotes authors as late as Orosius, and mingles tales from
Roman history with his mythology. Neither attained a wide circulation,
but they deserve a word in virtue of their attempts to hand on the
a
CH. XX.
## p. 528 (#574) ############################################
528
Anastasius the Librarian
ancient legends and throw light on the allusions to them in classical
literature.
By the end of the ninth century, it is probably true to say that the
Irish stimulus had worked itself out. Had a steady supply of Greek
texts been available, one cannot doubt that men would have been found
to make use of them, but, it must be repeated, no new material was
coming in. Byzantium despised the West and did not care to enlighten
it. The Greek monasteries of Southern Italy seem never to have attracted
any attention in the north. The chief scholar at Rome, Anastasius
Bibliothecarius, died in 897 and left no successor. Something more needs
to be said of what he had accomplished. Nearly all his translations,
which are not few, were made at the request of friends or of the Pope.
He revised John's Dionysius and provided it with scholia rendered from
Greek. He put into Latin the Acts of two Councils, that of 787 and
that in which Photius was deposed and Ignatius restored to the patri-
archate. For John the Deacon, who was designing a large Church history,
he translated the Chronography of Nicephorus and copied extracts
from the chronicles of George the Syncellus and of Theophanes, the
three together forming what was known as the Chronographia tri-
partita, not to be confused with the Historia tripartita that was made
for Cassiodorus. It is an imposing list, and there is more than this to his
credit.
The excursions made into Greek literature in the tenth century are
almost negligible. In the middle of it Leo of Naples produced a version
of an Alexander-romance for Duke John of Naples from a manuscript he
had brought from Constantinople. It marks a stage in the spread of
that most influential romance. Later on we encounter another type of
Greek scholar, the man thoroughly familiar with the spoken language,
in Liudprand of Cremona, diplomat and historian.
It is not pretended that what has been said here of the study and
influence of Greek in these centuries is a complete survey. The gaps will
be obvious to experts. The province of liturgy, for instance, has not
been touched, and there is much in early tropers and other service books
which goes to shew that forms were borrowed from the Byzantines,
That the litanies of the Saints first appeared in Greek, transmitted
from Rome late in the seventh century to England by a Greek-speaking
Pope, is a proposition recently maintained by that great scholar Edmund
Bishop. Hagiography, again, would easily fill a chapter of its own. We
do not yet know all that was done by eastern monks, driven westward
by the Iconoclastic troubles, in the way of translation of Acts of Saints,
or more generally in the diffusion of their language. Further—a small
matter, this, perhaps—it would be worth while to collect the instances
in which western scribes have employed the Greek alphabet for their
titles and colophons; it is mainly a piece of harmless parade, but
is not wholly insignificant. Irishmen, Bretons, and Spaniards were
a
## p. 529 (#575) ############################################
Gottschalk
529
a
a
fondest of the practice, though it is not confined to them. Yet another
class of documents in which the use of rare Greek words became a
fashion are the charters of the tenth century, especially those made in
England.
This love of a bizarre vocabulary, which we have noticed before, crops
up again and again almost to the end of our period. About 830 we have
the strange poem of Lios Monocus, a Breton, who uses the Hisperica
Famina. About 896, Abbo of St Germain appends to his two books
of verse on the siege of Paris by the Northmen a third which is nothing
but a series of conundrums, unintelligible from the first without a gloss,
A hundred years later our English chronicler Fabius Aethelweard puts
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle into a very crabbed Latin with tags of verse
and sesquipedal compounds of his own devising.
It is a relief to turn from these oddities to some writings which have
an appreciable value as literature. Gottschalk or Godescalcus, monk of
Orbais (805-869), fills an enormous space in the dogmatic history of his
time. He paid dear enough to Hincmar of Rheims for the errors of his
doctrine, and his tragic story has been remembered by many who forget
how grim was his view of election and reprobation: Christ did not die
to save all men, but only the elect.
Only in somewhat recent times have certain lyrics of his been brought
to light which make him a more sympathetic character. There is a light-
ness about them not very common; lightness, not of tone, for they are
plaintive, but of touch :
Ut quid iubes pasiole
filiole
carmen dulce
cum sim longe exul valde
intra mare ?
O cur iubes canere ?
Yet more recently Gottschalk has been accepted as the author of a
poem very famous for six or seven centuries after him, the Eclogue of
Theodulus. (Theodulus is no more than Gottschalk, God's slave, turned
into Greek. ) This Eclogue is a colloquy between Truth (Alithia) and
Falsehood (Pseustis) with Reason (Phronesis) for umpire. Falsehood cites
a number of incidents from pagan mythology, giving a quatrain to each.
Truth caps every one with a contrast from the scriptures. The verdict
is a foregone conclusion. In length and subject the poem was admirably
fitted to be a school-book, and as a school-book it survived well into the
Renaissance period.
In 874 died Hathumoda, first Abbess of Gandersheim. Agius her
friend, a monk of Corvey (? ), wrote a long prose life of her, and also a
dialogue in elegiac verse between himself and her nuns. Rather exalted
language has been used about the beauty of this poem, but its ease and
simplicity and truth of feeling do mark it out among the productions of
quare mandas
me cantare
a
C. MEI). H. VOL. III. CH. XX.
34
## p. 530 (#576) ############################################
530
Notker; school of St Gall
:
its time. It is not however distinguished for originality of thought or
excellence of technique.
Mathias et Barnabas, Timothēus, Apollo
Silvanus, Titus, Theophilus, Gaïus
is not a good couplet, but
Te iam portus habet: nos adhuc iactat abyssus:
Te lux vera tenet: nos tenebrae retinent:
Tu cum virginibus comitans, quocunque eat Agnus
Lilia cum violis colligis atque rosas
are better lines, and typical of what has been praised in the poem.
Opinion is still unsettled as to whether Agius and a writer known as
Poeta Saxo are identical. Agius would not gain greatly were his claim
established: the poem is nothing but a versification of prose sources
(Annals and Einhard) on the life of Charlemagne.
The community of St Gall, as may be guessed from the frequent
mention of it in these pages, has a wonderful record for the preservation
of ancient literature. It is scarcely less remarkable for its own literary
productions. Two of its writers shall have special notice now.
The first is Notker Balbulus, the Stammerer (840-912). Several
other Notkers of St Gall followed him, the most famous of whom was
Notker Labeo (+ 1022), translator into German of Boethius and much
else. But this first Notker is considerably more important, principally
on two grounds. One was the development of a form of church poetry
known as the Sequence. The essence of it was this. It had become the
fashion to prolong to an exaggerated extent the singing of the word
Alleluia where it occurred at the end of antiphons. The melodies of
such Alleluias were fixed, but were exceedingly hard to remember.
Taking the hint from a Jumièges service-book that had been brought
to St Gall, Notker fitted the Alleluias with words appropriate to the
Church season or feast, putting as a rule a syllable to each note of the
long wandering melody. Thus there grew up a new form of poem, non-
metrical at the outset, which in later years became bound by stricter
rules, and which exercised a great influence upon secular poetry. In
Notker's hands it was wholly conditioned by the tune to which it was
set. The one example of it that is widely known in this country is the
funeral sequence, Media in vita, “ In the midst of life,” whether that is
truly Notker's work or not.
He is also famous as the author of the book of reminiscences of
Charlemagne called Gesta Karoli and long current simply as the work of
the “Monk of St Gall. ” It is now recognised as Notker's. Alas! we
possess only a part of it, but what we have is one of the few books of
the period which can really be read with pleasure. There is not much
plan in it; it is in the main Notker’s recollections of stories told to him
in his youth by an old warrior Adalbert who had fought for the Emperor,
and by Adalbert's son Werinbert, a cleric, and also by a third informant
## p. 531 (#577) ############################################
Ekkehard; Gesta Berengarii
531
of
a
whose name has been lost with the preface and the third book of the
Gesta. It was written down at the request of Charles the Fat, who when
staying at St Gall in 883 had been greatly delighted with Notker's tales
of his great-grandfather and his father. Almost all the picturesque
anecdotes that we have of Charlemagne come from this book; tales of
war and peace, of embassies from the East and what they brought, of the
Emperor's dealings with his clergy, behaviour in church, dress, are to be
found here, many doubtless true, others shewing the beginning of a
Charlemagne mythology. The loss of the third book is particularly
exasperating, for in it were promised recollections of the hero's every-day
conversation.
Much more might be said of Notker, of his letters, his poems, his
humour, his treatise on the study of the Fathers (a parallel to the Insti-
tutions of Cassiodorus), but proportion must be observed, and we must
bid farewell to a man both gifted and amiable.
Our second St Gall author is Ekkehard, the first of five persons
that name who are prominent in the Abbey's annals. He died in 973.
Early in life he began the work by which he has deserved to be remem-
bered, the short epic of Waltharius. It is a heroic tale, a single episode
in a warrior's career. Waltharius escapes with his love from the Hun-
garian court in which both he and she were kept as hostages, is pursued
and successfully defends himself against great odds. The story ends
happily, and none of the Latin poems of all this age is better worth
reading. There is little of the flavour of a school exercise about it, and
there is a great deal of the freshness of the best romances in the vernacular.
With the exception of the Gesta Karoli, most of the writings we have
touched upon recently have been in verse. We will give a few paragraphs
to some of the remaining poets. John the Deacon, a Roman, writing in
875, gives us a curious versification of a curious old piece called the
Caena Cypriani, and mingles it with personal satire. The whole thing
is a jeu d'esprit, written, as Lapôtre has shewn, on the occasion of the
coronation of Charles the Bald at Rome, and was recited at a banquet
where were present various notabilities (Anastasius the Librarian among
them) who are smartly hit off.
Hucbald of St Amand's Eclogue in praise of baldness, produced about
885, must be passed with averted eye. Every word of its 146 lines begins
with the letter C.
The early part of the tenth century gives us two anonymous books
of some slight celebrity, the Gesta Berengarii, a panegyric on that
Emperor by an Italian who knew some Greek, and the Ecbasis captivi
by a monk of Toul, “ the oldest beast-epic of the Middle Ages. ” Animals
are the actors, and tales in which they figure are woven together not
without spirit. But more famous in respect of the sex of the writer and
of the vehicle she has employed are the works of Hrotsvitha, a nun of
Gandersheim who wrote about 960. They are collected into three books
CH, XX,
34-2
## p. 532 (#578) ############################################
532
Hrotsvitha; Libri Carolini
whereof the first consists of poems on the lives of the Virgin and certain
other saints (the grotesque legend of Gengulphus of Toul is among them),
the second of six so-called comedies, the third of a short epic on Otto I:
another, on the origins of Gandersheim, is preserved separately. The
comedies are the unusual feature. They are written in no strict metre
but in a rhythmical prose, and treat of episodes from saints' lives. They
are avowedly intended to extol chastity, as a counterblast to the mis-
chievous writings of Terence. We have here the earliest of Christian
dramas (dramatic only in form, for Hrotsvitha would never have sanctioned
the acting of them) and as such they would in any case be interesting;
but they are not without merit. Short and easily read, their plots are
not ill-chosen, and the dialogue moves quickly. There is even a touch
of humour here and there, as when, in Dulcitius, the Roman persecutor
makes love to the pots and pans in the kitchen, under the illusion of their
being Christian girls, and gets covered with soot.
In one or two cases the sources employed are interesting. The first
poem of the first book deals with the life of the Virgin and the Infancy
of Christ, and is drawn from an apocryphal Gospel, in a text usually
fathered upon Matthew, but here upon James the Lord's brother. The
second, on the Ascension, is from an unidentified Greek text translated
by a bishop John. One of the plays is an episode from the Acts of
St John the Evangelist.
It must be said once again that this chapter is not a text-book or a
history, but a survey, of the literature of two centuries. So far it has
been mainly occupied with what by a stretch of language might be called
belles lettres : but these form only a small fraction of the whole bulk of
writings which have come to us from the years 800 to 1000. To leave
the rest unglanced at would be outrageous. Five headings seem to com-
prise the greatest part of what it is really essential to notice: Theology,
Hagiography leading over to History, the Sciences and Arts, and books
in vernacular languages.
In the enormous department of Theology we find two great categories,
Commentaries on the Scriptures and controversial writings. Liturgy and
Homiletics we must leave untouched. From the commentators we have
a huge bulk of material, but with very few exceptions, it is wholly un-
original.
Like Bede, these men compiled from earlier authors. The
Glossa Ordinaria, already noticed, is typical. Angelomus of Luxeuil,
Haymo of Halberstadt, Raban Maur, are compilers of this class. For
anything like originality we must look to John the Scot and to Christianus
“Druthmarus” of Stavelot, who wrote (in 865) on St Matthew's Gospel :
but even he is distinguished rather by good sense than by brilliancy.
Five principal controversies occupied the minds and pens of the church
writers. At the beginning of our period we have two: the Adoptionist,
in which Elipandus and Alcuin were the foremost figures, and the Icono-
clastic. The latter produced a remarkable group of books. The Icono-
## p. 533 (#579) ############################################
Radbert and Ratramn; Hagiography
533
clastic cause met much opposition, but also some support, in the West.
The Libri Carolini against images, written at the Emperor's order (whether
or no Alcuin had a hand in them is not settled), are the work of a well-
read man who draws interesting illustrations from pagan mythology and
contemporary works of art. Claudius, Bishop of Turin, was also a hot
Iconoclast in deed and in word. We have only extracts from the treatise
he wrote, but we have replies to it from an Irishman, Dungal, and from
Jonas of Orleans. Dungal, who quotes the Christian poets very largely,
especially Paulinus of Nola, prefixes to his books some fragments from
Claudius, and says that the whole work was one-third as long again as
the Psalter: he seems to think that this aggravates the offence.
The middle of the ninth century saw two more great disputes. One
is that on Predestination, in which the monk Gottschalk, who took the
most rigid view, was forcibly silenced, scourged, and imprisoned by
Hincmar of Rheims, and written against by John the Scot and Paschasius
Radbert of Corbie, to name only two of a large group. Radbert was a
man of very wide reading and had one of the best libraries of the time
at his command. He is one of the very few who quote Irenaeus Against
Heresies. The other dispute concerned the Eucharist. Radbert is here
again to the fore, in defence of the view which, developed, is the faith of
Rome. Ratramn, also of Corbie, wrote in a strain which made the
Reformers of the sixteenth century claim him as an early champion on
their side.
We have other interesting matter from Ratramn's pen; a treatise
against the errors of the Greeks, and a letter to one Rimbert, who had in-
quired what was the proper view to take of the race of Cynocephali, tribes
of dog-headed men believed to inhabit parts of Africa. St Christopher,
it is not generally realised, was of this race, and the conversion of one of
them is also related in the eastern Acts of SS. Andrew and Bartholomew.
Ratramn, who does not cite these examples, answers Rimbert with good
If what is reported of the Cynocephali is borne out by facts,
they must be looked upon as reasonable and redeemable beings.
The controversy with the Greeks is the fifth and last of these to be
mentioned here. Besides Ratramn's book, there is an important con-
tribution to it by Aeneas of Paris.
To Hagiography the Carolingian Renaissance gave an immense
stimulus. The founding of a multitude of abbeys and the building of
great churches and the stocking of them with relics of ancient martyrs,
begged, bought or stolen from Rome, were operative causes. Einhard's
story of the translation of SS. Marcellinus and Peter is one classic to
which relic-hunting gave birth, Rudolf of Fulda's about St Alexander is
another, this last because passages from the Germania of Tacitus are
embodied in it. There was, besides, the natural wish to possess a readable
life of many a patron saint whose doings had been forgotten or else
were only chronicled in barbarous Latin of the seventh century. Lives
sense.
CH. XX.
## p. 534 (#580) ############################################
534
History
and by
invented or rewritten in response to this wish bulk very large in the Acta
Sanctorum. Not unimportant are the versified Passions and Lives which
perhaps begin with Prudentius and Paulinus of Nola and are carried on
by Fortunatus (St Martin), Bede (St Cuthbert), Heiric (St Germanus),
Notker (St Gall) and a whole host of anonymi. All these, fiction or fact,
have their interest, but are of course much inferior to the rare con-
temporary biographies such as those of St Boniface by Willibrord and
of St Anschar by Rimbert.
The mention of these leads naturally to the single biographies of
uncanonised persons. Charlemagne, we have seen, is the subject of the
two best. Those of Louis the Pious by the “ Astronomus
Thegan have nothing of the charm and skill of Einhard and Notker.
Nearest to them is a British writing, the first to be mentioned after a
long interval of silence, Asser's life of Alfred.
Of others, that of Eigil by Candidus, a Fulda production of about
840, and that of John of Gorze by Abbot John of Metz have distinct
interest. Agnellus's collections on the Archbishops of Ravenna, full of
archaeological lore (839), and some of the lives of Popes in the Liber
Pontificalis, perhaps due to the pen of Anastasius the Librarian, supply
us with many facts we are glad to have, but do not pretend to be artistic
biographies.
History writing takes three other principal forms. There is the
world-chronicle, of which Freculphus of Lisieux and Regino of Prüm
(near Trèves) and, later, Marianus Scotus, give examples; there are the
annals, commonly connected with a religious establishment, such as those
of Lorsch; and there is the episodic, telling of some particular campaign
or the rise of some great church. To this last class belongs Nithardus
(† 844); natural son of Angilbert by Charlemagne's daughter Bertha,
and successor (ultimately) to his father as lay-abbot of St Riquier. He
writes four short books in clear and simple prose, on Louis the Pious and
the quarrels of Lothar, Charles the Bald, and Louis the German-a
strictly contemporary record. Incidentally he has preserved, by tran-
scribing the terms of the Oath of Strasbourg, the oldest piece of French
and one of the oldest pieces of German which we have. The church
of Rheims had two historians. Flodoard (also author of some immense
poems) begins in the mists of antiquity and carries the story down to
about 966. Richer, whose book is extant (at Bamberg) in the author's
autograph, dedicates his history to Gerbert; he devotes small space to
early history and much to his own time: his narrative ends in 995.
Widukind of Corvey is another name that cannot be passed over : his
Gesta Saxonum in four books run to the year 973, but by the 16th
chapter of the first book he has reached 880, so that his also must rank
as a history of his own time. Of all these chroniclers and observers
Liudprand of Cremona is by far the smartest. His spiteful pictures of
the Byzantine court are not easily to be paralleled : he has a real turn
a
## p. 535 (#581) ############################################
Geography and science
535
for satire and for vivid description, and the gaps in his text are very
much to be deplored.
Of those who treat of the Arts and Sciences the grammarians are
probably the most numerous. I have renounced the idea of noticing
each Irishman or Frank who has left us an Ars, but I would find a place
here for mention of two Epistles, separated in time by a full century,
which are largely grammatical in subject and epistolary only in form.
They serve mainly as displays of their authors' reading. One is by
Ermenrich of Ellwangen to Grimald of St Gall (854), the other by
Gunzo of Novara to the monks of Reichenau (965) à propos of a monk
a
of St Gall who had rashly criticised his Latin. They are tedious com-
positions, but have their importance.
The ers on Geography are few. Dicuil, an Irishman (825), draws
lar upon ancient sources, but adds something about Iceland and the
Faroe Islands that depends upon the observations of compatriots who had
been there. The famous voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, inserted by
Alfred into his Orosius, though they are in the vernacular, must find
mention under this head. Other quasi-geographers are the translators
of Alexander's letter to Aristotle, and other matter on the Marvels of the
East. They probably fall within our period, but the best copies we have
of them-Anglo-Saxon versions illustrated with pictures—may be of the
eleventh century.
Medicine meant chiefly materia medica, collections of recipes, and
spells. The Latin version of Dioscorides, and the recipes and charms
current under the names of Apuleius and Sextus Placidus, were prime
authorities. Little new work was produced.
No idea of the progress made in Music can be given, but by a
specialist : it must suffice here to name Notker, Hoger, and Hucbald of
St Amand as the leading exponents.
Astronomy and Mathematics remain. Both were ancillary to church
purposes, the settling of the Calendar and especially the determination
of Easter. Bede's were the text-books which were perhaps found most
useful generally, and that of Helperic of Auxerre (c. 850) had a wide
circulation. But we may neglect every name that appears in connexion
with Mathematics in favour of that of Gerbert of Aurillac, who died as
Pope Sylvester II in 1003. He is the last really outstanding figure.
Everything that he wrote and did has distinction, and he demands a
somewhat extended notice. Born at Aurillac (Cantal) he spent the years
967–970 in Spain with Hatto, Archbishop of Vich. From 970 to 972
he was with the Emperor: for the next ten years (972–982) he was
master of the cathedral school at Rheims, and Richer devotes many pages
to telling us what he taught there. In 982 he was made Abbot of
Bobbio, the literary treasures of which were no doubt a great attraction
to him : in 991 he became Archbishop of Rheims, in 998 of Ravenna.
In the following year he passed to the Chair of Peter. His political
CH, XX.
## p. 536 (#582) ############################################
536
Gerbert (Sylvester II)
activities, which were great, we will pass over, and deal only with his
literary interests, as they are revealed in his letters and in other sources.
The letters most instructive from this point of view are mostly written
from Bobbio. To Archbishop Adalbero of Rheims he says (Ep. 8),
“Procure me the history of Julius Caesar from Adso, Abbot of Montièr-
ender, to be copied, if you want me to furnish you with what I have,
viz. the eight books of Boethius on Astrology and some splendid geo-
metrical diagrams. ” To Abbot Gisalbert (Ep. 9): “The philosopher
Demosthenes wrote a book on the diseases and treatment of the eyes,
called Ophthalmicus. I want the beginning of it, if you have it, and also
the end of Cicero pro rege Deiotaro. " Rainard, a monk, is asked for
M. Manlius De astrologia (who is thought by Havet not to be the poet
Manilius, but Boethius) and for some other books. Stephen, a Roman
deacon, is to send Suetonius and Symmachus. “The art of persuasive
oratory (Ep. 44) is of the greatest practical utility. With a view to it
I am hard at work collecting a library, and have spent very large sums
at Rome and in other parts of Italy, and in Germany and the Belgian
country, on scribes and on copies of books. " To a monk of Trèves
(Ep. 134): “I am too busy to send you the sphere you ask for: your
best chance of getting it is to send me a good copy of the Achilleis of
Statius. ” The monk sent the poem, but the sphere was again withheld.
Such extracts shew the catholicity of Gerbert's tastes. Richer tells the
same tale; he runs through the Seven Liberal Arts, and shews what
methods and books Gerbert used in teaching each of them. In Mathe-
matics his chief innovation seems to have been the revival of the use of
the abacus for calculations, and the employment, in connexion with it,
of an early form of the “ Arabic" (really Indian) numerals from 1 to 9,
without the zero. He also wrote on mathematical subjects, though,
perhaps, no signal discovery stands to his credit. Besides all this he was
a practical workman. William of Malmesbury describes in rather vague
terms an organ made by him which was to all appearance actuated by
steam. To the same excellent author and to Walter Map we owe all the
best of the many legends that have gathered about Gerbert; of the
treasure he found at Rome, guided to it by the statue whose forehead
was inscribed “Strike here,” of the fairy whom he met in the forest near
Rheims, and of his death. He, like Henry IV of England, was not to
,
die but in Jerusalem. His Jerusalem was the basilica of Sta Croce in
Gerusalemme at Rome. It may be worth while to end this sketch of
him with a correction. We are commonly told that the sixth or seventh
century uncial manuscript of the Scriptores Gromatici, the Roman writers
on land-measurement, which is now at Wolfenbüttel, and is known as the
Codex Arcerianus, was Gerbert's. This is denied by his latest editor,
Boubnov, though he allows that the book was at Bobbio in the tenth
century.
Our last topic is that of books in vernacular. For practical purposes
## p. 537 (#583) ############################################
Books in vernacular
537
this unscientific expression means the Celtic and Teutonic families of
speech ; our period has nothing to shew for the Romance languages.
Most of what it seemed needful to say about Celtic literature in connexion
with learning has found a place in the chapter preceding this. It must
be borne in mind that the evolution of fresh native literatures independent
of learning transmitted by books is foreign to our subject; the fact that
the really native product is in itself the best worth reading is irrelevant
here. Famous poems such as the Tain Bo Cuailnge and Beowulf, and
the Dream of the Rood, therefore have to be passed over, and such parts
of the old Northern corpus of poetry as critics allow to be anterior to
the year 1000.
Infinitely the largest place in these two centuries is occupied by the
Anglo-Saxon writings. A certain number of poems assigned to the latter
part of the eighth century are on themes derived from books. The
Andreas of the Vercelli manuscript is from a text which is only forth-
coming in scanty fragments of Latin, though we have it in Greek: there
was also once a poem on the adventures of St Thomas in India, but it
has disappeared; it was too fabulous for Aelfric to use as the basis of his
Homily on the Apostle. Other Acts of Saints are drawn upon in the
poems called Elene and Juliana. We have not the original that lies
behind the Dialogue of Salomon and Saturn, but there was one, pre-
sumably in Latin, and a strange book it must have been. The Phoenix
is in part at least a rendering of a poem attributed to Lactantius. One
of the Genesis-poems-that which is called Genesis B, and has been said
to be anglicised from Old Saxon-is held to be under obligations to the
poems of Alcimus Avitus. The ninth century Homilies of the Vercelli
and Blickling manuscripts, as has been said, present versions of and
allusions to the Apocalypse of Thomas. The source oftenest employed
for sermons is not unnaturally the homily-book of Gregory the Great, to
whom Christian England owed so much.
The end of the same century sees King Alfred's work: he puts into
the hands of his clergy and people Gregory, Orosius, Bede, and Boethius,
and infuses into Orosius and Boethius something of his own great spirit.
He did not seek to make his people or his priests erudite, but to fit them
for the common duties of their lives: we find little curious learning in
what he wrote or ordered to be written. And in the work of Aelfric, nearly
a hundred years later, I seem to see an equally sober and practical, yet not
prosaic, mind. His sermons, whether he is paraphrasing Gregory on the
Sunday Gospels, or is telling the story of a saint from his Acts, appear
to be exactly fitted to their purpose of leading simple men in the right
way: skill in narrative, beauty of thought, goodness of soul, are there.
Whatever Aelfric it was who composed the Colloquy for schoolboys,
he, too, was gifted with sympathy and freshness. It gives some pictures
of ordinary life and manners which have long been popular, and with
good reason.
CH. XX.
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538
Destruction of libraries
Of some books and fragments which concern matters not theological,
it is hard to say whether they fall just within or just outside our period.
Such are the medical receipts, the leechdoms and the descriptions of
Eastern marvels already alluded to; such too the dream-books, the
weather prognostics, the version of the story of Apollonius of Tyre.
Byrhtferth of Ramsey, almost the only author of this class whose name
has survived, wrote partly in Latin and partly in the vernacular upon
“computus,” Calendarial science, shortly before the year 1000, when he
anticipates the loosing of Satan.
There was a time when it would have been proper to say that important
remains of Welsh poetry far older than A. D. 1000 were in existence.
That time is past, and it is recognised that the poems of Taliesin and
the rest are not of the first age. Glosses and small fragments of verse
are the oldest things we have in Welsh. Ireland has more, but the
documents—so far as they have not been noticed already—which bear on
learning, a great many can only be dated by the linguistic experts, and
unanimity is no more the rule among the scholars than among the
politicians of the Celts.
There are, it has been said, Irish versions of the Aethiopica of Helio-
dorus, of the Thebaid of Statius and of the Odyssey. To the first no
date is assigned; it is not in print, and for all one can tell it may have
been made from a printed edition: the second appears to be a medieval
abstract in prose: the only published text that represents the third is a
short prose tale. It has some traits (as of the dog of Odysseus recognising
him) which are not derivable from Latin sources, and read like distorted
recollections of the Greek; but the main course of the story is wholly
un-Homeric. Nor is it claimed as falling within our period. I cite this
as a specimen of exaggerations that are current. They are wholly uncalled
for. Nobody doubts the reality of the ancient learning of Ireland. It is
safe to predict that sober and critical research will not lessen but increase
our sense of the debt which the modern world owes, first to Ireland and
after her to Britain, as the preservers and transmitters of the wisdom of
old time.
I end this chapter, as I began it, with these islands; and as I write,
just such a storm hangs over them as that which, breaking, drove Alcuin
from their shores eleven centuries ago; and just such destruction is being
wrought in the old homes of learning, Corbie, and St Riquier, Laon and
Rheims, as the Vikings wrought then. But the destroyers of to-day are
no Vikings. They are, and the more is the pity, men of a race which has
done a vast deal for learning; that has brought to light things new and
old. They are undoing their own work now: they have robbed the world
of beauties and delights that never can be given back. It will be long
before any of the nations can forgive Germany; longer still, I earnestly
hope, before she can forgive herself.
:
## p. 539 (#585) ############################################
539
CHAPTER XXI.
BYZANTINE AND ROMANESQUE ARTS.
When Constantine rebuilt the city which we still call Constantinople
as a new Rome in the East, doubtless mixed methods in architecture
were resorted to. The more important buildings of his official architects
must have been in the current Roman manner. Secondary buildings
and ordinary dwellings would, however, have been constructed according
to local customs, and a modified style must soon have resulted here, as
earlier had been the case in Alexandria, and in other Greek and Roman
cities of the East. The later Roman architecture became more and more
changed through these contacts with the East, not only in structure but
in the decorations and the underlying ideals which governed both. It
is this mixed product which formed the Byzantine architecture, and
has been so named by modern students from the old name of the new
capital of the Empire.
As through recent explorations we come to know more of the building
modes practised in Egypt, North Africa, Syria, Asia Minor and Mesopo-
tamia, that is, throughout eastern Christendom, it becomes increasingly
difficult to cover them all with the one narrow word Byzantine. In
Syria, for instance, the builders had much fine stone at command, but
little or no brick or timber, and here, in consequence, everything archi-
tectural tended to be turned to stone. In Constantinople the common
stone was a good, easily cutting, white marble, and this was liberally
used in association with excellent burnt bricks of thin flat shape. In
Egypt there was a little fine limestone and much mud for bricks, which
were frequently, for secondary purposes, used in an unburnt condition.
The term Byzantine properly applies to the style of building
developed in the new imperial capital, but some such word as Byzan-
tesque seems to be required to describe inclusively those many varieties of
building practised in the Christian East, which were yet more or less the
members of a common tradition.
In the fourth century, when the new capital was built, the style was
still Roman and the point of view was mainly pagan. Byzantine archi-
tecture developed step by step as the Empire became Christianised ; and
two hundred years later, during the reign of Justinian, the Byzantine
style was fully established. We may put the emergence of the style
CH. XXI.
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540
Early building
about the middle of the fifth century, that is half-way between the reigns
of Constantine and Justinian.
In the East from a very early time ordinary building works were for
the most part done with sun-dried mud bricks. In hot, dry countries this
forms a fairly good material. Besides this use of crude bricks there had
come down a still simpler way of building by aggregations of clay. The
mud, even when subdivided into crude bricks, adhered so thoroughly when
put together in a mass with liquid mud in the joints, that a type of struc-
ture was developed which was homogeneous; the roofs and floors being of
the same materials as the walls, and continuous with them. The chambers,
large or small, were cells in a mass-material. Such a method of building
was common to the valleys of the Nile and the great rivers of Western
Asia. Burnt bricks were in turn developed from mud bricks by an exten-
sion of the method found so successful in making pottery. Such bricks
were often used for special purposes in combination with the crude bricks
from an early time. The building forms made use of in typical Byzan-
tine architecture largely depended on the use of brick, which may be
regarded as the bringing together of small units well cemented so as
to form continuous walls and vaults. Burnt bricks were usually set in
so much mortar, the bricks being thin and the joints thick, that the
whole became a sort of built concrete. The mortar in a wall, in fact,
must frequently have been much more in quantity than the bricks.
Arising doubtless out of primitive ways of forming mud roofs, it
became customary later to construct vaults of mud bricks, and then of burnt
bricks, by leaning the courses against an end wall so that the vault was
gradually drawn forward from the end of a given chamber in inclined
layers. Each layer was thus supported by the part already done and no
centring was required. Domes came to be erected in a somewhat similar
way. A rod or a cord being attached to the centre so as to be readily
turned in any direction, a dome was reared on its circular base, a course
at a time, the curvature being determined by the length of the rod or
cord. About 1670 Dr Covel described this method of procedure, and it
is still practised in the East, although skilled dome builders are now but
few.
If a dome is not set over a circle, but over an octagon or a square, a
troublesome question arises in regard to the angles. Where the chamber
is small, and especially in the case of the octagonal form, the work can
easily be jutted out in the angles so as roughly to conform to the circular
base required for the dome. When, however, a square area is large,
some regular solution becomes necessary. The angles of the square may
be cut off by diagonal arches so as to form an octagon. If such arches
are so built as to continue back into the angles forming little vaults,
on a triangular base, they are called squinches. In such cases as these the
base of the dome is governed by the width across the chamber, but it is
possible to plan a dome on the diagonal dimensions of the area to be
а
## p. 541 (#587) ############################################
Domes
541
a
а
covered so as to spring out of the angles. In this case it is clear that
the dome as seen from within gradually expands from the four lowest
points and spreads on the walls as it grows upward, forming concave
triangles having curved lines against the four walls.
