"We will and order that none of those who serve in our palace, take upon himself to receive any man who seeks a refuge there, and comes there to conceal himself, on account of robbery, homicide, adultery, or any other crime; that if any free man violate our prohibition, and conceal a malefactor in our palace, he shall be forced to carry him on his shoulders to the public place, and there he shall be attached to the same post as the malefactor. . . . . Whoever shall find men fighting in our palace, and cannot or will not put an end to the conflict, he shall pay a share of the damage which they have caused, &c."

The capitularies contain numberless analogous provisions; internal police was evidently of great importance in the government of Charlemagne.

4. I class, also, under the head of political legislation all which concerns the distinction between the lay and the ecclesiastical powers and their relations. Charlemagne made great use of the ecclesiastics-they were, in truth, his principal means of government; but he wished to make use of them, and not for them to make use of him: the capitularies attest his vigilance in governing the clergy himself, and keeping it under his power. You have seen, by some of the questions which he proposed addressing to the bishops in the general assemblies, to what a degree he was impressed with this idea.

5. It seems to me necessary, lastly, to refer to political legislation, the provisions relative to the administration of the sees conceded by Charlemagne, and his relations with the beneficiaries. This was certainly one of the leading features of his government, and one of those to which he most assiduously called the attention of the missi.

I need not point out to you that the general character of all this political legislation, in its various parts, is a continual, indefatigable effort towards order and unity.

III. Penal legislation. This in general is scarcely more than the renewal, to a certain extent, of the ancient Salic, Ripuarian, Lombard, barbarian, &c., laws. Punishment,

repression of crimes, of abuse of force, is, as you have seen, almost the only object, the essential character of those laws. There was, therefore, less to do in this respect than in any

Cap. a., 800, § 3 and 4; vol. i., col. 343.

other. The new provisions which Charlemagne here and there added, were in general for the object of mitigating the ancient legislation, especially the rigor of the punishments inflicted upon slaves. In some cases, however, he aggravated the punishment, instead of mitigating it—when, for example, punishments were a political instrument in his hands. Thus the punishment of death, so rare in the barbaric laws, recurs in almost every article of a capitulary of the year 789, intended to restrain and convert the Saxons; almost every violation of order, every relapse into idolatrous practices, is punished with death. With these exceptions, the penal legislation of Charlemagne has but little originality or interest.

Here,

VI. The civil legislation offers but little more. also, the ancient laws, the ancient customs, remained in vigor; Charlemagne had very little to alter in them. He, however, carefully occupied himself, doubtless at the instigation of the ecclesiastics, with the condition of persons, especially with the relations between men and women. It is evident that at this epoch these relations were prodigiously irregular—that a man took and quitted a woman without scruple, and almost without formality. The result was a great disorder in individual morality, and in the state of families. The civil law was thence strongly interested in the reformation of manners, and Charlemagne understood this. Hence the great number of provisions inserted in his capitularies concerning the conditions of marriages, the degrees of parentage, the duties of husbands towards wives, the duties of widows, &c. The greater portion of these provisions are borrowed from canonical legislation; but it must not be supposed that their motive and origin was purely religious-the interest of civil life, the necessity of fixing and of regulating the family, had evidently a large share therein.

V. Religious legislation. By religious legislation, I mean provisions relative, not to the clergy, to ecclesiastics alone, but to the faithful, to the Christian people, and to its relations with the priests. It is thus distinguished from canonical legislation, which concerns only the ecclesiastical society, the

Bal., vol. i., col. 251.

relations of the clergy among themselves. The following are some provisions of religious legislation:

"Let care be taken not to venerate the names of false martyrs, nor the memory of doubtful saints.”

"Let no one suppose that God is only to be prayed to in three languages, for God is adored in all languages, and man is heard if he ask just things.'

"Let preaching always be performed in such a manner that the common people may be able to understand it thoroughly."

These provisions have generally a character of good sense, even of liberty of mind, which one would scarcely expect to find in them.

VI. The canonical legislation is that which occupies the greatest place in the capitularies, and naturally so; the bishops (as I have already observed) were the principal counsellors of Charlemagne; they sat in the greatest numbers in the general assemblies; their affairs were always attended to first. Accordingly, these assemblies were generally looked upon as councils, and their laws were transmitted to the collection of canons. They are almost all drawn up in the interest of the power of the bishops. You will remember that at the accession of the Carlovingian race, the episcopal aristocracy, strong as it had been, was in complete dissolution. Charlemagne reconstituted it; under his hand, it regained the regularity, the entirety it lost, and became, for many centuries, the dominant ruler of the church. At a later period, I shall speak of this more minutely.

VII. The domestic legislation contains only what relates to the administration of the private property, the farms of Charlemagne; an entire capitulary, entitled de Villis, is a collection of various instructions, addressed at different periods of his reign to the persons employed on his domains, and which have been erroneously asembled under the form of a single capitulary. M. Anton has given, in his History of German Agriculture in the Middle Ages,' a very curious com

1 Cap. a., 789, § 41; a., 794, § 40; vol. i., col. 228, 269.

2 Probably in Latin, Greek, and the German language. Cap. a., 794, § 50; vol. i., col. 270.

Cap. a., 813, § 14; vol i., col. 505.

5 In German, vol. i., p. 177-243.

mentary upon this capitulary, and upon all the domestic details which we find there.

VIII. The occasional legislation is inconsiderable in amount; only twelve articles belong to this head, and I have just cited some of them.

Here closes my examination, far too brief in itself doubtless, but still more detailed, more definite, I think, than any previously made of the legislation of Charlemagne and its object. I say legislation, because I wish to avail myself of words in common use; otherwise, it is quite clear that in all we have gone through there is nothing of what we understand by a code, and that Charlemagne, in his capitularies, did anything but legislate. Capitularies are, properly speaking, the whole acts of his government, public acts of all kinds by which he manifested his authority. It is evident that the collection which has come down to us is far from containing all those acts, and that a large number of them are wanting. There are whole years for which we have no capitularies; in those which we do possess we find provisions which relate to acts which are missing. The collection of Baluze is a mere collection of fragments; they are mutilated wrecks, not of the legislation only, but of the whole government of Charlemagne. This is the point of view under which any one wishing to make an accurate study of the capitularies should view them in order to comprehend and explain them.

In our next lecture, we shall begin to occupy ourselves with the state of mind at the same epoch, and with the influence of Charlemagne over intellectual development.

TWENTY-SECOND LECTURE.

Of intellectual decay in Frankish Gaul, from the fifth to the eighth century-Of its causes-It ceases under the reign of CharlemagneDifficulty of describing the state of the human mind at this epochAlcuin is its most complete and faithful representative-Life of Alcuin-His labors for the restoration of manuscripts-For the restoration of schools-His teaching in the school of the palace-His relations with Charlemagne-His conduct as abbot of Saint Martin of Tours-His works; 1. Theological; 2. Philosophical and literary; 3. Historical; 4. Poetical-His general character.

I HAVE said, and I consider it established, that, from the fifth to the eighth century, decay in Frankish Gaul was constant and general; that it was the essential character of the time, and only stopped under the reign of Charlemagne.

If this character was anywhere more visible, more signal than elsewhere, it was in the intellectual order, in the history of the human mind at this epoch. Recal to mind through what vicissitudes we have seen it pass. At the end of the fourth century, two literatures, two philosophies, marched, as it were, side by side, profane literature and sacred literature, pagan philosophy and Christian theology. It is true, profane literature and pagan philosophy were dying; but they still breathed. We saw them soon disappear; sacred literature and Christian theology alone remained. We have continued on our way; Christian theology and sacred literature themselves have disappeared; we no longer meet with anything but sermons, legends, monuments of an entirely practical activity, devoted to the wants of actual life, foreign to the research and contemplation of the true and beautiful. This is the state into which the human mind had fallen in the seventh, and during the first half of the eighth century.

This decay has been generally attributed to the tyranny of the church, to the triumph of the principle of authority and faith over the principle of liberty and reason. Quite modern writers, men of impartiality and learning-Tennemann, for example, in his History of Philosophy'—have adopted this ex

1 In German, vol. viii., p 1-8.