But was it Christian? Forcing pagans to convert at sword-point was hardly the cause for which Boniface had died, after all. Perhaps it was telling, then, that the most pointed criticism of the policy should have come from a compatriot of the sainted martyr. ‘Faith arises from the will, not from compulsion.’11 So wrote Alcuin, a brilliant scholar from Northumbria who in 781 had met Charlemagne while returning from a visit to Rome, and been recruited to his court. Pagans, he urged the king, should be persuaded, not forced to convert. ‘Let peoples newly brought to Christ be nourished in a mild manner, as infants are given milk – for instruct them brutally, and the risk then, their minds being weak, is that they will vomit everything up.’12 Charlemagne, far from objecting to this advice, appears to have taken it in good spirit. In 796, the policy of forcible baptism was eased; a year later, the laws that governed the conquered Saxons reissued in a milder form. The king, who enjoyed nothing more than discussing theology with Alcuin while soaking with him in a hot bath, had full confidence in his advisor. He knew that the Northumbrian’s commitment to the creation of a properly Christian people was absolute. Alcuin’s conviction that there was no improvement so radical that it might not be achieved by education was precisely why Charlemagne had employed him. ‘For without knowledge no one can do good.’13 Alcuin, schooled in the sternest traditions of Northumbrian scholarship, wished everyone in his patron’s empire to share in the fruits of Christian learning. Monasteries, in his opinion, had a greater role to play in the pacification of Saxony than fortresses. It was not only Saxons, though, who caused Alcuin anxiety. Christians in lands from which paganism had been scoured many centuries before still laboured in darkness. How, when they were illiterate, and their priests semi-lettered, could they possibly profit from the great inheritance of writings from the ancient past: the Old and New Testaments, the canons of Nicaea and other councils, the teachings of the fathers of the Church? How, without these timeless texts, could they be brought to a proper knowledge of God’s purposes and desires? How could they even know what Christianity was? It was not enough to take the light of Christ into the forests of Saxony. It had to be taken into the manors, and farms, and smallholdings of Francia. An entire society needed reform.
Charlemagne did not duck the challenge. He knew that greatness brought with it grave responsibilities. A king who permitted his people to stray, who indulged their mistakes, who failed to guide them, would be sure to answer for it before the throne of God. Charlemagne, declaring in 789 his ambition to see his subjects ‘apply themselves to a good life’, cited as his model a king from the Old Testament: Josiah, who had discovered in the Temple a copy of the law given to Moses. ‘For we read how the saintly Josiah, by visitation, correction and admonition, strove to recall the kingdom which God had given him to the worship of the true God.’14 But Charlemagne could not, as Josiah had done, cite a written covenant. His subjects were not, as Josiah’s had been, governed by the law given to Moses. Different peoples across his empire had different legal systems – nor, provided only that these codes did not subvert Frankish supremacy, did Charlemagne object. The one law that he wished his subjects to obey, the one law that existed to guide all the Christian people, could not be contained in a single book. Only on their hearts could it be written. Yet this imposed on Charlemagne a ferocious obligation: for how could God’s law possibly be written on the hearts of the Christian people if they were not properly Christian? Without education, they were doomed; without education, they could not be brought to Christ. Correctio, Charlemagne termed his mission: the schooling of his subjects in the authentic knowledge of God.
‘May those who copy the pronouncements of the holy law and the hallowed sayings of the fathers sit here.’15 Such was the prayer that Alcuin, following his appointment as abbot of Tours in 797, ordered to be inscribed over the room where monks would toil daily at their great task of writing. Under his leadership, the monastery became a powerhouse of penmanship. Its particular focus was the production of single-volume collections of scripture. Edited by Alcuin himself, these were written to be as user-friendly as possible. No longer did words run into one another. Capital letters were deployed to signal the start of new sentences. For the first time, a single stroke like a lightning-flash was introduced to indicate doubt: the question mark. Each compendium of scripture, so one monk declared, was ‘a library beyond compare’.16 In ancient Alexandria, it had been called ta biblia ta hagia, ‘the holy books’ – and in time, so as to emphasise the unique holiness of what they were producing, monks in Francia would transliterate the Greek word biblia into Latin. The Old and New Testaments would come to be known simply as Biblia – ‘the Books’. The sheer number of editions produced at Tours was prodigious. Large-format, easy to read, and distributed widely across Charlemagne’s empire, they gave to the various peoples across the Latin West something new: a shared sense of God’s word as a source of revelation that might be framed within one single set of covers.
Yet Alcuin and his colleagues were not content that scripture and the great inheritance of Christian learning be made available merely to the literate. Familiar as they were with the shrunken settlements that huddled within even the most imposing Roman city walls, they knew that there could be no true correctio without reaching deep into the countryside. The entire span of the Latin West, from its ancient heartlands to its newest, rawest marches, needed to function as a great honeycomb of dioceses. Even the meanest peasant scratching a living beside the dankest wood had to be provided with ready access to Christian instruction. This was why, every time Saxon rebels burned down a church, the Frankish authorities would hurry to rebuild it. It was why as well, under the stern and tutelary gaze of Charlemagne, the project of correctio had as a particular focus the education of the priesthood. This was a topic on which Boniface, only a generation previously, had expressed robust views. Frankish priests, he had charged, ‘spend their lives in debauchery, adultery, and every kind of filth’.17 Some were barely distinguishable from serfs: ordained at the behest of their lords, they were more practised in holding the leashes of hunting dogs or the reins of a lady’s horse than in teaching the word of God. That, as ever more instructions flowed from Charlemagne’s court, was now starting to change. Everyone in the empire, so the king ordained, was to know the Creed. So too were they all to learn the words which Christ himself, asked by his disciples how they should pray, had taught: the Lord’s Prayer. Small books written specifically to serve the needs of rural priests began to appear in ever increasing numbers. Battered, scruffy and well-thumbed, these guides were the index of an innovative experiment in mass education. Charlemagne’s death in 814 did nothing to slow it. Four decades on, the archbishop of Reims could urge the priests under his charge to know all forty of Gregory the Great’s homilies, and expect to be obeyed. One was jailed for having forgotten ‘everything that he had learned’.18 Ignorance had literally become a crime.