The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [8]
Between the hamlets the Roman roads crumbled under the onslaught of bracken and bush. With no movement from one place to another, there was little point in maintaining them. The dwindling members of the population subsisted on what they could grow in the forest clearings, or ‘assarts’, as they were called, which poked like hesitant fingers into the shadows of the forest. Only the well armed, or those protected by spiritual courage, ventured into the woods.
Gradually, however, as the forest was pushed back, the small communities grew, and by the eighth century some were loosely linked in the manorial system. The manor was a totally autonomous entity, seldom covering more than a few square miles, its illiterate serfs ruled by an equally illiterate lord, whose duty it was to protect his manor in return for payment in kind. There was no money. The manor had to be self-sufficient, as no help could be expected from elsewhere. Life expectancy at the time was about forty years.
Several hundred such small manors might be held in sway by one overlord, administering them as he saw fit. All transactions were conducted in terms of land: ownership, tenure or rent. Each man paid his debts in acreage, produce or service. Only the seasons changed. The routine of daily life was an unvaried cycle of sleeping, eating, working and sleeping again. The mental horizons of even the most inquisitive were limited by the forest wall. Customs, clothes, dialect, food and laws, all were local. And there was no way of knowing if things were any different elsewhere, for a small community might be fortunate to see one visitor a year.
Charlemagne signed all his documents with this monogram of his name (in Latin, Karolus) abbreviated to the letters KRLS placed round the central shape made up of A, O and U.
The rare sight of a passing monk was an event of note. These strange, cowled figures must have seemed to come from another world. They could read and write. They knew things beyond the ken of even the great barons. They lived in fortified stone monasteries, islands of knowledge in a sea of ignorance, protecting themselves where they could against barbarian havoc, preserving what they knew against the day when there would be a world able to make use of it. Guardians of the past, the monks shared their learning among their own kind as the centuries passed. Fittingly perhaps, knowledge spread from monastery to monastery with the recorders of death - monks who spent their lives travelling the countryside inscribing mortuary rolls with details of members of the order who had died. These travelling scribes would bring and take away knowledge in the form of copies of manuscripts from the various monasteries.
In the eighth century the barbarian invasions halted for a short while, during which time, with extraordinary speed, Europe made a cultural recovery. The man most responsible for the revival was Charlemagne. When he came to the throne of Frankland at the age of thirty, he was known to love good food, books and women. His first edict, gloomily entitled ‘A General Warning’, reveals the general state of affairs. The clergy were evidently carrying arms, dabbling in business, indulging in mistresses, gambling and drinking. Illiterate and speaking degenerate Latin, they were autonomous in their liturgical conduct. Charlemagne’s first aim was to standardise religious practice, since this would provide him with administrators who had shared a common training.
The standardised script introduced throughout his Empire by Charlemagne. Known, after his name, as Carolingian miniature, the style survives as modern upper and lower case lettering.
The Royal Portal of Chartres Cathedral, added to the building by the Chancellor, Thierry, one of a group of new thinkers who called themselves ‘the modern ones’. In placing the figures of the liberal arts so close to the Virgin and Child, Thierry was