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 lightness about them not very common; lightness, not of tone, for they are plaintive, but of touch:
Ut quid iubespusiole
quare mandasfiliole
carmen dulceme cantare
cum sim longeexul 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
