Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/250

210 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the epithet, " the Pious," by his obsequiousness to the clergy, was recrowned by the pope after his father's death ; and his son, grandson, and their two successors all went through the same ceremony, so that a series of precedents established the claim of the popes to crown, if not to make, emperors. Charlemagne perceived the value of education in both Church and State. He established a school at his palace to Charlemagne train up men to do his work. He wished the and learning c j er gy to know enough Latin to be able to read the church service, to write a respectable letter, and to in- terpret the Holy Scriptures with understanding. This was asking a good deal of the Frankish Church at that time, and he had to call in as teachers monks from England and scholars from Italy — countries where there was some- what more culture. An ordinance in which Charlemagne ex- horts his bishops and monks to lead exemplary lives has sometimes been incorrectly interpreted to imply that he established universal elementary education for slave as well as free-born. But it would be truly extraordinary for a monarch suddenly to decree universal education in a land plunged in ignorance, by making an incidental remark or two in an "admonition" to the clergy. So important a measure would at least call for an elaborate law devoted to it exclusively, and would have needed a whole set of capitu- laries ever really to enforce it. Anyway, Charlemagne says nothing of the sort to his clergy. He does not bid them educate serf as well as free; he does tell them to bring. up for the Christian ministry not merely boys of servile origin, but also the sons of freemen, and to maintain schools where such boys may learn to read, so that in later life they may copy the Gospel, Psalter, and Missal without making mistakes. There is also little evidence for the so-called" Carolingian Renaissance," over which some historians have waxed elo- The so-called °l uent ar *d which one has declared almost com- Ren^is^nce" parable in its results to the later Italian Renais- sance. It is true that the pope had sent Pepin some hymnals and textbooks written in Greek; that a revi-