Another Bible
executed to the order of Theodulf is now in the Town Library at Puy.
It seems incredible, after the efforts made by Charlemagne and his
ministers for the maintenance of learning and the arts, that there
should ever be any risk of a return to barbarism, but it is a fact that
the dissolution of the Empire proved in certain localities the
suspension of prosperity. Fortunately the monastics--especially the
Benedictines--and the canons of the cathedrals still kept up the
practice of copying books; but almost all the South of France,
Languedoc, and Provence, always conservative, remained more or less
illiterate. They produced poets and jongleurs, but seldom artists or
scholars. And even in the North, where the capitular schools were most
flourishing--as Paris, Reims, and Chartres--the general tendency was
towards relapse. In High Germany it was even worse. In spite of all
efforts of the clergy by the extension of secular schools, the laity
preferred the excitement of chase and camp to the quiet humdrum of the
schoolroom. Religion seemed to be regarded rather as a profession than a
principle, quite right in its place, _i.e._ the Church and the
monastery, but unsuited for active life. The wealthy land-owners,
therefore, did not cease to endow religious houses or to build churches,
but they left book-learning to the clerics.
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