become a dead language, comprehensible only to the clerical élite. The liturgy could no longer be understood by most of the lay congregation. Sermons had to be, however. Capitularies not only demanded that sermons should be delivered in every church, but also that they should be in the language of the ordinary people, 'in rustic Roman' (Old French, or Romance) or in German. Manuals of preaching were produced for use in the parish churches which had, by the ninth century, been established over most of the Carolingian lands, and episcopal statutes were issued by bishops in an attempt to ensure that parish priests knew their duty and had the basic library needed to accomplish it. For the first time in the west, Church and State united to try to bring Christianity to all under their control.

The movement for the basic education of the clergy had a number of useful by-products. Charlemagne was provided with an ever-growing number of literate clerics who could be used in his administration and, in the newly reformed Latin and the new more legible script, had a precise and international written language that could be used throughout his multilingual empire. And the long study of late Latin grammars and classical Latin literature which was needed to produce that reformed classical Latin produced a generation of scholars--poets, historians, textual critics, theologians, philosophers--whose achievements really did begin to rival those of late antiquity. This classical revival, the central part of what has earned the blanket term 'the Carolingian Renaissance', began at the royal court itself. Most of the scholars there were foreigners: Peter of Pisa and Paul the Deacon from Italy, Theodulf of Orléans from Spain, Alcuin from Northumbria, Joseph from Ireland. There were some Franks, however, including Angilbert (whose liaison with one of Charlemagne's unmarried daughters gave the world the historian Nithard) and Einhard (whose main criticism of Charlemagne concerned the emperor's tolerant attitude to the behaviour of his unmarried daughters). The Renaissance came to its climax in the reign of Charles's grandson Charles the Bald, by which time there were a number of major centres of book production and scholarship in the kingdom. It is an ironic

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