himself may have regarded the new title as a personal one; certainly when he drew up his will in 806 he divided his empire among his sons and made no provision at all for the survival of the imperial title. It was the subsequent death of two of his three sons which convinced him, and his son Louis the Pious, that God intended the empire to survive as a unity.

From early in his reign Charlemagne and his clerical advisers were concerned to order the Frankish lands in accordance with God's will. A whole series of decisions, 'capitularies', made at the annual councils witness to their determination to restore strict canon law to the Church, conformity to a rule in the monasteries, and correct Christian living throughout the kingdom. The most urgent necessity was education, above all for the clergy. It was not only the clergy for whom German was the first language who needed to learn Latin; the spoken language of those living in Gaul had diverged so far from written Latin, along the path to French, that accurate comprehension of the Bible or the liturgy had become difficult. Charlemagne's Admonitio generalis of 789 stressed the importance of education for clergy and people, and urged the establishment of schools for both. The Anglo-Saxon and Irish clergy whom Charlemagne gathered around him, Alcuin at their head, were to be of great importance in this process. They had developed textbooks for teaching Latin to non-Latin speakers, and had also great familiarity with some of the basic books of Christian learning, some of which were unknown in northern Gaul. It has been suggested that one of the contributions made by the Anglo-Saxons and Irish was the introduction of a new method of Latin pronunciation, as recommended in Alcuin's own textbook on correct Latin. It treated Latin as a dead language (which it was not, in Gaul), giving each syllable equal weight, and pronouncing all the consonants clearly, as written. Thus the proper word-endings, giving the grammatical function of the word, could be heard; thus could be avoided such problems as the Bavarian priest encountered by St Boniface, who, by being unclear about his word-endings, baptized in the name of the Fatherland, the Daughter, and the Holy Spirit. But in the process Latin did

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