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HANDWRITING 545
more writing on to the skins available. Sheepskins and cal
skins, properly prepared, were hard to come by, and when, as
often, Christian texts were written over those of the Latin
classics (palimpsests) no disrespect was intended to what was
erased. The scribes, in their
poverty, were first
simply putting
things first. Our knowledge ofhow all this came about is onex
sided, since so little is known ofthe writing which the minus-'
cule
displaced the scripts of the notaries and the traditional
products ofa fading classical culture. The only learning known
to us in the eighth century is that of the monasteries, and the
remains of the Frankish
only scripts, apart from the exiguous
and Italian chanceries, are those connected with particular
regions or monasteries. In south Italy, for instance, a local
minuscule arose, which we call Beneventan, associated parties
larly with the abbey ofMonte Cassino: in Spain another, the
so-called Visigothic, and in Frankland another, the Merovinx
gian. Still earlier, Ireland and northern England had evolved
a highly distinctive, ifcrabbed, minuscle with its own charac^
teristic system ofabbreviations based, like all abbreviations, on
those used in Roman law-books. The insular scribes, however,
with whom parchment seems to have been especially scarce,
were pioneers in admitting abbreviations into the text of their
writings. Different as these local scripts are from one another,
they share the common fault ofbeing extremely difficult to read.
This defect was at last overcome by a new script with a great
future (PL 113). This was the Caroline minuscule, a hand of
great beauty and supremely legible, the emergence of which is
closely associated with the great religious revival of Charles the
Great's reign. Smaller than majuscule it writing, achieved its
affect, Dr. Lowe tells us, *by a rigorous elimination of cursive
dements and by keeping letters distinct and properly aligned*.
It was no sudden discovery, but the achievement of a new
dear style, approaches to which go well back into the eighth
century in various monastic centres. The earliest recognizable
specimens come from Corbie, but it was the great abbey of St.
Martin of Tours which was responsible for its diffusion over
Europe in the ninth century, though rather after the time of its