Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

abbesses, abbots appear to have had more freedom to travel to court (and thereby be part
of decision-making processes).
However, the use of canons such as these as evidence for a thoroughgoing reform
is dangerous. It is evident that the canons prescribe an ideal form of Christian life which
might never have found a practical response in wider society. There is but one example of
a female community, that of Valenciennes, being re-founded as a house for male canons
in 749, and even for that it is impossible to know what the exact circumstances of the re-
foundation were: it could, conceivably, have had nothing whatsoever to do with any
laxness on the part of the original community. 163 More concretely, the signature lists of
the bishops who attended such gatherings show that by no means all of the Frankish
bishops were involved in their design. In his study of Chrodegang’s attempts at reform,
Eugen Ewig notes that the geographical reach of such a reform can be sketched out by the
sees of bishops attending the meetings, alongside the witnesses to certain charters. 164 In
the privilege of 757 produced for his new foundation of Gorze, Chrodegang is
accompanied by the bishops of Cologne, Reims, Rouen, Sens, Tours, Trier, Besançon and
Alemannia. At the council of Attigny of 762, these bishops had been joined by those of
Lyon, Vienne, Tarentaise and Rhaetia. The bishops of certain areas seem never to have
been involved in the construction of Chrodegang’s reforming documents: those of
Aquitaine, Provence and most of Burgundy do not appear as signatories. By no means,
then, were the measures that Chrodegang set out in his councils taken up across Francia.
This is not to say, of course, that individual bishops did not make their own prescriptions
for the religious in their dioceses, but these must have been much more local in scope.
Chrodegang had close links with Rome - Pope Stephen II travelled to Francia in
743 and gave him the archiepiscopal pallium in 754 – and this had implications for the
reform and development of religious life in Francia. One aspect of this was the particular
form of devotion employed by Chrodegang in the cathedral of Metz. A second, and of
163 GC III, 156.
164 E. Ewig ‘Saint Chrodegang et la réforme de l’église franque’, Saint Chrodegang: Communications
presentées au colloque tenu à Metz à l’occasion du douzième centenaire de sa mort (Metz, 1967), 25-53, at
33-41.
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