Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

law: all men (and in this case, women) are subject to a higher and unassailable authority.
This basic understanding of the place of monastic men and women in his kingdom would
be substantially refined over the following decades. The capitulary of Herstal (779), for
instance, reflects different perceptions of the textual basis of male and female religious
life. While both genders are enjoined to live according to a rule, for monks it is assumed
to be the Benedictine regula, and for nuns, an ordo sanctus. 9 Further underlined are the
different expectations of male and female religious. While abbots were present at Herstal
for these very discussions, abbesses were now reminded that they could not leave their
monastery, a persistent complaint of synods that, as will be seen, was not always listened
to.
Charlemagne’s efforts to reform the Frankish church reached their apogee with
the Admonitio Generalis of 789, the first of his capitularies to concern the church
directly. 10 This work, substantially drawn from the canons of the early church councils,
was directed at all the ranks of the church (but particularly, one suspects, bishops and the
heads of monasteries) to insist that they ‘bear the erring sheep back inside the walls of the
ecclesiastical fortress on the shoulders of good example and exhortation’. From now on,
the missi would be the main channel of instruction from king to church, and would
themselves have the authority to correct ‘those things which ought to be corrected’. 11
Basing his intervention on the precedent of Josiah, reformer of the laws of Israel, the
watchwords for the future royal relationship with the church would be circumeundo,
corrigendo and ammonendo: visitation, correction and advice. 12
The first fifty-nine of the eighty-two articles are drawn from early church councils
via the collection known as the Dionysia-Hadriana. Charlemagne had been given this
collection of canon law, based on that compiled in the sixth century by Dionysius
9
Capit. Harist., can. III: De monasteriis qui regulares fuerunt, ut secundum regulam vivant; necnon et
monasteria puellarum ordinem sanctam custodiant…. MGH Capit. I, 47.
10
MGH Capit. I, 53-62. See in particular J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (Oxford, 1983) 259-
60.
11
Admonitio Generalis, praef, at 53.
12
Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church, at 259.
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