better.^797 Corruption of morals went hand in hand with ignorance. It is re-ported that when the
papacy had sunk to the lowest depth of degradation, there was scarcely a person in Rome who knew
the first elements of letters. We hear complaints of priests who did not know even the Lord’s Prayer
and the Creed. If we judge by the number of works, the seventh, eighth and tenth centuries were
the least productive; the ninth was the most productive; there was a slight increase of productiveness
in the eleventh over the tenth, a much greater one in the twelfth, but again a decline in the thirteenth
century.^798
But we must not be misled by isolated facts into sweeping generalities. For England and
Germany the tenth century was in advance of the ninth. In France the eighth and ninth centuries
produced the seeds of a new culture which were indeed covered by winter frosts, but not destroyed,
and which bore abundant fruit in the eleventh and twelfth.
Secular and sacred learning was confined to the clergy and the monks. The great mass of
the laity, including the nobility, could neither read nor write, and most contracts were signed with
the mark of the cross. Even the Emperor Charlemagne wrote only with difficulty. The people
depended for their limited knowledge on the teaching of a poorly educated priesthood. But several
emperors and kings, especially Charlemagne and Alfred, were liberal patrons of learning and even
contributors to literature.
Scarcity of Libraries.
One of the chief causes of the prevailing ignorance was the scarcity of books. The old
libraries were destroyed by ruthless barbarians and the ravages of war. After the conquest of
Alexandria by the Saracens, the cultivation and exportation of Egyptian papyrus ceased, and
parchment or vellum, which took its place, was so expensive that complete copies of the Bible cost
as much as a palace or a farm. King Alfred paid eight acres of land for one volume of a cosmography.
Hence the custom of chaining valuable books, which continued even to the sixteenth century. Hence
also the custom of erasing the original text of manuscripts of classical works, to give place to
worthless monkish legends and ascetic homilies. Even the Bible was sometimes submitted to this
process, and thus "the word of God was made void by the traditions of men."^799
Scholasticum; the fourteenth, S. Wicklevianum; the fifteenth, S. Synodale; the sixteenth, S. Reformationis. All one-sided or
wrong except the last. Historical periods do not run parallel with centuries.(^797) Hallam (Lit. of Europe, etc., ch. 1, § 10) puts the seventh and eighth centuries far beneath the tenth as to illumination
in France, and quotes Meiners who makes the same assertion in regard to Germany. Guizot dates French civilization from the
tenth century; but it began rather with Charlemagne in the eighth.
(^798) In Migne’s Patrologia Latina the number of volumes which contain the works of Latin writers, is as follows:
Writers of the seventh century, Tom. 80--88 8 vols.
" " " eighth " " 89--96 7 "
" " " ninth " " 97--130 33 "
" " " tenth " " 131-138 7 "
" " " eleventh " " 139-151 12 "
" " " twelfth " " 152-191 39 "
" " " thirteenth " " 192-217 25 "
None of these centuries comes up to the Nicene and post-Nicene ages. Migne gives to Augustine alone 12, and to
Jerome 11 volumes, and both of these were no compilers, but original writers. The contrast between the literary poverty of the
middle ages and the exuberant riches of the sixteenth or nineteenth century is still greater; but of course the invention of the art
of printing and all the modern facilities of education must be taken into account.
(^799) One of the most important uncial manuscripts of the Scriptures, the Codex Ephraem (C), is a palimpsest (codex
rescriptus), but the original text can with difficulty be deciphered, and has been published by Tischendorf (Lipsiae, 1843). See