Introduction

The relationship of church and state in early France and the dynamic exchanges within the early church involve areas of contention: urban versus suburban, episcopal versus monastic, dictatorial versus conciliar and local bishop versus Roman pope. Within these spheres, civilised and orthodox Christian confronts rural pagan, cathedral practice encounters monastic observance, the cathedral clergy conflict with collegiate chapters, and the legitimacy of the appointed clashes with the rights of the elected; furthermore, a wide array of local concerns chafe against what is touted as a universal, Catholic heritage. In reality this period reveals an indisputable liturgical dynamism, rather than an irrefutable, definitive Urliturgie or precise repetition of a daily – or even annual – ceremony. Anyone who has periodically attended recurring religious or secular ceremonies recognises this implicitly. For those who have not, Lizette Larson-Miller’s prudent statement generally applies: ‘adjustments to the liturgy occur in every generation’.¹

Roman Gaul

Within about a century of its defeat at the hands of Julius Caesar (58–50 BC), all of Gaul was integrated into the Roman governmental system and remained so for five hundred years. The region was divided into two major cultural areas and four imperial provinces under Augustus: Narbonensis (called Provincia nostra or simply Provincia), which had been part of the empire since the second century BC, and Gallia Comata (‘Long-Haired Gaul’), comprising Aquitania (in the west, south of the Loire), Celtica or Lugdunensis (between the Loire and the Seine) and Belgica (between the Seine and the Rhine). The ancient town of Lugdunum (Lyons) was the centrally located administrative capital and trading hub and was largely inhabited by people from Italy and further east. It had been a place for religious assemblies from pre-Roman times, and by the early second century ad the theologian St Irenaeus (d. c. 200) from Asia Minor was leading its persecuted, Greek-speaking Christians. Although the indigenous peoples adhered to paganism, Christianity was solidly entrenched in Lyons and its environs well before the arrival of the first Frankish tribes.²

The primary institution providing structure for the formation of Christian tradition was episcopal: the urban diocese with its attendant clerics subordinate to a bishop. The bishops were selected from a patrician class, particularly from the southern parts of Gaul, whose members had been schooled in the classical tradition. By the mid-third century, the major organisational divisions of the church had been mapped out over late imperial provinces and dioceses.³ Subsequent to the issuing of the Imperial Edicts of the early fourth century, these urban sees functioned not only as salvific bastions of Nicene Christianity but also as points of civic stability, especially through the turbulent centuries to follow. Public prayer and ritual were in large part under the supervision of a Gallo-Roman episcopate that drew to the cities the intrinsic spiritual power of the collected bones of the earliest saints.

The secondary institutions that held sway over the spiritual lives of the faithful were monastic. In contrast to the urbane and aristocratic municipal overseers stood the more-or-less ascetic and reformatory suburban communities, of both men and women.⁴ At times, cathedral and convent were at cross-purposes, as the former necessarily dealt with lives lived ‘in the world’ and thus was often ‘of the world’. Nevertheless, a permeable wall existed between the institutions, with monks being elected bishop, and bishops often in full support of monasteries. Under the patronage of Bishop Hilary of Poitiers (d. c. 368), the hermit Martin (d. 397) established his monastery of Ligugé and began preaching locally. After becoming bishop of Tours in 371 or 372, Martin set up the monastery of Marmoutier to be independent of episcopal control. The strength of Martin’s regional influence is evidenced in the two thousand monks and consecrated virgins said to have been present at his funeral, by which time the area was already filled with Christian organisations. One can only speculate about the earliest communal practices, though it is definitively known that the holy places of the East and cities where the Church Fathers walked offered liturgical inspiration. In the Rhône valley, Egyptian-influenced monasticism was instituted by both Honoratus of Arles (d. 429), who founded the abbey at Lérins (c. 410), and by John Cassian (d. c. 430), who established Saint-Victor at Marseilles, which mimicked the East with camel-hair shirts, Eastern herbs and desert practices.⁵ The rule at Lérins, which required the monks to meet periodically for prayer at dawn and sunset as well as in the course of the day, may have been an amalgam of several Eastern usages.⁶ Cassian’sInstitutiones, for example, sets out a model at Marseilles for the antiphonal chanting of the Office, limiting the number of Vespers and Nocturns (Matins) psalms to twelve by appealing to the usage in Alexandria from the generation of St Mark, despite maintaining that the chanting of Prime was a contemporary practice specifically translated from his personal monastic experience in the environs of Bethlehem. The monasteries of Condat (at Saint-Claude, Jura) and Lauconne (founded c. 435) were likewise initially modelled on hermetic Egyptian communities.

During the fifth century, bishops subdivided their dioceses into parishes, the better to serve the faithful and to convert the arriving waves of Germanic tribes. The immigrant peoples adopted the Latin language, without always accepting the prevailing creed or engaging in one style of observance. Instead, Germanic practices as well as indigenous Celtic beliefs tended to persist haphazardly throughout the rural pagi.⁷ Amid these times of invasion and public calamity, the actions of Gallo-Roman bishops, often as judges and courageous civic guardians, were prompted by the prelates’ firmly held belief in their rights as regional magnates and ecclesiastical landowners.⁸ This exercise of temporal supremacy was made spiritually manifest in the bishops’ directing the liturgical structure and forms of public prayer. To help ward off catastrophe, the aristocratic Bishop Mamertus (d. c. 475) inaugurated the Rogations, or processional litanies, around 460 in Vienne, which seem to have incorporated psalmody. This is according to Sidonius Apollinaris (d. c. 480), who imported them to Clermont. Gregory of Tours notes that the Rogations were introduced to Clermont by the bishop St Gallus (d. c. 551), stating, ‘in the middle of Lent he led a procession, singing psalms, on foot to the church of St Julian the Martyr’. These apparently rival statements may indicate that each procession served a different function.⁹ His brother, theologian and phonascus Claudianus laboured to put together readings appropriate to the season, and he directed psalm singing in his brother’s church.¹⁰ In Marseilles, Bishop Venerius (d. 452) requested that the priest Musaeus (d. c. 460) compile readings and entire psalms to be sung responsorially, probably Mass Propers, and at the bidding of the successor Bishop Eustachius, Musaeus assembled a sacramentarium egregium et non parvum volumen, which contained a series of chants and psalms.¹¹ Whereas daily Mass seems to have been a sporadic possibility everywhere in Gaul, the public celebration of daily Offices was ordered by Caesarius of Arles (d. 542), who had been schooled at the abbey of Lérins. To this end, he added Terce, Sext and Nones to Matins and Vespers.¹² Caesarius memorised scripture and encouraged Bible reading by the literate and suggested that peasants commit to memory texts heard in church, including selected antiphon and psalm texts, reasoning that they found it easy enough to memorise and sing ‘shameful and diabolic love songs’.¹³ He formulised some of the earliest rituals surrounding death and recommended that the musical conventions of the church be mimicked by the faithful, who ‘should chant in a high and modulated voice, like clerics, some in Greek, some in Latin’.¹⁴ The rather disparate and chaotic nature of liturgy in general and extant sources in particular dictates that no assumptions be made about diocesan rites reflecting Eastern monastic custom, notwithstanding the extent to which personnel and practice at convents might have overlapped with those in nearby sees. Anecdotes provide interesting snapshots of the historical landscape rather than detailed topographical maps.¹⁵

The Merovingians

When Germanic tribes moved westward into this largely Romanised Gaul, local bishops sometimes shared control with the invaders, Christian or otherwise. The Visigoths and Burgundians had already adopted Arianism before their relocation, though the Alemanni and Franks remained pagan. During the first part of the fifth century, the group of Salian Franks who had been settled along the Meuse advanced to the Somme. Their chief Childeric (d. c. 481–2), son of the legendary Merovech, became the earliest known king of Tournai. After his death, his son Clovis (Chlodovech, d. 511) achieved dominion over some Frankish bishoprics and began to move westward out of Austrasia into the newly conquered area roughly between Soissons and the Loire. At the beginning of the sixth century, he made Paris the capital of his kingdom and continued south into Aquitania to unify all except south-east Gaul and Septimania (the more-or-less coastal region between the Rhone and the Pyrenees), which was in Visigothic hands. St Gregory of Tours (d. 594) alleges that Clovis, under the influence of his wife Clotilda (d. 545) and St Remigius (d. 533), bishop of Reims, converted to Catholic (Nicene) Christianity and, as late as 508, was baptised at Reims in fulfilment of a vow taken before a military campaign.¹⁶ The baptism gave Clovis the backing of the Catholic Gallo-Roman hierarchy in manoeuvres against his heretical Burgundian and Visigothic neighbours, thereby ensuring the triumph of a legitimate Roman episcopate. After he became Theodoric the Great’s brother-in-law, Clovis was sent a citharist, selected by the Ostrogothic monarch in consultation with Boethius. Clovis seems to have first heard one while dining with the king.¹⁷

Practical Christianity in its various forms, however, always remained a haphazard affair. Residual idolatry was rampant throughout the countryside, and the cult of the saints thrived as a form of syncretic polytheism. Nonetheless, the bishops moved towards the promotion of a uniform creed and liturgical discipline in the sixth century by means of an evolving conciliar process.¹⁸ Whereas the Council of Agde, in which Iberian prelates met with the bishops of south-west France in 506, permitted certain local usages in Christian worship, the council held at Orleans in 511, supposedly convened by Clovis, declared that newly erected parishes fall under the juridical authority of bishops. Local practices were permitted only insofar as the bishops allowed. For example, the Second Council of Vaison in 529 formally introduced the Kyrie and the Sanctus to the Gallican Rite.¹⁹ Thirty years later, clerics appointed to serve in the private oratories of the emerging landed gentry were likewise subjected to episcopal governance. Baptisms were normally held at the cathedral complex, but waivers were sometimes granted for the sacrament to be administered in these personal sanctuaries. Upon Clovis’s death, his realm was partitioned and distributed among his four male heirs, but Catholicisation continued: his son, Childebert, King of Paris, banned paganism in 533 as part of a growing trend probably prescribed in the other locales as well.²⁰ Theuderic of Austrasia, the son charged with the lands stretching north-west from Reims to beyond the Rhine, arranged for trained singers to be brought into his realm, most notably Gallus from Clermont, who was conscripted from a monastery to serve the church of Trier.²¹ Early Merovingian bishops and abbots, because of their wealth and power, had always been socially important figures, and this fact was especially evident during the sixth and seventh centuries. Strong personalities like the bishops Avitus of Vienne (d. 523), Remigius of Reims and Gregory of Tours or monastic leaders like Irish missionary to the Franks St Columbanus (d. 615) effectively set themselves up as independent of the monarchy and helped to found a strong Franco-Roman church.

Initially, Frankish sovereigns called on the classical nobility to labour in their administration but, by the beginning of the seventh century, a new elite class had arisen whose members possessed land and served the king. Within civil jurisdictions, the Roman idea of the civitas continued to develop as the principal administrative division of a province, with a count installed to administer and sometimes a duke to preside over a number of counts (comites) in a military fashion. Parallel to this arrangement, which had been passed down from Roman times essentially unchanged, the dioceses with cities at their centres comprised the ecclesiastical province. Within the spiritual realm, an episcopal aristocracy concomitantly developed, and both the possession of land and the execution of quasi-secular offices formed a significant part of its domain as well. A bishop administered a diocese, and what came to be the archbishop in the metropolitan provincial capital presided over a number of suffragan bishops.²² The bishop lived in the domus ecclesia (or domus episcopalis), sometimes with his clerical entourage, at the centre of the city, surrounded by a baptistery and an agglomeration of churches. In times of crisis or invasion, the city became the refuge of the folk. The organisation of the court and the structure of taxation had been delivered to the bishops from classical Rome, and the conquering Merovingians, appointing their comites as their judicial and military officials in urban centres, inherited this administrative system in turn from the bishops. As kings had the right to appoint bishops and these prelates likewise had access to forms of power, that is, to ‘liquid, landed, and spiritual resources’, bishops inevitably came into occasional conflict with these counts.²³

Although early bishops accrued influence by gathering the relics of the martyrs to the cities, Roman law prior to the sixth century prohibited the burial of the dead among the living. Consequently the early veneration of the saints and their relics conjointly developed around tombs in the suburban cemeteries. The resultant houses of worship constructed outside the city gates naturally fell within the extended episcopal purview. These places became secondary hubs of settlement, as the suburban cults’ emphasis on death, burial and saintly ancestors was integrated both formally and informally into the devotional lives of its adjacent city.Bishop Perpetuus (d. 490) arranged the ritual year at Tours in the latter part of the fifth century into a calendar. The cycle, described by his successor Gregory, included vigils for six feasts associated with Jesus, which were to be celebrated in the cathedral, plus four to honour the apostles, two for St Martin, two for St Symphorian of Autun (d. 178) and Hilary of Poitiers and two for bishops Brice (d. 344) and Litorius (d. 371–2) of Tours.²⁴ However, at least four suburban churches were enlisted for other celebrations. Late sixth-century Auxerre similarly housed solemnities in eight different urban and suburban churches. Moreover, the physical spaces between these structures were always the domain of the church, and hence processions invoking God’s protection took place outside the walls of cities.²⁵

Monastic spiritual sovereignty was intensely upheld, yet monasteries concurrently relied on clerical sacramentaries to guide custom. As religious communities began to grow in size and number by the end of the sixth century, the learned Columbanus superimposed a rule that insisted on the celebration of the Office over earlier Gallic regulations. He bypassed the prelates who maintained supremacy over the communities, and he appealed directly to the papacy for his reformational authority. This exacerbated a situation present from earliest times in which the Gallo-Roman diocesan community was at odds with the private, individualised practices of the monks. While bishops continued training urban clergy and encouraged lavish liturgies, rural monastic centres rose in importance not only by continuing the traditions of classical education but also by encouraging scriptorial activity.²⁶

Over the next century, Francia, the kingdom of the Franks, underwent various geographic expansions, contractions and divisions. As in much of history, the players operated in two distinctly dissimilar, often contradictory spheres: one of ruthlessness and political practicality and one based on a sincere spirituality and devotion to the church, insofar as the latter did nothing to obstruct the former. Foreign psalmists, perhaps through both diplomatic delegations and political marriages, were brought to Metz around 560 to sing at an important Frankish see where the office of cantor was already part of the clerical establishment. Impressive performance of the Gallican liturgy was in the interest of the Merovingian kings and their bishops.²⁷ Chlothar I (d. 561) killed the sons of his brother Chlodomer in his accession to and preservation of the throne, yet he and other early Merovingians actively founded monastic houses. His second wife, St Radegunde (d. 586), established the convent of aristocratic nuns of Notre-Dame de Poitiers and employed the poet Venantius Fortunatus (d. c. 600) as her chaplain.²⁸ Chlothar’s life of Radegunde relates a tale of one of her nuns admitting to being a composer of worldly tunes, to which the local folk boisterously carolled, accompanied by citharas. Chlothar’s son Chilperic I (d. 584) composed ‘several hymns and masses’.²⁹ The fame of Chlothar II (d. 629), King of Neustria, who reunited the Frankish kingdom in 613, continued to reverberate in the veiled, oral secular tradition. The ninth-century bishop of Meux, Hildergar, notes that women danced a rustic circle, a dance publicly extolling this leader’s political and martial victories with the acclamation, ‘Let’s sing about Chlothar, the King of the Franks.’³⁰Chlothar’s son Dagobert I (d. 639) contributed generously to the nearby church of St Denis, which was dedicated to a saint to whom he was especially devoted and where both saint and king were buried.³¹ Meanwhile, Pope Martin I (d. 653) sought to reinforce Western Christianity by requesting that Frankish bishops be sent to accompany the papal envoys to Constantinople.³²

The Carolingians

During the seventh century, aristocratic leaders, called mayors of the palace, held the real power in the kingdom, with the Merovingians degenerating into ceremonial rulers. One of these mayors, Charles Martel (d. 741), the illegitimate son of Pépin II (d. 714), made his authority known from one end of Gaul to the other: he stopped the forces of the Umayyad caliphate between Tours and Poitiers (732), waged a campaign against them a second time in Septimania, subjugated the duchy of Aquitania and pressed eastward into Germany. Charles merely entitled himself maior domus and princeps et dux Francorum, sustaining a Merovingian figurehead to the extent that he left the throne vacant upon the death of Theodoric IV (d. 737).³³ However, he secured firm political alliances not only by giving church lands to his circle of followers but also by erecting dioceses in German territory through St Boniface (d. 754), an apostle of unrelenting orthodoxy who was commissioned by Pope Gregory II (d. 731). Charles simultaneously emerged as a champion of the papacy. There is slim evidence of a diplomatic connection between Charles and the Holy See until Gregory III (d. 741) reached out to the Frankish leader for protection against the menacing Lombards. The fact remains that the prestige of the pope in relation to the Eastern Emperor had been waning over several centuries. However, the period from the late seventh century to this early Carolingian era was a time of prodigious invention, and it witnessed a flowering of the Roman schola cantorum and an expansion of liturgical control through the formalisation of the Mass temporale into the earliest Frankish booklets (libelli) – texts of chants that would become Gregorian.³⁴

Charles Martel’s two sons inherited his supremacy upon his passing, but when one abdicated in 747, the other, Pépin III the Short (d. 768), was elected King of the Franks. At the moment he re-established kingship, Pépin directly requested the endorsement of Pope Zacharias (d. 752) and subsequently effected his consecration at Soissons by Boniface. The new king’s alliance with and obedience to Rome was unmistakable. An age of reforms and Frankish synods commenced with the bishops of Francia, led by Boniface, submitting to the absolute prerogative of Rome in ecclesiastical matters. Pépin, concerned about aspects of liturgical orthodoxy, posed questions relating to the musical participation of nuns of Zacharias.³⁵ In January 754, the new king had himself re-consecrated by Pope Stephen II (r. 752–7) south-east of Reims at Ponthion, where the two swore mutual oaths of fidelity. It is generally assumed that out of personal liturgical necessity, the pontiff must have travelled in the company of at least some of his schola cantorum. In July at Saint-Denis, the pope anointed both Pépin and his two sons, Charles (Charlemagne, d. 814) and the toddler Carloman (d. 771), endowed upon each of them the title patricius Romanorum (‘noble of the Romans’) and gave official sanction to the deposition of the Merovingian figurehead Childeric III (d. c. 754). As if installing an apostolic cenotaph as a permanent guarantee of this reciprocal bond of romanitas, Stephen dedicated an altar to St Peter and St Paul in front of the tomb of St Denis.³⁶

Merovingian kingship was hereditary and sacred, with the old Frankish kings traditionally presented to their magnates for acclamation. Heretofore, neither a biblically inspired unction nor quasi-religious sanctification of a Frankish chief had arisen, even though Visigoths had already adopted this.³⁷ A formal Christian rite of consecration now supported, from a spiritual standpoint, both the moral legitimacy and the hallowed character of the monarchy. At this moment, Pépin’s right to rule emanated from a God whose grace had exalted him above all others, and any allegiance owed him became, in effect, an expression of submission to divine will.

Pépin began deliberately copying Roman liturgy and, as a reflection of the unity of God and crown, desired that the two be bound together in both a single faith and ‘single chant’. Later attestation by Charlemagne supports Pépin’s role in initiating this musico-liturgical connection. Influence clearly flowed both ways, with Frankish musical additions and adjustments applied to the Roman core.³⁸ Pépin asked Stephen for clerics to be directed to his court for this purpose, and Paul I (d. 767) sent him an antiphoner and book of responsories around the year 760. Likewise, Pépin’s half-brother Remigius, archbishop of Rouen from 755 to 762, introduced Simeon, the secundus of the papal schola cantorum, into his diocese in 760. Musicologists diffidently if not tacitly assume that these books of antiphons and responsories and all liturgical texts were transmitted without neumes, but some scholars have proposed this generation as creators of a primitive musical notation.³⁹ Pépin’s queen, Bertrada, housed scholares, including the young Benedict of Aniane (d. 821), who was involved in liturgical reform, and a chaplain, Gervoldus, who was focused on ‘the art of chanting’ and on teaching ‘the best melodies of chant’.⁴⁰ At approximately the same time, Chrodegang (d. 766), bishop of Metz and court functionary to both Charles Martel and Pépin, brought to his diocese instruction in legitimate, decorous and sacred Roman rituals. The meridian in the old kingdom of Austrasia, from Aachen down through the metropolitan of Trier to Metz, seems to have been the axis of liturgical and musical rectitude, a correctness that extended eastwards. The singers of the cathedral of Metz, musically important from the time of Chlothar I, were the first outside Rome to be organised into a schola cantorum. The town itself was symbolically connected to the city on the Tiber and was replete with churches dedicated to St Peter and other Roman saints; it was a capital of the Merovingians in Austrasia and hence a bishopric of great historical significance to the Franks, perhaps even considering itself a liturgical reflection of Rome.⁴¹ However, the ebb and flow of liturgical ideas between Gaul and Rome persisted. Older Frankish customs such as the recitation of the names of the dead during the canon were practised in Gaul before being introduced to Rome, and the Office of the Dead (ordo defunctorum) appeared in southern Gaul before it was adopted by Rome in the sixth or seventh century. Conversely, in the seventh and early eighth centuries Roman liturgy migrated throughout Francia, Germania and even Italy, though it was no doubt randomly combined with local material before the mid-eighth century.⁴² During the Carolingian era this back and forth included the importation of liturgical text and chant that, having undergone a metamorphosis, reveals Gallic style superseding Roman style.⁴³ Analogous to these exchanges, St Petronilla (St Peter’s reputed daughter) became a venerated patron of the French royal house at the Vatican basilica and a self-evident allegory of this familial relationship between papa and ‘the eldest daughter of the church’. In return, Pope Paul received an ‘altar-mensa’ donated by Pépin, which was transported into St Peter’s aula and placed before the tomb of St Peter in the Confessio, as Rudolf Schieffer put it, ‘to the singing of the litaniae laudes – probably Frankish royal Laudes that praise the military and imperial Christ triumphant and his anointed on earth, which may then have been heard in Rome for the first time’.⁴⁴

All actions reinforced the clear and unmistakable links between the Carolingians and the Holy See. Pépin donated certain tribal lands to the pope and sent armies to suppress the Lombards, securing Rome’s supremacy. Paul’s diplomatic manoeuvres to free the pope from imperial hegemony included cautioning Pépin about the Greeks as both doctrinal deviants and papal rivals. Pépin yet again secured this complex Franco-Roman political alliance by promulgating missionary work to the north and east, and by securing southern territories against the Muslims. For these acts, the pope bestowed on Pépin the title of ‘orthodox king’ and defender of the Catholic faith, appellations previously reserved for the emperor in Constantinople.⁴⁵

After Pépin’s death and the untimely passing of Carloman in 771, Charlemagne reunited the Frankish kingdom and moved his political centre to Aachen, where he commenced the construction of a Roman-style private chapel near his palace.⁴⁶ Over the years, he strengthened the communion with Rome, consolidated his sovereignty beyond the borders of Gaul, took possession of Pavia, where he was crowned King of the Lombards, and acted in defence of Pope Hadrian I (d. 795), bolstering the ever-evolving concept of the Papal States.⁴⁷ By the end of his first decade of rule, Charlemagne had initiated a revision in both learning and religious custom unprecedented in the West. His renown attracted minds from beyond Frankish territories, individuals from Ireland, Italy and England, where robust traditions of classical antiquity were more persistent. Charlemagne brought a group of scholars together in each diocese, gathering them into schools located near churches and cloisters. At Aachen, educators like Alcuin (d. 804) revived a pedagogy, handwriting and scribal technique in imitation of classical Roman systems. Besides the fact that an emphasis on a greater exactitude in the learning of chant emerged, a practice that was becoming the norm, a renewed desire to align rituals with those of Rome arose at that time. Charlemagne demanded that clerics of every monastery and cathedral learn the psalms, the alphabet and chant. He placed two of his own singers in the papal schola cantorum.⁴⁸ These attitudes made his court the lynchpin for the production of written histories, the collection of books in libraries and the development of Romanesque architecture in both ecclesiastic and secular spheres. About this time, the forging of the Donation of Constantine reflected this robust Frankish-Roman interest both in the restoration of a Western empire and also in making visual representation of incorporeal concepts, manufacturing tactile evidence of things not seen (writing was becoming important).⁴⁹ Over the course of Hadrian’s reign, the pontiff came to be the analogue of St Peter, and his spiritual domain regarded as equivalent to ancient imperial Rome.⁵⁰ Hadrian’s black marble tomb slab at the Vatican indicates by its Carolingian lettering that the object was produced in Francia, metaphorically not only representing a daughter’s duty to her deceased father but also embodying the mutual ideological and political aspirations of a renovatio imperii.⁵¹ Charlemagne made four trips to Rome, with the Liber pontificalis providing the protocol for the royal reception in 774; it again probably furnished the essentials in 781 and 787 when the reigning pope saluted him on the steps of St Peter’s. When Leo III (d. 816) met Charlemagne in 800, the pope further alienated the West from Constantinople: he greeted the Frankish king with great honour at the twelfth milestone outside the city, twice as far away as the location stipulated for meeting the Greek emperor.⁵² Charlemagne’s final stay in Rome lasted five months over 800–1, during which time he was crowned emperor on Christmas Day. This conferral of a semi-sacerdotal honour in effect deputised the sovereign to act as an agent of the church in the protection of God’s people throughout his domain.

In pre-Carolingian times, church discipline was established via the conciliar method, which had evolved in the sixth century. By the time of the Carolingians, synods were in decline. Whereas Merovingian abbots and bishops grew to become governors of a sort, both subject to and yet immune from secular supervision, the Carolingians maintained the right to nominate bishops, despite the participation of chapters of clergy. When Frankish bishops asserted their rights to control clerics in their dioceses, they did so over the objections of local nobility. However, the bishops as Charlemagne’s surrogates were granted sufficient power to resist the supremacy of the counts, which thereby created bastions of centralised imperial influence independent of lesser temporal authorities. As a result, Carolingian magnates were sometimes nominally supportive of ecclesiastical independence, but in practice, church lands and the income they generated were always subject to secular appropriation.⁵³ During this time, bonds between Frankish bishops and Roman pontiff naturally reinforced and paralleled connections between the crown and the papacy.

Many abbots named their successors for political, economic and familial reasons. Whereas the heads of the prevailing monastic houses wielded a power that simultaneously buttressed and was subject to both ecclesiastical and feudal political structure, Fulrad (d. 784), the abbot of Saint-Denis from around 750, was quite another creature still. A priest, not a monk, and a member of this Carolingian administrative aristocracy, Fulrad either collected under his protection or founded small monastic houses in eastern Francia and beyond as his personal patrimony, bequeathing to his abbey the property and income of his house.⁵⁴ As Frankish ambassador, he was also responsible in large part for arranging the relationship between the papacy and the crown that led to the anointing of the royal lineage, a lineage that had long ago placed itself under the protection of St Denis.⁵⁵ Moreover, Fulrad reaffirmed from Pope Stephen II a sustained independence from episcopal control for his own community. His design for a new abbey church was based on his personal knowledge of Old St Peter’s on the Vatican Hill, and he intended this edifice to be a symbol of papal influence and Petrine supremacy, and a mirror of Rome, the point of embarkation for St Denis and his companions.⁵⁶

Charlemagne’s efforts to regularise liturgical practice within Francia were at the same time successful yet thwarted by the weight of its diversity. Fundamental liturgical reform must have arrived in the cities from imperially sanctioned centres in an instantaneous way as clerics were sent eastwards into new territory but also south and west to venerable and established sees. Thus Lyons received its tradition by hand from a singer from Metz.⁵⁷ Monastic custom maintained dissimilar purposes and contexts; hence it generally developed independently of cathedral usage.⁵⁸ So the models of a centralised rule and liturgy were antithetical to its very being. However, Chrodegang of Metz instituted a Roman-influenced, Benedictine-style practice for his canons and is given a great deal of credit for the flourishing of Roman liturgy in the Frankish dominion of Pépin. The apostolic work of St Boniface strengthened this Benedictine standard. Throughout the Carolingian period, members of this order were critical to the effective expansion of Catholic Christianity to the tribes in the east and north. Additionally, the emperor and his only surviving son Louis I the Pious (d. 840) further endeavoured to institute a uniformity of education and ritual that had far-reaching effects among the populace. Benedict of Aniane, now working under the protection of Louis in a monastic reform that began in 814, combined Columban into what was generally a Benedictine model.⁵⁹ At the Synod of Aachen of 817, monastic discipline was reinforced, and monks were compelled to keep close to their abbeys, where the chanting of an expanded Office was imposed, as Benedictine rule was ordained throughout Francia, though with varying success.⁶⁰ But any repertorial reform would be monastic and have little or no correspondence in diocesan plainchant. Decades before, Pope Hadrian had sent Charlemagne a sacramentary (the Hadrianum) designed for the use of the pope himself on feast days and other solemnities. The Hadrianum was then adapted to more common, local usage by Benedict around 810–15. The programme of Pépin and Charlemagne was to embrace the contemporary Roman convention, incorporating various traditions and usages insofar as that liturgy was already Romano-Frankish.⁶¹ This synthesis serves as only the latest example of medieval liturgy, being both ‘an indicator of ecclesiastical romanitas’ and a testament to ‘the strength of local innovation and originality’.⁶² Strabo, writing around 840, felt that any adoption of what was believed to be Roman usage was logically sound, since practice disseminated ‘from the apostolic head’ was as close as one could get to being ‘free from every heretical taint’.⁶³ Certainly this is what Amalarius was seeking when, in search of a Roman antiphoner for Louis, he went first to Rome and then to Corbie, where he found ‘a responsoriale bearing an attribution to Hadrian’.⁶⁴

The 816 coronation of the Louis the Pious as emperor – a secular ceremony – was complemented by his anointing in Reims – a religious ceremony – at which Stephen IV (d. 817) presided. Louis formally introduced the act of consecration, which therefore made the pope an official part of the ceremony. Emperors were henceforth compelled to act in the interests of the papacy. The entire concept of the emanation of power derived from religious principles set forth in the Donation of Constantine. Louis saw the empire as a religious ideal to the extent that when the Northmen threatened attack, Louis proposed the conversion of Scandinavia as a solution. Even so, whatever Pépin’s desired ‘single chant’ had degenerated into at the end of the ninth century, the music of Rome and the emperor had diverged as an older Roman repertoire was fed back to the Eternal City through a Frankish filter.⁶⁵

Francia occidentalis

The problem of imperial succession and division of the empire among Louis’s three sons seemed to have been solved by the creation of separate kingdoms within his domain. However, when Louis died in 840, chaos reigned in light of the competing interests of his heirs. The Treaty of Verdun (843) divided the disputed territories into three separate but equal kingdoms: the east (Francia orientalis) went to Louis the German; the west (Francia occidentalis) went to Charles the Bald; the central portion (Francia media, or Lotharingia) was conferred upon Lothair (d. 855), who kept a greatly diluted imperial title along with Aachen, Trier and Metz. Until 861, the clergy attempted to maintain a kind of peace of brotherhood among the three, but their efforts failed.

Paradoxically, the final work of Amalarius is closer to the books at Lyons than to the books of Metz, and this takes us full circle back to the origins of ecclesio-political history in Gaul. Perhaps Amalarius recognised a deeper romanitas or an older, more authentic tradition in his experience. But whereas scholarship has eschewed the broad generalisations and perhaps oversimplified assertions of the chroniclers and early authors, it remains true that the complexity and diversity of practice is a kind of chaos theory of liturgical and stylistic fractals currently impenetrable to a straightforward and comprehensible formulaic rendering. Though a musico-graphic technique may have begun over a hundred years earlier, by around 900 Frankish-Roman chant began to appear in neumes that in broad gestures are relatively precise or must have been so at least to experienced singers of the time. The increasing exactitude in graphic representation was a consequence of Carolingian literacy, and it ultimately emerged from conscientious education impelled by an idealistic imperial fervour.⁶⁶ A developing literacy perforce cultivates an evolving sense of exactitude in both word and music.

Yet is ‘liturgical and musical stability’ an equivalent concept in the ninth and the twenty-first centuries? The proper ordering of the cycle of texts serves a didactic if not downright kerygmatic purpose for newly evangelised congregations. The appropriateness of the scripture verse proclaimed should take precedence over how that verse is proclaimed. At least this seems true in a pre-Carolingian environment. Most telling in this regard perhaps is the story of King Guntram of Burgundy (d. 592), grandson of Clovis, who, after a banquet during a church council, demanded that the best singer chosen by each bishop present his interpretation of the (or a) responsorium. This challenge was surely not a call for stylistic judging on a nuanced twenty-first-century level but rather an opportunity for singers to exhibit their melodic and rhythmic inventiveness and creativity. Whether inspired by the Holy Spirit or by an unnamed muse in modern-day terms, Guntram’s experiment seems more akin to comparing versions of ‘Cross Road Blues’ than to juxtaposing renderings of a Debussy prelude.⁶⁷ Furthermore, if in our own time a carefully educated child of immigrants can lose all knowledge of parental language and culture, then a properly placed singer arriving from Metz or from Rome with imperial or ecclesiastical endorsement, a cantorial pedigree and a few books could radically transform the education of young men in a monastery, cathedral chapter or patrician chapel. The force of tradition is powerful; the force of literacy is as powerful.