Charlemagne and Offa, Their Kids’ Failed Betrothals, and Trade

By Kim Rendfeld

About 790, Frankish King Charles (Charlemagne) had a proposition for Mercian King Offa: one of Offa’s daughters marry one of Charles’s sons.

Charles likely saw this as a way to secure an alliance between a powerful kingdom in England and his vast realm—stretching from the Atlantic to east of the Rhine, from the North Sea to the Pyrenees and part of Italy. If Charles did not sire any other sons, the bridegroom, his son Charles (whom I call Karl in my books), stood to inherit all but Aquitaine and northern Italy.

Gervold, abbot of St. Wandrille, served as Charles’s envoy to work out the details. The two kings likely brought their wives into the discussions. Frankish Queen Fastrada and Mercian Queen Cynethryth were both strong-willed women. Although Karl might have also favored the marriage, but we don’t know the sentiments of the young woman involved.

In some modern eyes, princesses and other young noblewomen appear to be pawns. In medieval parents’ minds, daughters had an important role in forming the alliances and swaying their husbands to uphold her family’s interests. A husband would think his wife should convince his in-laws to side with him.

Matthew Paris's 13th century tract on St. Alban
(public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Offa, who had seized power in 757 during a civil war after the murder of his cousin, was no exception. Although one daughter, Æthelburh, was an abbess—an influential position—another daughter, Eadburh, wed Beorhtric, king of Wessex. The marriage solidified Beorhtric’s claim to his throne, and the father- and son-in-law drove out Ecgberht, son of Kentish King Ealhmund and a rival for the West Saxon crown.

Offa had another daughter, Ælfflæd, who remained unattached in 790. Offa might have wanted her to wed a ruler in a neighboring kingdom rather than go to the continent. (She would marry Northumbrian King Æthelred I two years later.)

Offa made his own offer to Charles. He would only agree to the Frankish king’s proposition if Charles’s daughter Bertha married his son, Ecgfrith. Crowned co-ruler with his father in 787, Ecgfrith was quite the bachelor, assured of succession. Offa had, ahem, reduced the number of claimants to the throne.

But why Bertha, too young to marry at only age 11, and not her older sister, Hruodtrude, who was the marriageable age of 15? Hruodtrude had been betrothed to Byzantine Emperor Constantine, whom she never met, but that agreement fell apart a few years before.

Apparently Offa was willing to wait a couple of years as he expanded his rule into Kent. Perhaps, he thought the marriage of Charles’s second daughter to his son would remind the Kentish folk of a successful royal couple from long ago: a Merovingian princess named Bertha and Æthelberht, the most powerful Anglo-Saxon king in the late sixth century.

14th century work by Jacob van Maerlant
(Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Charles was not having it. Not at all. While he was willing for Offa’s daughter to come to Francia, learn the ways of the Frankish court, and benefit from the scholars there, he might not have wanted his own child to live in Mercia. He might have heard firsthand accounts of Offa’s ruthlessness and did not wish to subject Bertha to it.

Charles became angry, and that led to Mercia and Francia closing their ports to each other’s merchants.

This isn’t the first time a failed betrothal in Charles’s family had international consequences. According to the Revised Royal Frankish Annals, Constantine, furious at being refused Hruodtrude’s hand in marriage, ordered the Sicilians to attack Benevento, a duchy recently allied with Charles. (Exactly who dashed Constantine’s hopes is unclear. Both Charles and Empress Mother Irene take credit for the breakup.)

Yet I wonder if the cause of Charles’s ire was something in addition to a failed betrothal. Perhaps, Offa brought up another issue. Charles was sheltering Ecgberht, among other exiles, and that must have irked Offa, who still saw Ecgberht as a threat. Might Offa have demanded Charles surrender his guest as a condition for their children’s marriage? If that was the case, I can imagine Charles feeling indignant.

By 796, the two monarchs reconciled, and trade resumed. In an April letter from that letter, Charles calls Offa “dearest brother.”

Still, it turns out that Bertha was better off staying at home. Offa died in 796, and his son succeeded him, but Ecgfrith’s reign didn’t last even a year. He died, likely not of natural causes.

796 was a bad year for Ælfflæd, too. Her husband, Æthelred, had been a ruthless ruler, and two ealdormen took matters into their own hands and murdered him. Ælfflæd might have joined her sister Æthelburh in the cloister, a common refuge for a widowed queen. Karl himself never married. The reason remains a mystery.

Had politics not interfered with Karl and Ælfflæd’s betrothal, what kind of a couple would they have been? We’ll never know.

Sources

Charlemagne: Empire and Society, edited by Joanna Story

Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity by Rosamond McKitterick

"Carolingian Contacts" by Janet L. Nelson, from Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, edited by Michelle P. Brown, Carol A. Farr

“Offa” by S.E. Kelly, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Carolingian Connections: Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Francia, c. 750–870, by Joanna Story

Charlemagne: Translated Sources, P.D. King


~~~~~~~~~~

This story appears in Kim Rendfeld's third novel Queen of the Darkest Hour. In Kim's version of events, Queen Fastrada must stop a conspiracy before it destroys everyone and everything she loves. The book is available on Amazon, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords.

Kim has written two other books set in 8th century Francia. In The Cross and the Dragon, a Frankish noblewoman must contend with a jilted suitor and the fear of losing her husband (available on Amazon). In The Ashes of Heaven's Pillar, a Saxon peasant will fight for her children after losing everything else (available on Amazon). Kim's short story “Betrothed to the Red Dragon,” about Guinevere’s decision to marry Arthur, is set in early medieval Britain and available on Amazon.

Connect with Kim at on her website kimrendfeld.com, her blog, Outtakes of a Historical Novelist at kimrendfeld.wordpress.com, on Facebook at facebook.com/authorkimrendfeld, or follow her on Twitter at @kimrendfeld.

Why Alcuin Joined Charlemagne’s Court

By Kim Rendfeld

In 781, Alcuin had a choice. Should he accept an offer from Frankish King Charles (Charlemagne) to teach in the brand new Palace School or should he continue serving as master of the Cathedral School of York as he had for 15 years?

At the time, the Northumbrian was about 46. (His exact birthdate is unknown; the estimate is 735, which is good enough for me.) He had been with the York school since he was a child, placed there by his noble parents. York was a prestigious place, second only to Canterbury. York’s archbishop, Ecgberht, was King Eadberht’s brother.

Alcuin proved to be an apt pupil and said the school taught him “with tenderness of a mother’s love” and “a fatherly chastisement.” He attracted the attention of Ælbert, the master of the school, and Ecgberht.

In the morning, Ecgberht taught Latin literature, Greek, Roman law, astronomy, music, and theology such as the New Testament. Ælbert’s subjects were rhetoric, grammar, jurisprudence, poetry, astronomy, and the Old Testament. The students attended Mass at midday, followed by dinner and recreation, which included discussions and debates of the morning’s lesson. At vespers, students knelt for blessing.

Alcuin also might have grown up hearing about missionaries such as Willibrord and Wigbert, who tried to convert pagan peoples on the Continent. He likely knew about Boniface and the nuns and priests who followed him across the channel to strengthen Christianity. Alcuin would have been 19 when Boniface was martyred.

All this must have instilled a deep faith and devotion to scholarship in him. Later he would write, “My master Ecgberht used to tell me that the arts were discovered by the wisest of men, and it would be a deep and lasting shame if we allowed them to perish for want of zeal. But many are so faint-hearted as not care about knowing the reason for such things.”

Public domain,
via Wikimedia Commons

When Alcuin was 20, Ecgberht sent him to the Continent to acquire books to enrich York’s library, an expensive and hazardous mission. Alcuin risked his ship sinking, bandits on the road, being robbed by hosts, and sudden turns in the weather. Books were precious. Made of sheepskin, a large tome could require a whole herd. They were copied by hand, and those beautiful illuminations and ornate covers added to the price.

Yet York had a collection to boast about. It included work by Greeks and Romans (Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero, and Lucan), Church fathers (Jerome, Ambrose, Hilary, Augustine, Leo, and Gregory the Great), historians (Bede and Aldhelm), and grammarians (Donatus, Probus, and Phocas).

We don’t know how long Alcuin’s first errand for the archbishop lasted, but it likely took months. At home, the political situation was unstable. Alcuin thought King Eadberht, the archbishop’s brother, had a prosperous, harmonious, and militarily successful reign. But in 756, when Alcuin was 21, Eadberht suffered a disastrous defeat. Two years later, the king received the tonsure and joined his brother at York. The king’s successor, his son Oswulf, was murdered a year later.

In 766—and two more Northumbrian kings later—Ecgberht died. Ælbert succeeded the archbishop, and Alcuin, newly ordained a deacon, became master of York’s school. Alcuin must have been a good teacher. He attracted students from all over Britain and abroad, including Frisia and Ireland.

Politics remained volatile. In 774, another king seized the crown after his predecessor was deposed and exiled. Four years later, Ælbert resigned his archbishopric to retire, and Alcuin’s friend Eanbald succeeded him.

© Hubertl / Wikimedia Commons /
  CC BY-SA 4.0

In 779, yet another king ascended to the Northumbrian throne: Ælfwald, son of the murdered Oswulf and grandson of Eadberht. Although Alcuin admired Eadberht, he didn’t think much of the current king: “From the days of King Ælfwald fornications, adulteries, and incest have flooded the land, so that these sins have been committed without any shame and even with the handmaids of God.” (Ælfwald reign ended with his murder in 788.)

Ælbert died in 780. Soon after, Eanbald sent Alcuin to Rome to fetch a pallium (a woolen band with pendants that symbolize authority). Alcuin was on his way home when he met the king of the Franks. What was running through Alcuin’s mind when Charles asked him to come to the Frankish court?

Here is my speculation. He might have craved stability on the political front. In the past 10 years, Northumbria had three kings, and the current one was leading his realm into immorality. Charles had ruled the Franks alone since 771. Twice divorced, the king of the Franks had his own shortcomings, but he was a steadfast husband to his current wife. More important, he was an ally of the pope and providing missionaries like Alcuin’s friend Willehad with the military support for they needed to bring Christianity to pagans. In the Frankish court, Alcuin could interact with scholars from Italy, Francia, Ireland, and Hispania. He would still teach. His students would be the royal family and their close friends.

The prospect of leaving York might have been nerve-wracking, yet the opportunity to do something different might have excited him. Alcuin returned to York to get his superior’s permission to join the Palace School in Francia. With that choice, he would help build the intellectual foundation for Charles’s empire.

Sources

Alcuin: His Life and His Work, by C.J.B. Gaskoin

Alcuin, by E.M. Wilmot-Buxton

“Alcuin” by James Burns, The Catholic Encyclopedia.

The Oxford Companion to British History (2 ed.), edited by Robert Crowcroft and John Cannon

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

~~~~~~~~~~

Alcuin appears in Kim Rendfeld’s third novel, Queen of the Darkest Hour, which will be launched August 7. In Kim's version of events, Queen Fastrada must stop a conspiracy before it destroys everyone and everything she loves. The ebook is available for preorder on Amazon, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

Kim has written two other stories set in 8th century Francia. In The Cross and the Dragon, a Frankish noblewoman must contend with a jilted suitor and the fear of losing her husband (available on Amazon). In The Ashes of Heaven's Pillar, a Saxon peasant will fight for her children after losing everything else (available on Amazon). Kim's short story “Betrothed to the Red Dragon,” about Guinevere’s decision to marry Arthur, is set in early medieval Britain and available on Amazon.

Connect with Kim at on her website kimrendfeld.com, her blog, Outtakes of a Historical Novelist at kimrendfeld.wordpress.com, on Facebook at facebook.com/authorkimrendfeld, or follow her on Twitter at @kimrendfeld.

Osulf: the Prince’s Friend or Lover?

By Kim Rendfeld

We know the British Saxon Osulf and Charlemagne’s son Charles (called Karl in my books) were close, but just how close remains a mystery.

The intrigue centers on a poem by the courtier Theodulf. The Visigoth composed a parody of Virgil’s Second Eclogue, about the shepherd Corydon and his love for the boy Alexis. In Theodulf’s version, the prince, Karl, is playing a flute for Mochanaz, whose name is similar to Arabic muhannat, meaning catamite. Mochanaz might be Osulf. Theodulf’s poem praises Karl, but his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather are urged to scourge Mochanaz.

Osulf was a part of the prince’s retinue, but were Karl and Osulf lovers? Hard to say.

Karl was one of three heirs to Charlemagne’s realm, and he led soldiers into battle during the later years of his father’s reign. When the emperor wrote his will, he divided it among the three sons he had with the late Queen Hildegard. Louis got Aquitaine. Pepin got Italy. Karl got everything else.

Yet Karl never married and never had children. His two full brothers had married young and had fathered lots of kids.

Could the reason Karl remained a bachelor be that he was gay? We don’t know Karl’s sexual orientation, but attraction or love for a man would not prevent marriage to a woman. As long as the husband fulfilled his duty to his wife—the conjugal bed was her right as well as his—and sired children, what he did outside the marriage was between him and his confessor. Homosexuality was considered a sin, but most often it was tolerated on the same level as adultery (for men) and premarital sex (for men). If a man fathered a baby by a woman other than his wife, he was expected to acknowledge and support the child, but otherwise, no one thought much of it.

1900 image of Charlemagne presiding
over the Palace School (by Internet Archive Book
Images, via Wikimedia Commons)

Perhaps, Theodulf’s target was not Osulf but the Visigoth’s rival Alcuin, a scholar from York. Osulf was among four pupils who accompanied Alcuin from York to the Frankish court. In 781, Alcuin had met Charlemagne in Parma. Alcuin had already earned a reputation as master of the cathedral school at York, and Charlemagne invited him to lead the Palace School in Francia. Alcuin agreed, after he got permission from his superior upon his return to York.

Charlemagne had a circle of scholars in his court—the brightest minds in the realm. They might have had the egos to go with them. They were not above using their poetry to tease and snipe at each other.

Theodulf did not target Alcuin directly, although Alcuin might have loved other men. A missive to Arno, the bishop of Saltzburg, reads like a love letter, where Alcuin expresses deep feeling and physical longing. But Alcuin affections were for a bishop, albeit an influential one, not a prince. Theodulf likely saw an opportunity in Osulf, who caused Alcuin frustration. We don’t know what Osulf did exactly, but there are a few clues, none of them about homosexuality.

In a letter to Mercian King Offa about Osulf or another student whom Alcuin calls “my dear son,” the scholar asks the monarch not to “let him wander loosely or fall into drink. Give him boys to teach, and see that he teaches them with energy. I know he can, because he was a good student.”

Detail from 1830 painting by Jean-Victor Schnetz
(public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

In a letter directly to Osulf, Alcuin laments, “Why hast thou abandoned thy father who has educated thee from thy childhood, who has instructed thee in the liberal sciences, and led thee in the ways of virtue, and furnished thee with the doctrines of external life? Why hast thou joined thyself to a troupe of harlots, to the revels of the drunkard, to the follies of the vain? Art thou that youth who was praised by every tongue, lovely in every eye, commended to every ear? Alas! Alas! Now thou art censured by every tongue, hateful to every eye, and cursed to every ear.”

Another manifestation of Alcuin’s frustration is in his interpretation of another student’s disturbing dream: “O Osulf, thou wretched one, how oft I have warned thee, how oft corrected! Much labour did I devote to thine uncle, that he should reform and begin to walk in the way of the commandments of God; and I told him that if he did not he would be smitten with the plague of leprosy; which thing happened to him. And to thee, my son, I predict of Osulf, of whom is this vision, that neither in this land, nor in the land of his birth, shall he die.” (Osulf would die in Lombardy.)

Knowing Osulf was a beloved, if flawed, pupil of Alcuin, Theodulf likely took aim at his rival by criticizing Alcuin’s failure to rein Osulf in. Theodulf’s poem seems to say more about the poet and his spite for a rival that a courtier’s relationship with a prince.

Sources
Alcuin and the Rise of the Christian Schools by Andrew Fleming West
Alcuin of York by George Forrest Browne
Alcuin, friend of Charlemagne: his world and his work by Eleanor Shipley Duckett
Charlemagne by Johannes Fried
“Presidential Address: England and the Continent in the Ninth Century: IV, Bodies and Minds” by Janet L. Nelson, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society: Volume 15: Sixth Series, edited by Aled Jones
The Life of Alcuin, Frederick Lorenz, translated from the German by Jane Mary Slee
Gay History and Literature
~~~~~~~~~~

Kim Rendfeld has written two novels set in 8th century Europe, and her third novel, Queen of the Darkest Hour, will be published August 7. The ebook about how Queen Fastrada must stop a conspiracy before it destroys the kingdom is available for preorder on Amazon, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

In The Cross and the Dragon, a Frankish noblewoman must contend with a jilted suitor and the fear of losing her husband (available on Amazon). In The Ashes of Heaven's Pillar, a Saxon peasant will fight for her children after losing everything else (available on Amazon). Kim's short story “Betrothed to the Red Dragon,” about Guinevere’s decision to marry Arthur, is set in early medieval Britain and available on Amazon.

Connect with Kim at on her website kimrendfeld.com, her blog, Outtakes of a Historical Novelist at kimrendfeld.wordpress.com, on Facebook at facebook.com/authorkimrendfeld, or follow her on Twitter at @kimrendfeld.

Did Lull Advise Charlemagne to Get Tough on Pagans?

By Kim Rendfeld

What was it like for Saint Lull in 785, when he got the news Continental Saxon ruler Widukind, responsible for church burnings and mass murder, had agreed to accept baptism, with Frankish King Charles as his godfather?

Lull was between age 75 and 80. A disciple of the missionary Saint Boniface, the English-born churchman had worked for 40 years to restore the faith where Christians had lapsed and wanted to spread it to pagan lands. Lull might have recently retired to the abbey at Hersfeld. Before his death on Oct. 16, 786, he composed a few verses celebrating Charles’s conquest.

Perhaps he did more than watch from the sidelines. Lull was an advisor to Charles (Charlemagne), and historian Richard A. Fletcher suggested Lull might have encouraged the Frankish monarch to get tough with recalcitrant pagans.

It is possible for several reasons. Boniface, who had anointed Charles’s father as king of the Franks, had chosen his close friend Lull to be his successor as the archbishop of Mainz. Lull had joined Boniface in Germany after a pilgrimage to Rome, and rose through the clerical ranks. He was a deacon in 745, priest in 751, and bishop in 752. His ascendance in 753 to an influential position in a city that was almost 800 years old was bittersweet. In instructing Lull to keep building churches, Boniface told his disciple he was nearing the end of his life. Lull wept at this foretelling.

An advocate for strict discipline and the authority of bishops over all monasteries and convents, Lull might not have been the easiest guy to get along with, as Saint Sturm, abbot of Fulda, would attest. After Boniface’s martyrdom in 754, they fought over where the relics would have their final resting place, and Lull retaliated when he lost. (See the link below for more on that.)

Statue of Saint Lullus in Bad Hersfeld
(photo  by 2micha GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0,
 via Wikimedia Commons)

The King Needs Allies in the Right Places

Charles was only a child when this tiff happened, and history doesn’t record what he thought about it. Twelve years later, a dying Pepin split his kingdom between his two sons, Charles and Carloman. The brothers didn’t get along, and Charles needed allies. Lull was a good choice. His diocese was near Carloman’s realm, and Charles would have liked that Lull, educated at monasteries in Malmesbury and Nhutscelle, was a learned man. In fact, Lull was constantly asking for more books.

Charles also made friends with Sturm, who had not forgotten his earlier dispute with Lull. I suspect the feeling was mutual. Yet the two clerics might have agreed on one thing: protect their abbeys, along with Fritzlar, from the pagan Saxons. The monastery at Hersfeld, which Lull had founded with Charles's support around the time Charles became king, was less than a week’s journey from the Saxon fortress Eresburg. Sturm’s abbey at Fulda was a two-day journey after that.

Lull and Sturm would have known about the long-standing hostility between the Christian Franks and the pagan Saxons. But Charles’s first war in Saxony in 772 was different; it was the first time religion became a factor. Charles borrowed a tactic from Boniface and ordered the destruction of a monument sacred to the pagans, a pillar in this case. It’s not too much of a stretch to think Lull or Sturm reminded him of the story where Boniface felled a sacred tree and pagans had converted.

Boniface chops down a tree sacred to pagans,
engraving by Bernhard Rode, 1781
(public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Why Charles, now sole ruler of the Franks, invaded Saxony at that time is open to speculation. Perhaps, the Saxons had stopped paying yearly tribute won from the previous war 14 years before, while Pepin, and then Charles were distracted with the wars in Aquitaine. Charles might have thought to let such insolence go unanswered would weaken him. Perhaps, Charles was trying to protect Church interests in pagan lands, or he saw the Saxons as a threat with the fortress of Eresburg so close to Frankish territory.

Charles had a military victory that year, but the wars with brutality on both sides would continue on and off for decades. At one point, he appointed Sturm to watch over affairs in the conquered Eresburg. In 779, age and illness caught up with Sturm. On his deathbed, he asked his brethren to pray for him and singled out Lull “who always took sides against me” for forgiveness.

Time to Be More Aggressive?

I would like to think Lull welcomed the attempt at reconciliation, but he probably had other things on his mind. At this point, he had supported missionary work for 34 years. He likely remembered the pagans who had burned Saint Lebwin’s churches in Deventer and the attacks on Fritzlar and the nearby fortress of Büraburg. Just the previous year, the Saxons again burned churches all the way to the Rhine and slaughtered indiscriminately.

And then there was the abbey in Hersfeld, which sat on land Sturm was told to leave many years ago because it was too close to Saxony to be safe. Lull was setting it up as a center for learning, a monastery that would rival Fulda. He might have already wanted to translate Saint Wigbert’s relics to Hersfeld, making it an attraction for pilgrims and their alms.

Might Lull have encouraged Charles to be more aggressive? The best answer I can give is it’s possible.

In 782, the same year Charles avenged a disastrous military defeat in the Süntel with a mass execution (4,500 if we are to believe the Royal Frankish Annals), he issued a capitulary to the Saxons. Among other things, it made capital offenses of pagan practices such as burning the dead. The capitulary put the force of law behind the missionaries’ efforts. Perhaps in Lull’s mind and others’, a few souls would be lost, but they were going to hell anyway. This was a way to prevent them from dragging others with them.

Charlemagne accepts Widukind's submission,
1840 painting by Ary Scheffer
(public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Now the Saxons were in a hard place. If they followed their old gods, they risked execution. If they ignored the deities responsible for victory in battle and successful harvests they risked starvation and the ability to be ruled by their own. Led by Widukind, they decided to keep fighting. So did the Franks.

Near the end of 784, Charles took the extraordinary step of going to war in the winter, using Eresburg as a base. Most early medieval wars were fought in summer, when animals could graze and soldiers could get food by raiding farms on enemy lands. The lack of crops and fodder made fighting in winter risky. Apparently the pressure was too much for Widukind. He and Charles made a deal: Widukind would convert to Christianity and submit to Charles, and Charles would offer his protection as his lord.

Lull must have felt triumphant to hear the news. Finally, missionaries would be able to do their work unimpeded. Finally, Saxon souls would be saved. He might have gone to his death at peace with the knowledge, despite a conspiracy against Charles from Franks or Thuringians unhappy with the deal. What he didn’t know was that the wars would resume in a few years.

Related: A Fight over Who Gets the Martyr's Relics

Sources

The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge

The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints, Alban Butler

The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity by Richard A. Fletcher

“St Lullus” Athelstan Museum, Malmesbury

"Hersfeld" by Oswald Hunter-Blair, The Catholic Encyclopedia

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England

Willibald: The Life of St. Boniface

Kim Rendfeld’s rereleased novel The Ashes of Heaven’s Pillar opens with the destruction of the Irminsul, a monument sacred to the pagan Continental Saxons, and Charlemagne’s deal with Widukind plays a key role in her work in progress, Queen of the Darkest Hour.

You can order The Ashes of Heaven's Pillar, about a Saxon peasant who will fight for her children after losing everything else, at Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes. Kim's first novel, The Cross and the Dragon, in which a Frankish noblewoman must contend with a jilted suitor and the fear of losing her husband, is available at Amazon, Kobo, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, CreateSpace, and other vendors.

Connect with Kim at on her website kimrendfeld.com, her blog, Outtakes of a Historical Novelist at kimrendfeld.wordpress.com, on Facebook at facebook.com/authorkimrendfeld, or follow her on Twitter at @kimrendfeld.

Sheepskin Cloaks: The Most Practical Medieval Fashion

By Kim Rendfeld

If we are to believe Notker the Stammerer (and there are plenty of reasons not to), Charlemagne was trying to make a point when told his courtiers they ought to go hunting. At that moment. No changing clothes.

By Tare Gheorghe

Charles was wearing a sheepskin cloak. His followers were bedecked in silks, pheasant skins, ribbons, ermine robes, peacock feathers, and other finery. So they trekked through forests thick with briars and tree branches, got drenched with rain, and oh yeah, got spattered with blood from their prey.

The next day Charles ordered them to appear before him with in yesterday’s clothes. The courtiers’ garments were tattered and stained, not good for anything but rags, but once brushed off, Charles’s sheepskin was as good as new.

Then Charles asked his courtiers which garments were truly worth more, and the courtiers were duly ashamed of their vanity.

Writing about 70 years after Charles’s death, Notker probably made the whole thing up. Such a stunt would more likely cause resentment, and for Charles to rule such a vast empire, he needed trustworthy allies within his realm.

Besides, Einhard, a more reliable biographer who actually knew the monarch, doesn’t include a sheepskin in Charles’s outfit. To stay warm, Charles favored a vest of expensive otter or marten furs and a blue cloak.

But Notker’s anecdote does illustrate the practicality and durability of sheepskin cloaks.

A 14th century sheep pen from the Luttrell Psalter

Medieval folk depended on sheep, which were only a third of the size of today’s breeds or smaller. While alive, they were a source for wool and milk. Slaughtered, they provided meat, tallow for candles, and bones that could be made into anything from flutes to dice. Their skins could be used for parchment or cloaks.

A sheepskin cloak might cost a commoner as much as a live sheep or farm dog. When you consider that a peasant family might have thought themselves well off if they had a mix of 16 sheep, cows, and pigs, such an item isn’t cheap, but it is within reach. A sable-lined garment cost about 10 times more, and the marten and otter furs were 30 times as much.

To a family planning to keep a sheepskin cloak for years, it was worth the expense. The fleece kept its wearer warm and the lanolin repelled water when someone had to go outside to fetch firewood, walk to church, or get food from the cellar. It was valuable indoors, too; fires did not adequately warm the house.

Notker probably crafted his story to entertain his patron, Charles the Fat, and show the king how wise and pious his great-grandfather was. And perhaps Notker, like many writers, was fulfilling a wish. I can’t help but wonder if he had seen noblemen showing off their wealth with fancy, impractical clothes and wanted someone to teach them a lesson.

Images are public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sources

The Monk of Saint Gall: The Life of Charlemagne

Einhard: The Life of Charlemagne

Katie Cannon’s Craft

Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne by Pierre Riche

Daily Life in Medieval Times by Frances and Joseph Gies

Kim Rendfeld is the author of two books set in Carolingian Francia, The Cross and the Dragon and The Ashes of Heaven’s Pillar, and is working on Queen of the Darkest Hour. For more about Kim and her fiction, visit kimrendfeld.com or her blog, Outtakes. You can also connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.

Why the Saxons Kept Breaking Their Vows

By Kim Rendfeld

Alcuin of York wanted the Christian mission in pagan Saxony to succeed, but in the 790s, he was deeply troubled by how it was carried out.

A 9th century manuscript
illustration with Alcuin in the middle.

Letters from the Northumbrian scholar who led Charlemagne’s Palace School might be as close as we get to the Continental Saxons’ side of the decades of bitter wars. The Saxons themselves had no written language as we know it, and the Church, aided by King Charles (Charlemagne), did whatever it could to obliterate a religion it equated with devil worship.

Neither side is innocent. The Saxons burned churches and killed indiscriminately, the latter perhaps as a thanksgiving to the war god. As for the Franks, in 782, Charles issued a capitulary that among other things called for the death of anyone who didn’t convert to Christianity.

In 789, Alcuin was optimistic about the spread of Christianity and for good reason. The Saxon war leader Widukind had accepted baptism four years before, and the peace thus far held. Alcuin asked a friend how the Saxons took his preaching, and a few months later, he praised Charles for pressuring the Saxons to convert whether it was with rewards or threats.

Three years later, Charles’s wars with the Saxons had restarted. Other contemporary sources complain that the Saxons broke their oaths. The entry in the Lorsch annals invokes Proverbs and compares the Saxons’ reverting to paganism, burning churches, and killing priests “as a dog returns to its vomit.”

Alcuin took a more nuanced approached in 796. Writing to Arno, a former student and bishop of Salzburg, Alcuin advised, “And be a preacher of compassion, not an exactor of tithes … It is tithes, men say, that have destroyed the faith of the Saxons.”

A 19th century illustration of Saxons being baptized.

The year before, emissaries of an Avarian governor came to Saxony, where the Franks were at war again, and promised to submit to Charles and accept baptism. It’s not too much of a stretch to think that Charles and his magnates talked about spreading Christianity to the Avars, whom the Franks had fought off and on since 788. Perhaps, Arno was already a candidate to lead the spiritual mission.

In 796, the Franks had a major victory over the Avars. With Avarian leaders killed in internecine conflict, the Franks broke into a stronghold and took its riches, probably centuries of plunder. The Avar governor, identified only as the tudun, and his companions accepted baptism.

Was Alcuin trying to prevent repeating the mistakes made with the Saxons in addition to changing the Christian mission there? Again and again that year, Alcuin pleaded for a different, gentler approach to spreading Christianity, even taking his message to King Charles. He pointed out the apostles did not exact tithes from the newly converted and said it was better to lose the wealth than the soul.

In a letter to Meginfrid the chamberlain (although the real audience is King Charles), Alcuin outlined how the process should work: teach first, then baptize, then expound on the Gospel. “And if any one of these three is lacking, the listener’s soul cannot enjoy salvation. Moreover, faith, as St. Augustine says, is a matter of will, not of compulsion. A person can be drawn to faith but cannot forced to it.”

Alcuin himself was well educated. Born around 735, he had directed the school at York for 15 years before joining Charles’s court.

“If the light and sweet burden of Christ were to be preached to the obstinate people of the Saxons with as much determination as the payment of tithes has been exacted and the force of the legal decree applied for faults of the most trifling sort imaginable, perhaps they would not be averse to their baptismal vows,” he wrote to Meginfrid, adding that missionaries should be learned men, “preachers, not predators.”

Arno was, in fact, assigned mission territory in Avaria and later appointed archbishop. Perhaps another letter to him from Alcuin is as much a warning as a lament: “It is because the wretched people of the Saxons has never had the faith in its heart that it has so often abandoned the baptismal oath.”

Public domain images via Wikimedia Commons.

Sources

Charlemagne: Translated Sources by P.D. King

“Alcuin” by James Burns, The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907). Retrieved from New Advent

"Salzburg" by Cölestin Wolfsgrüber, The Catholic Encyclopedia (1912). Retrieved from New Advent

Charlemagne by Roger Collins

Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals and Nithard’s Histories, translated by Bernhard Walter Scholz with Barbara Rogers

Alcuin’s letters played an important role in Kim Rendfeld’s research about eighth-century Saxony, where the story for The Ashes of Heaven’s Pillar begins (August 28, 2014, Fireship Press). Kim’s latest release is a tale of the lengths a mother will go to protect her children after she’s lost everything else. To read the first chapter or find out more about Kim, visit kimrendfeld.com, her blog Outtakes of a Historical Novelist, at kimrendfeld.wordpress.com, like her on Facebook at facebook.com/authorkimrendfeld, follow her on Twitter at @kimrendfeld, or contact her at kim [at] kimrendfeld [dot] com.