Enlisting Clergy

Charlemagne project about schooling was a comprehensive one: Palace School at the top, affiliated monastic and cathedral schools throughout Frankish dominions, village and parochial schools for people. From Frankish kingdom's summit to villagers, everyone was called to a educational effort. This project was defined by a series of enactments dated 787-789 A.D. Clergy was the natural ally of Charlemagne in this project as since the end of the Antiquity, Church had taken teaching burden in the Western world. In the capitulary of 787, Charlemagne stated that he had observed that, from letters received from monasteries, thoughts expressed herein were just but language in which they were expresssed, rude. This was leading the Emperor to fear that study of Scriptures might suffer. Hence each bishop and abbott was asked to take care that some teaching be organized in their constituencies. Such decisions were re-enacted at the council of Aachen in 789, leading to the creation of one school per bishopric and per abbey. Secular and regular clerics, under penalties, were to be able to read and write and possess knowledge requisite for intelligent performance of their clerical duties. A better learned clergy was to be more efficient in terms of the Church. A better learned clergy was to be more efficient about the Carolingian educational project too. On another hand, Charlemagne capitularies were ordering monasteries and abbeys to maintain a school where not only clergy candidates and children of neighbouring nobles would be admitted, but children of villagers too. This was further developped and in 802 A.D. it was enacted that priests establish schools in very town and village to teach the rudiments of general education. Hence by the middle of the 9th century a hierarchical educational system was, at least formerly, established in the Frankish world

That is the way that, shortly after Palace School was reformed, schools spreaded, teaching the new learning teached at court. The network of the schools in the countryside and the towns' parishes performed a minimum instruction for the people, as the one of the monasteries and bishoprics allowed to the training of the clerics, along with the civil servants of the monarchy too. As they came to master grammar and computing, Carolingian administrators could read king's orders, make reports and manage his domains and revenues in a better way! The upper row in training, at last, was performed by some of those schools, which training was of a university level and allowing for the formation of the elite. Such were Corbie, Metz, Tours, Ferrières as, of course, was the Palace School too. Fulda and Raban Maur were the next agents to this diffusion. Solenhofen, Celle, Hirsfeld, Petersburg, Reichenau, and St. Gall schools were revived. Movement continued and other schools endured the Carolinigian revival further: Rheinau; Pavia and Bobbio among others in Northern Italy; Reims, Auxerre, Laon, and Chartres in France proper; Utrecht, Liège and St. Laurent in the Low Countries

Such a educational effort was not to be contempted by Church either, as it was part of its tradition since earlier times to permit laity access to its schools and to worry about to provide faithfuls with a appropriately-minded profane learning