1

the Debonair had died the year before, and war was then raging between his son Lothaire and his grandson Pepin on the one side and his sons Louis the German and Charles the Bald on the other. Lothaire had already suffered a severe defeat at Fontenoy, but during the campaign of 842 he had recovered sufficiently to press very hard the armies of Louis and Charles, who finally concentrated their forces on the borders of the Rhine near Strasburg, and swore, in the presence of their legions, a new oath of alliance for mutual defense. By way of making this covenant at once more binding on themselves and more intelligible to their hosts it was taken in the popular language of the two peoples. Louis the German, as he was called, swore in Romance, and Charles the Bald in the Alemannish of the period, and the rude, stammering, inchoate syllables were written down phonetically, together with their translation into monkish Latin.

"Pro Don amur, et pro Christian poblo," began Louis, and "In Godes minna ind um tes Christianes folches," echoed Charles.

The Church in general inclined to the side of Charles and Louis, for the reason that Lothaire had sought heathenish alliances with Saxons and with Saracens ; but none the less did Abbot Odo, who was obliged by the terms of the charter of Ferrières to lead his contingent of troops into the field, espouse the cause of Lothaire and Pepin, of whom the latter kept up the struggle in Aquitaine for several years longer. It was a time of great anxiety and suspense for Lupus, who was personally loyal to Charles the Bald, but who was left in charge of the cloister when Odo took the field for Lothaire, and who, as early as 841, had written several letters in the name of the latter, in one of which he says, "We fluctuate in a strait betwixt two, not knowing in the least who will make 1 Not the Fontenoy of Maurice de Saxe's great victory, but Fontenoy near Auxerre.

good his claim to this most important region of ours."

It was Charles the Bald who did so, as we know, whereupon Odo was deposed without loss of time, and Lupus was made abbot in his stead. The office was theoretically elective, but Charles had no need to do more than suggest a candidate to the monks of Ferrières, for those were not days in which the royal advice on such a matter could safely be disregarded. Lupus accepted his promotion with equal docility, but did not hesitate, in the candor of his spirit, to place the responsibility for the change exactly where it belonged. Shortly after his elevation he wrote a letter to the Bishop of Orléans, deploring the destruction (probably by the Norman freebooters) of sundry farms and vineyards in that diocese, whose revenues were a perquisite of the abbey of Ferrières, and then proceeded as follows:

"I know not what sort of lying report has reached you concerning our former abbot; but that you may give it no further credence allow me to offer your sanctity a veracious account of what did really happen. Our lord the king gave orders that he should be dismissed from the monastery, prefacing the command by certain remarks concerning Odo which it may be as well not to repeat. On my return to the monastery I communicated the tidings to the abbot as gently as possible; men were told off to escort him, and horses, clothes, and money supplied him for his journey. I myself, being under orders from our lord the king, had to quit the monastery on the last day of November, but I left instructions that he should be out of it before the 3d of December, on which day I expected to appear before our lord the king. This I did; and he, after according me a ceremonious reception, inquired what I had done with the aforesaid abbot. I, who supposed that the abbot had kept faith with me, replied that I had executed his [the king's]

orders concerning him. I then got leave to depart, but as I drew near the monastery, on the 12th of December, I learned that the oft-mentioned abbot was still there. Much disturbed at the discovery that I had been fibbing to our lord, I dispatched a messenger to the abbot by night, telling him squarely that he must be out before break of day; that it was unpardonable of him to be staying on in defiance of the king's command, and preventing me from coming in. He replied that he had always intended to leave the next day, and I, in order to afford no handle whatever for calumny, answered that I would not enter until he was out. So at last he departed from the community, I allowing him the same abundant provision as before, and some other things beside. I lost no time in laying the matter before my friends at court, and also, at the earliest opportunity, I confessed that inadvertent false hood of mine to the king, and they all agreed in thinking that I had done perfectly right. Let those who have spread other stories see whether they have been justified in so doing. I have most assuredly had a single eye in the whole business, whence I trust that, under Providence, my whole body will be found full of light.

"And so farewell, and may all good attend you."

Lupus entered upon his new duties at the close of 842, devoting himself heart and soul to the welfare of the monastery both in temporal and spiritual things. We have already seen him taking measures to restore the hoary church, and looking after his humbler dependencies in the neighborhood of Orléans. But there was a far more precious and important appanage of Ferrières, which had been severed from the domain of the abbey during the brief period of Lothaire's ascendency in central France, and given to one of his creatures. This was the so-called Cell of St. Judocus, now St.-Josse-sur-Mer, then a basilica

with a small cloister attached, in the
diocese of Amiens. The holy Judocus
was an Armorican prince who had re-
nounced the world and his claims to
the throne of his father, and built this
fair church in the wilderness about two
hundred years before Lupus's day. The
monastery had been given by Charle-
magne to the English Alcuin, at the time
when the latter was abbot of Ferrières,
to be used as a house of entertainment
for pilgrims; chiefly, no doubt, for those
who came from the British Isles. Some
objections had been made at the time on
the ground of the law against pluralities,
but these were overruled, and Louis the
Debonair confirmed the union of the two
establishments. The Cell retained its
humble name, but it was richly endowed
and its lands were highly cultivated.
The extraordinary beauty of the site and
surroundings once inspired a monkish
poet with so sweet a strain of elegiac
verse that one hastens to cull it like
some rare flower of the wilderness. It
may be freely rendered thus:-
"Home of my heart, beloved Cell,

Farewell, dear dwelling, a last farewell!
Farewell to the shade of blossoming boughs,
The whispering forests that gird the house;
Healing simples and herbs of balm,
Culled by the leech in meadows calm;
Flower-sown borders of winding streams
Where the nets are spread and the fisher
dreams;

Fragrant fruits of the garden-close,
White of lily and red of rose!
Here, for aye, shall the birds upraise
A matin-song in their Maker's praise,
But the word of truth shall fall no more
From the lips of the master, gone before."

In that final division of territory among the descendants of Charles the Great which was effected by the treaty of Verdun this beautiful bit of ecclesiastical property was included in the portion of Charles the Bald, who presently bestowed it upon a layman named Odulf. But Lupus was resolved to have it back. He appreciated its loveliness, prized its associations, and needed its revenues; and he forthwith began to besiege the

monarch in a series of vivacious letters, some extracts from which may be found interesting.

He reminds his sovereign that "the most pious Emperor Louis, author of your nobility," at the request of "Judith Augusta, your mother of all-glorious memory," had confirmed by a charter the union of St. Josse and Ferrières, "to the end that the monks of this monastery might serve the Lord in easy circumstances and entertain pilgrims in the aforesaid Cell with godly hospitality, and comfortably pray to God for the health and security of them both [Louis and Judith]. This their deed of charity you at first most graciously approved, and even confirmed it by fresh enactments; but later you were induced by certain persons, who care not how they offend God so only they get rich, to make null and void this double benefaction. . . . The consequence is that the servants of God in this place, who do always pray for have failed now you, for three years to receive their accustomed allowance of clothing; and that which they are compelled to wear is worn to rags and very much patched. They subsist upon market vegetables, with exceedingly rare consolation of fish or cheese; and even the servants are not paid the wages which are justly their due because all these things used to accrue to us from the aforesaid Cell, for whose present state of dilapidation and its neglect of strangers from beyond the sea may God not hold you responsible." Again he writes:

"Even while we held [our possessions intact] we had no harmful superfluity, nor were we tempted to dally in the lap of luxury; for the entire resources of the monastery barely sufficed to provide us with what our rule allows. Now, however, for a long time, we have had to put up with much less. We cannot keep warm, and we abstain when we would not; and the sick and children and the aged are uncared for."

"If you desire to know," he says bluntly in another letter, "what they [the brothers] really say about you, it is this: that it is most unfair for you to exercise them with cold and hunger while they are under bonds to pray without ceasing for your temporal and eternal welfare; and they do not think you will ever attain the felicity to which you aspire so long as you make not your peace with our little St. Peter [the patron of Ferrières]. And you need not fancy that they speak in jest; for our old men say that they had it from their fathers, when they were boys, and can confirm it by their own experience, that whoever inflicts any marked injury upon our house incurs thereby great peril of his own health and life, unless he do quickly repent."

After a half dozen years or so of unwearied and undaunted importunity on the part of our abbot the king succumbed, and St. Josse was reunited to Ferrières. The precise date of the formal restitution is not known; but the first allusion to it in the correspondence of Lupus occurs in a letter to the Archbishop of York, written from the Cell itself, and praying for a renewal of the relations with England which had subsisted in the days of Alcuin. Lupus also takes advantage of the comparatively easy communication with England which he now enjoys to request of a certain abbot in the city of York the loan of sundry books which he wishes to have copied, namely, Bede on the Old and New Testament, the Disputations of St. Jerome, the books of Jerome on Jeremiah after the first six which he already possesses, and the twelve books of the Institutions of Quintilian. King Ethelred of England had married a daughter of Charles the Bald, and it was to him, therefore, that Lupus applied for the lead which was wanted for the new church roof at Ferrières. The request appears to have been readily granted; and accordingly rafts of

especial strength were built for the conveyance of the unwieldy metal up the rivers Seine and Cléry. Their construction was all the more necessary because Lupus had had the misfortune to lose ten of the convent horses, when making a tour of inspection among the monasteries of Burgundy in company with the Bishop of Troyes. Lupus had also his military service to perform, like Odo before him; and in June of 844, the detachment of troops with which his contingent was marching to the support of Charles the Bald under the walls of Toulouse having been cut off by a raid of Pepin's men, the abbot was taken prisoner. He says in one of his letin one of his let ters that he "lost everything;" but his captivity was at least a brief one, for we find him writing that "by the sig nal grace of God, and the intercession of his saints, and the intervention of one Count Turpio" (of Angoulême), he was back again in his cloister, "safe and sound, on the 5th of July."

Before the close of the same year we find him drawing up the twelve canons of the Council of Verneuil; and very curious some of them are, as, for example:

No. 6. "A maiden who has been married by one man, and then seized and appropriated by another, must, according to the tenth statute of the Council of Ancyra, be restored to the man by whom she was first espoused, even though she have suffered violence. But it is recommended that the ravager be threatened with the penalties of the secular law, since criminals of this class make very light of ecclesiastical excommunication."

No. 7. "If any nuns, from what they falsely deem a religious motive, do either adopt male attire or shave the head, since we hold this to be a sin of ignorance rather than of perversity, it is ordained that they be [merely] admonished and whipped."

Lupus is almost always found at the

synods from this time on, and there is a letter of his, of the year 849, which shows pretty plainly what he himself thought of the relative cogency of his civil and ecclesiastical obligations : —

Lupus to Pardulus, the bishop, his dearly and singularly beloved, greeting in the Lord.

"I did not attend the synod, because I was not summoned by our lord the king. I have taken care that his letter should be exactly copied, so that if by chance my name is mentioned you may be able to show that I was justified in remaining away. However, since you have been so good as to admit me to your friendship, I do beseech you that now and always, as God gives you opportunity, you will intercede in my behalf. You know very well that I was never instructed in the principles of attack and defense, nor how to fulfill any of the duties, whether of infantry or cavalry service; nor is it warriors only of whom our lord the king stands in need. I entreat you, therefore, to use your influence, and if possible also that of Hincmar,1 to induce him [the king] to consider my [sacred] profession and assign me some duty less inconsistent with it: the rather since he really holds my [military] services very cheap. If you truly love me, you will manage this thing in such a way that I shall not only incur no odium, but may even get a little credit thereby."

Lupus probably refers, in this letter, to the preparations for the last expedition of Charles the Bald against Nomenoius, the rebellious king of Brittany. If so, our abbot was not wholly excused from service, as he desired, but he came safely home, after a brief campaign; while Nomenoius, who had declared his independence on the death of Louis the Debonair, maintained the same successfully until his sudden and rather mysterious death in 851. He had disposed in the most high-handed manner of the 1 The famous Bishop of Rheims.

bishoprics within his province, altering the bounds of sees, pulling down one ecclesiastic and setting up another. His arbitrary arrangements, strange to say, subsisted almost unchanged until the time of the great revolution, but they were regarded as acts of heinous aggression in his own day; and it seems to have been for the purpose of protesting against some of these enormities that Lupus was sent on a mission to the head of Christendom at Rome some time in the later forties. This journey was a very great event; and how anxiously and assiduously the abbot made his preparations for departure will appear from the following naïve letter to his friend the saintly Marquard :

"For purposes of prayer and the transaction of certain church business, which, God willing, I will explain more fully to your paternity on my return, I am about starting for Rome. And since I cannot succeed in these affairs without the apostolical [that is to say, the papal] good will, and I know well that this can be won only by means of gifts, I hie me to you, as to my father's nay, my mother's bosom; begging that you, who have never yet failed me in any time of need, will deign to assist me now. Be so good, therefore, as to forward me - if possible by the messengers whom I send two cloaks of dark blue woolen cloth, and the same number of those linen ones which the Germans call glizza,1 which I understand that he [the Pope] greatly admires. If you are unable to execute the whole of this commission, don't fancy that I shall despise the half; for I have learned from my worldly books always to ask for more than I expect to get.

"Lest, however, you should imagine that I am at the end of my desires, I will add that, should you choose to facilitate my journey by the gift of a trot

1 One editor has suggested that this odd word was the German form of cilicina, and that it was hair-shirts the good abbot wanted; but this

ting nag or any other beast of uncommon strength, I should consider it a great favor. Seriously, though, I shall not take it amiss if I get nothing, provided only you read this letter to our dear Egil,2 and you and he keep to yourselves the good laugh I trust it will give you."

Lupus also applied to an Italian bishop, bearing the exceedingly Gothic name of Regenfried, to have gold of the country ready for him when he should pass through the diocese of the latter, on his way to the south; and this is all we hear about the Roman journey at the time of its occurrence. But there is a letter addressed some ten years later by the abbot of Ferrières to his apostolic lord, Benedict III., in which he tells that pontiff that he had been most graciously received and entertained by his Holiness's predecessor of blessed memory; whence we may perhaps conclude that the glizza did not prove wholly unacceptable to that fourth Leo, from whom the "Leonine City" took its

name.

Lupus held one rather famous theological controversy with an heretical monk of Fulda named Gotteschalk, on the inexhaustible subjects of predestination and freewill; and he was thought to have acquitted himself more gloriously in this field than in the campaigns which he served under Charles, and quite to have demolished his adversary. But the book De Tribus Quæstionibus, in which his own arguments are properly marshaled, is dreary reading compared with the letters, to which we return for a few more indications concerning the course of our friend's declining years.

The cloister of Ferrières enjoyed for a long while a marvelous immunity from the ravages of the Northmen, who devastated, at one time or another, nearly the whole of the surrounding country. But its inmates lived in a

can hardly have been so, since we infer from other allusions that the glizza were very costly. 2 Afterward Archbishop of Sens.