Chapter two shows how the development of monasticism in the seventh century contributed to the changes in the patterns of literacy as many educated people began to shift their writing habits to hagiography. It investigates the ways in which sacrality, originating from monastic community, was added to the image of the king which had been hitherto perceived as the intermediary between the Mediterranean post-Roman world and the world of barbarian limes. This chapter suggests that these sources produce a picture one needs to take into account with caution. On the one hand, the wide spread of saints’ lives produced an impression of the monastic communities’ privileged position since the very first day of monastic onslaught. Careful examination suggests, however, that for a relatively long period the rising number of monasteries had not initiated the reshaping of the foundations of the royal authority. Using the example of St-Denis, this chapter suggests that the monastery’s history shows it to be a regular monastic establishment which had not yet developed a unique tie with the Frankish kings it did later. Much as with the Gregory of Tours’ Histories, hagiography produced an impression of the close ties between the kingship and monasticism from the early seventh century, whereas in reality the kings long continued to be ignorant of the opportunities the new phenomenon provided. Thus in the lives of the seventh and early eight centuries nothing had changed with the coming of the monasteries as the kings remained largely out of contact for the monks. This chapter suggests that the Merovingian kingship continued to be built in this age on the close connection the cities that had been important until the trends first noticed by Henri Pirenne started to weigh heavily on their existence. Thus the imagined historical picture needs to be separated from the actual history of the Merovingian kingship in the case of hagiography just as it has been done in the first chapter in the case of narrative histories.
Chapter three addresses records of court proceedings that had become a peculiarly interesting sort of documents since the middle of the seventh century and that filled an important gap that appeared when both narrative histories and hagiography stopped appearing as a result of the overall drop in literacy. These records were an offshoot of the imperial rescript and they conveyed to the conflicting parties the solutions found by the kings’ representatives and the king himself to the conflicts that had no precedent in Late Antique law. These court proceedings dealt with reshaping of the power balance in Neustria and they showed how different aristocratic groupings used appeals to the king to get a grip on those lands that lost their direct owners and that fell through the cracks of the Frankish and Gallo-Roman networks of authority. Although scholars have thought that these court proceeding, mostly favoring the monastery St-Denis, were “political” in the sense of favorite the key royal monastery, I suggest that even the most evident of them still showed that the merovingian court in the late period of the dynasty’s rule was the place of negotiation and incorporation of elites into the orbit of royal prestige. These documents suggest contrary to the image of the “weak rulers” the kings in this period were deemed to be peacemakers and rulers in the image of the emperor and that they were accorded the right to pronounce law. This prerogative, although derided by Einhard in the 830-s, meant a significant rise in prestige of the verovingian kings who had finally managed to move away from the military commander status and who added to their aristocratic standing (unstable and questioned by Gregory of Tours) the right to be considered worthy of law-giving, the status first accorded to Theodosius II by the Senate in 439.