ABSTRACT
In choosing the Carolingian bequest as the subject of my last lecture instead of offering a concluding summary, I am not unaware of the inevitable shortcomings which this approach to the subject involves. But I am inclined to think that it may perhaps be more useful and possibly even provoke agreement or, as the case may be, constructive disagreement, if now that we have surveyed at least some landmarks of the Carolingian landscape, we try to find out how far further historical development was influenced by the developments in the Carolingian epoch. It is indeed painfully obvious that the greater part of the tenth century witnessed not so much a decline as a virtual collapse of public order and safety in some of the regions which had once made up the East and West-Frankish realms. It would nevertheless be erroneous to hold that this collapse was general and that it also affected all branches of intellectual activities, including the science of government; and it would be grievously wrong to say that because the brisk Carolingian activity had been merely ephemeral and only effective on the surface, there had been nothing from which the immediately succeeding period could have benefited. I would think that juxtaposing the age preceding the Carolingian era and the one immediately following it, the latter still compares very favourably with the former in whatever field you care to draw comparisons. That the great intellectual advance-great in respect of quantity, quality and speed-of the Carolingian period could not very well have been sustained much longer, would seem to me easily explicable, if one gives due consideration to the common historically vouched phenomenon that after a period of concentrated and accelerated development there sets in a period which in comparative terms appears as one of stagnation or at any rate of retardation. The drive, the impetus and the vivifying stimulus appear to have spent themselves. The situation was aggravated by a number of external factors, such as the ending of the Carolingian line itself and its concomitant unsettling and disintegrating effects, the continued raids by land and by sea from the Vikings, the undeniable economic decline hastened by a series of bad harvests, and so on.
