De Villis Chapter : The De Villis capitular or more exactly the Capitulare de villis vel curtis imperii (or imperialibus) is a legislative act dating from the end of the XNUMXth century or the beginning of the XNUMXth century. Charlemagne enacts there for the villici, the governors of his domains (villæ, villis), a certain number of orders or recommendations which can be controlled by the missi dominici (“the envoys of the master”).
This text is especially known by its capitula (articles) 43, 62 and especially 70 which contains the list of a hundred plants, trees, shrubs or simple grasses whose culture is ordered in the royal gardens. By this long ordinance of 120 articles (the famous capitulae), Charlemagne intended, eight centuries before Sully, to completely reform agriculture and the administration of his domains, immense since they extended from Germany to Spain.
Conversely, it would be far too inaccurate and restrictive to reduce this text of 120 articles to just these three articles.
The author and date of this long text, of which the only surviving copy is kept in the Library of Wolfenbüttel in Germany, are unknown, as is often the case with Carolingian manuscripts.
This real technical sum of about forty pages, could not be written in extenso by Charlemagne but reflects his political, economic and cultural will. However, some authors[Who?] think that he could have participated in certain articles such as hunting or falconry.
This text, which deals with and meticulously describes a thousand things and activities (trades, fabrics, hunting, butchery, medicine, botany, agriculture, food, but also the authority vested in the queen , teaching and the creation of schools, etc.), obviously could not have been written by a single man but by a complete team. It is a collective work: one of the first of its kind.
To try to attribute paternity to this chapter, only the scholars remain, the scholars of the time in the forefront of which come the monks. According to specialists in the matter, it would be, for the most part, the work of one of Charlemagne's great scribes. Some exegetes lean today for Alcuin (born in Yorkshire around 730, and died in Tours on May 19, 804, is an English poet, scholar and theologian of Latin language. One of the main friends and advisers of Charlemagne, he directs the greatest school of the Carolingian Empire, the palatine school in Aix-la-Chapelle.Main architect of the Carolingian Renaissance, Alcuin is according to Éginhard, (*) “the most learned man of his time”).
(*) intellectual, artistic and political personality of the Carolingian period (770 -840).
Article (capitule) 70: Although the identification of the precise species is not always easy, the long list of the 94 plants (73 herbs, 16 fruit trees, 5 textile and dye plants) that the royal domains must cultivate , contained in chapters 43, 62 and especially 70, gives valuable information on the fruits and vegetables grown at the time in France.
The modeled gardens: For the first time, the different gardens of the monks are clearly named and located in space; similarly, their powers and content are defined and, for some, detailed. This results in three different kinds of gardens:
– The herbularius or garden of herbs: it is in general, and at the same time, a garden of medicinal, aromatic and spice plants, for the simple reason that most food plants are also remedies;
– The hortus or vegetable garden: (literally “enclosure”);
– The viridarium or orchard: (“vergier” in Old French) planted with vines, hornbeam and boxwood, it can also evolve into a pleasure garden. It must contain several specimens of the following 16 fruit trees: walnut, hazel, apple, pear, plum, mountain ash, medlar, chestnut, peach, quince, almond, mulberry, laurel, pine, fig, cherry.
The De Villis chapterhouse nowadays: Today many monasteries have a garden (more or less) conforming to the chapterhouse. Let us quote, in addition to Corbie:
– The garden of the abbey of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire;
– The garden of the Abbey of Saint-Gall in Switzerland, dating from the XNUMXth century;
– The Carolingian garden of Melle, located in Melle (in the Deux-Sèvres, in the archaeological site of the former silver mines of the Frankish kings), is a reconstruction of the gardens of the Carolingian period. The cultures are inspired by the De Villis chapter house while the layout of the garden is in the image of the garden of the monastery of Saint-Gall.
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