But how about medieval attitudes toward forgery? Their attitudes were pretty much the same as ours. Augustine wrote on lying and why expressing something that wasn't true, whether in speech or in writing, was a sin. (His attitude isn't surprising--lying is mentioned in the Ten Commandments.) But just as modern people may consider a tiny fib not really wrong "if it doesn't really hurt anyone," people in the Middle Ages were capable of expressing things that weren't exactly true.
Medieval scholars have been interested since the seventeenth century, when medieval studies really began, in separating real from forged documents. There has been a strong suspicion of any copies of documents made in the Middle Ages, concern that the copy may have "improved" the content of the original or even be a total fabrication. Because before the eighth century documents were generally written on papyrus, most of which would be totally lost to us if they hadn't later been copied onto parchment, we are really dependent on post-eighth-century copyists for information on the early Middle Ages--or for that matter the Roman Empire. (The image below is of a thirteenth-century book into which earlier documents were copied.)
For a long time historians were interested in "what really happened," and any forged (or "improved") document was tossed aside, along with saints' lives and anything else that didn't match modern standards. More recently historians have become interested again in forgeries. Once we decided that the really interesting question was "what did people in the past think was important and interesting," rather than just "what happened in what order," historians have decided there is value in studying forgery.
Examining forged documents should not be seen as just determining the truth, because, as already suggested, there was a lot of gray area. Sometimes medieval scribes just made their best guesses as to what a document said when it was almost illegible, or they corrected spelling or grammar--should we call this a forgery because it's not exactly like the original? Or sometimes they abbreviated a verbose text--is this not an accurate transcription? Out and out forgeries were fairly rare.
But sometimes medieval monks might nonetheless forge (in the full sense of the word, which is related to forging implements in a blacksmith's shop, taking raw materials and turning them into something useful). Sometimes they just knew that (for example) Charlemagne had been generous to them, and since inexplicably there were no documents from him in the archives, they created some. This was part of an attempt to create a "useful past," an account of past events that worked for their present.
At the monastery of St.-Denis, outside of Paris, the monks went so far in the eleventh century as to take some old, genuine papyrus documents they still had in their archives, turn them over, and write new charters on the backs--charters much more useful to them than what the papyrus had actually said. (They glued the papyrus to parchment, original charter face down.)
In other cases people forged documents to try to win in court. A well-known example took place in ninth-century Le Mans (now known for its 24-hour car race, an important religious center then). The bishop was trying to assert authority over a nearby monastery, which thought it should be independent. Both bishop and monastery appealed to King Charles the Bald, bringing with them a large collection of forged documents saying that half a millennium of kings and saints had said the monks were dependent on the bishop (or vice versa). Imagine everyone's dismay when Charles said all these documents were forgeries, ordered them all burned, and said the monastery was in fact his own personal property. (That didn't turn out well for anyone.)
© C. Dale Brittain 2019
For more on history and the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.
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