Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/186

158 trace the outlines of animals, they drew conventional animals which are difficult to recognise, geometrical designs or roseate and foliate forms.

Some houses which Fortunatus describes to us seem still to have had a fine appearance. Such was the castle built by Nicetius, bishop of Trèves, on a hill overlooking the Moselle. The single entrance gate was commanded by a tower; a mechanical contrivance raised water from the river to turn a mill. This is quite a medieval donjon-keep. There were great houses too at Bissonnum and Vereginis villa, belonging to the bishop Leontius of Bordeaux, where under porticoes formed by three rows of columns guests could promenade sheltered from rays of the sun. But such dwellings must have been exceptional; the ordinary houses surrounded by the necessary appurtenances must have resembled farms rather than castles. Merovingian art, however, is mainly represented by the numerous pieces of jewellery which have been discovered, as was mentioned earlier. This art is certainly of Oriental origin: it was practised not among the Franks only, but among the other barbarian peoples of the West, and even here are found the same decorative ornaments.

In art as well as in literature the seventh century and beginning of the eighth are marked by a profound decadence. But just at the period of blackest barbarism the Frankish kingdom came into contact with Italy, the mother of arts and sciences, where the monuments of antiquity were preserved; and with England, where the monks still studied in their cloisters, and where the Venerable Bede had founded a school of worthy disciples. The Anglo-Saxons and the Italians brought to the Franks the treasures they had safely guarded; the Emperor Charles the Great recognised that it belonged to the duties of his office to spread enlightenment, to foster art and literature; and at length, after this night of darkness, there shone forth the brilliance of a true renaissance.