Letter on the Cultivation of Learning (De litteris colendis)

The letter is in the name of Charles as king of the Franks and Lombards and patrician of the Romans, a title that places it before his coronation as emperor in 800. The surviving copy is addressed to Baugulf, who was abbot of Fulda, and it ends by telling him to send copies to his fellow bishops and to every monastery, so that it was meant to circulate widely.

It gives the king’s reason for caring about schooling. Letters sent to him by monasteries had shown sound thoughts in uncouth language, and he had begun to fear that men who wrote badly would also read the Scriptures badly, for “far more dangerous are errors of the understanding”. The date within the two decades before 800 cannot be fixed more closely from the text.