Forged texts In The Middle Ages: Why Holy Men Became Counterfeiters

Published:
February 4, 2021 at 7:08 am
The desire to deceive – and be deceived – is universal, and the forging of documents as old as writing itself. In ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, local priests – the experts in literacy – forged inscriptions in the names of earlier pharaohs and kings, claiming rights of preferential treatment. And scarcely a society can be found since in which such skulduggery was not practised in some form or another.
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But few regions in world history can rival medieval Europe for the sheer scale of forging. As modern scholars have established, over half of the surviving texts in the names of the Merovingian rulers of early medieval France and Germany (c481–752) are fakes; a third of those in the names of the Lombard rulers of northern Italy (568–774) are suspect; and similar figures hold true of the nearly 2,000 documents of pre-Conquest England. The vast majority of these texts were forged in the Middle Ages, in most cases between the 10th and 13th centuries. Those responsible were not a small cadre of recalcitrant rogues, but leading figures within the church – men such as Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg and Gilbert Foliot, abbot of Gloucester and later bishop of Hereford.

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