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Forgery of official documents by monks was rife across medieval Europe because of social changes and the growing importance of the written word, a new book shows.
Fake documentation began to be produced in earnest in the tenth century across much of the continent and was the white lie of the Middle Ages . Monks justified deceit because they felt their efforts were for the greater good.
During this time many diocesian boundaries were being drawn for the first time, and there were changing practices in law and administration. The book, by Dr Levi Roach from the University of Exeter, argues forgery helped people seek solace and security in the past. It was also an important tool for monks to cement what they saw as their institutional rights to land and property as aristocrats gained more power.
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 case