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Updated: May 23, 2025
He counselled a gathering of all the peoples outside Paris to make common cause against the Normans, and Abbo saw the proud Franks march in with heads erect, the skilful and polished Aquitaines, the Burgundians too prone to flight. But nought availed: the motley host soon melted away.
Abbo now pauses to bewail the state of France: no lord to rule her, everywhere devastation wrought by fire and sword, God's people paralysed at the advancing phalanx of death, Paris alone tranquil, erect and steadfast in the midst of all their thunderbolts, polis ut regina micans omnes super urbes, a queenly city resplendent above all towns. The second attack begins with redoubled fury.
Germain des Prés, Abbo by name, who had taken part in the defence, was one day sitting in his cell reading his Virgil. Desiring to exercise his Latin, and give an example to other cities, he determined to sing of a great siege with happier issue than that of Troy.
Suffolk cheese—Danes, Saxons, and Normans—Philosophers and statesmen—Artists and literati. Abbo Floriacencis, who flourished in the year A.D. 910, describes East Anglia as ‘very noble, and particularly because of its being watered on all sides.
Monk Abbo wearies not of singing, but the deeds of noble Eudes are wanting; all the poet craves is another victory to rejoice Heaven; another defeat of the black host of the enemy. Alas! the noble Eudes was now a king with rebellious vassals. Paris was never captured again, but the acephali were devouring the land.
It falls as naturally for me that the Englishman and the Frenchman should be on the same side as that Alfred and Abbo should be on the same side, in that black century when the barbarians wasted Wessex and besieged Paris. But there are now, perhaps, less certain tests of the spiritual as distinct from the material victory of civilization.
But the ill-disciplined hordes were hard to hold in and bands of brigands, as soon as the ramparts were passed, began to plunder and slew a score of Christian men. The Parisians in their indignation sought out and Hurrah! cries Abbo found five hundred Normans in the city and slew them.
The siege lasted thirteen months, whiles pushed vigorously forward with eight several assaults, whiles maintained by close investment, and with all the alternations of success and reverse, all the intermixture of brilliant daring and obscure sufferings, that can occur when the assailants are determined and the defenders devoted. Not only a contemporary but an eye-witness, Abbo, a monk of St.
Abbo saw the black hulls and horrid prows of the pirates' boats as they turned the arm of the Seine below Paris, seven hundred strong vessels, and many more of lighter build. For two leagues and a half the very waters of the Seine were covered with them, and men asked into what mysterious caves the river had retreated.
Hardly pleased with the cumbersome mass of Carlovingian Latinists, the Alcuins and the Eginhards, he contented himself, as a specimen of the language of the ninth century, with the chronicles of Saint Gall, Freculfe and Reginon; with the poem of the siege of Paris written by Abbo le Courbe; with the didactic Hortulus, of the Benedictine Walafrid Strabo, whose chapter consecrated to the glory of the gourd as a symbol of fruitfulness, enlivened him; with the poem in which Ermold the Dark, celebrating the exploits of Louis the Debonair, a poem written in regular hexameters, in an austere, almost forbidding style and in a Latin of iron dipped in monastic waters with straws of sentiment, here and there, in the unpliant metal; with the De viribus herbarum, the poem of Macer Floridus, who particularly delighted him because of his poetic recipes and the very strange virtues which he ascribes to certain plants and flowers; to the aristolochia, for example, which, mixed with the flesh of a cow and placed on the lower part of a pregnant woman's abdomen, insures the birth of a male child; or to the borage which, when brewed into an infusion in a dining room, diverts guests; or to the peony whose powdered roots cure epilepsy; or to the fennel which, if placed on a woman's breasts, clears her water and stimulates the indolence of her periods.
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