established
herself, and led a cloister life. And when this place no longer suited
her, she removed to a cell in the valley of Saint Gall. The bishop
himself conducted her thither and put the black veil around her, and led
her by the hand to the Irish hill (Saint Gall had been an Irish
missionary in Germany) and spoke the blessing over her; with the trowel
he made the first stroke on the stones with which the entrance was
walled up, and pressed four times his seal upon the lead wherewith they
closed the cracks, and thus separated her from the world, and the monks
sang at that, mournfully and with muffled tones, as if someone were
buried. But the people of the neighborhood held the recluse in high
honor; they said that she was a "hard-forged mistress of holyness," and
on Sunday they stood head to head on the meadow plain, and Wiborada
stood at her little window and preached to them, and other women settled
in the neighborhood and sought instruction from her in virtue.

The influence of the Church was especially beneficial to the position of
woman in married life. The Church insisted upon, and frequently
enforced, monogamy and the sanctity of marital vows, and sanctified
marriage by making it a sacrament. Dissolution of marriage, according to
the law of the Church, was permitted only in case of adultery, of danger
to the life of the one or the other party from hate or crime, the exile
of one of the couple, impotence on the part of the man, or sterility on
the part of the woman, and by common agreement between husband and wife
for sacred purposes, e. g., entrance into a monastery or cloister. Yet
while the influence of the Church, in theory, was, on the whole,
extremely helpful in fashioning the standard of morals, there prevailed,
nevertheless, even during the Carlovingian epoch, a terrible
demoralization and sexual laxity a legacy from the preceding Merovingian
period.

It is historically doubtful whether at Charlemagne's birth his mother
was married to his father, Pepin. It was no uncommon practice for the
actual consummation of marriage to follow close upon the betrothal, and
for the actual marriage, with the consecration of the Church, to follow
much later, if at all. The private life of the greatest German emperor,
who was canonized by the Church and who thus is a saint, at least in his
imperial city, Aachen, or Aix-la-Chapelle, is by no means edifying.
Gustav Freytag characterizes Charlemagne from the moral point o