Early Church: Lightening of Candle.
A Christian church was not a proper church unless there were lights burning on the altar of God. A council of 721 extended papal protection to Olive Groves because keeping the lights on - in the Mediterranean - depended on a steady stream of olive oil.
In Northern Europe, tallow candles were the norm. This horrified Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious when he discovered that the monks of Fulda (the burial place of the Anglo-Saxon missionary Boniface, often described as the Apostle of Germany) were lighting their church with pork fat. The Emperor promised them an olive grove in Italy instead.
The Christian kings of Northern Europe didn’t have any olive groves to offer, but they could send money to the holiest sites of Christendom for them to buy their own oil.
Lighting up Rome itself was the duty of kings. Late in the 8th-Century, the Anglo-Saxon King Offa of Mercia sent an annual 365 gold ‘mancuses’ (a type of coin) in order to support the poor and for lights. When he died, the pope petitioned his successor to continue the offering. Similarly, Alfred the Great’s father, Æthelwulf of Wessex bequeathed 300 mancuses a year to buy oil for the lamps of the main churches of Rome.
By the 11th-Century, English thanes (the noble class) were required by law to light their local churches, and they did this with candles instead of the oil lamps of the Mediterranean world.
The photo shows three candles from an Alamannic grave in Oberflacht in Germany: these are possibly the oldest surviving beeswax candles north of the Alps, complete with their wicks of spun flax.
They date to the 6th or early 7th-Century.
Today in the Landesmuseum in Stuttgart.
Photo at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Candles_Oberflacht.jpg
Early Christian Church.
Copied
.jpeg)
0 comments:
Post a Comment