GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCE. 



'75 



the Capitulary Laws of the great KmjMTor, and which eventually, under the 

 feudal regime, gave the geometrical measure of the area of the soil, while 

 carefully preserving the ancient names of the different localities. By means 

 of this descriptive definition of the limits of fiefs, historical geography 

 recovered, after the lapse of centuries, all the topographical details of the 

 territory of the Gauls during the lifetime of Charlemagne and of his successors. 

 The historians and the poets of this period, of whom but a few are known to 

 us, do not give much information as to the state of geographical knowledge, 

 which, notwithstanding the schools founded by Alcuin, seems to have been 



Fig. 197. Seal of the Town of Dunwich (Thirteenth Century). 



very scanty. But it is probable that the knowledge of geography was much 

 more advanced in Great Britain and Ireland, for Alcuin was educated in the 

 monasteries of those countries, as also were St. Columba, St. Gall, Theodore, 

 Archbishop of Canterbury, Scotus Erigena, and other savants who came to 

 France, where they founded monasteries and established chairs for teaching 

 the sciences, and geography was always given a place in their programmes. 

 There was the more need for its cultivation in England, as it was very useful 

 to the traders and fishermen of the ancient port of Dunwich (Fig. 197), in the 

 North Sea. 



