Chrodegang of Metz, Saint: Privilegium pro Monasterio Gorziensi

In this privilege Chrodegang, bishop of Metz, confirms the liberties of the monastery of Gorze, which he had founded. He begins by recounting how, reading in Scripture the commands to give and to give alms, he asked himself what he could do for the remedy of his soul in imitation of his predecessors, and so built the monastery at Gorze in the district of Scarpone in honour of the apostles Peter and Paul, with the consent of King Pippin and of the canons and faithful of Saint Stephen’s, the cathedral of Metz. He then grants the monks the right to live under the Rule, to pray for the king and the kingdom, and to elect their own abbot.

Chrodegang was the leading churchman of Pippin’s reign, author of the Rule for canons and promoter of Roman liturgy in Francia, and Gorze became one of the most important abbeys of Lorraine, later the centre of a tenth-century monastic reform. The privilege is a key document for the abbey’s foundation and for relations between bishop and monastery in the Carolingian church, though, as with other early Gorze documents, the form of the surviving text has been studied critically.