Sichard Explained

Sichard (Latin: Sichardus; Italian: Sicardo) was a 9th century Italian monk. He was the Abbot of Farfa from to 842. His tenure corresponds with a drop in the number of property transactions involving Farfa, perhaps because "[its] wealth was by that time sufficient to cover major building at the abbey itself".^[1] Sichard added an oratory to the existing abbey.

On Sichard's death in 842, Emperor Lothair I intervened to appoint Bishop Peter of Spoleto in charge of the abbey until an abbot, Hilderic, could be elected (in 844).^[2] Sichard's epitaph was copied into the Libellus constructionis Farfensis, the earliest history of Farfa, of which only a fragment survives in an eleventh-century lectionary. The rediscovery, in 1959, of most of the epitaph demonstrates that the author of the Libellus was an accurate copyist.^[3]

Notes and References

1. Marios Costambeys, Power and Patronage in the Early Medieval Italy: Local Society, Italian Politics, and the Abbey of Farfa, c.700–900 (Cambridge: 2007), 162–63. As Costambeys, 162 n5, points out, the number of transactions per annum under Sichard was 0.83, while under his predecessors Mauroald, Benedict and Ingoald it was 2.05, 3.28 and 3.6, respectively, albeit such figures come with the caveat that "they should not be used to infer anything other than the level of information available to Farfa's historians."
2. Costambeys, 344.
3. Costambeys, 13–14. Cf. also C. McClendon, The Imperial Abbey of Farfa (New Haven: 1987), 2, on the twentieth-century discovery.