THERE ARE several reasons why historians might bridle at this question. The word ‘private’ was not in common use in the eighth and ninth centuries. It has been doubted often enough if there was anything approximating to a concept of the private in the earlier Middle Ages. Even if there was, could the life of the aula have offered a king any privacy? Could he ever have been alone in a palace from which the throng and press of noisy petitioners could hardly be excluded – when even if the royal bedchamber was a separate room, the count of the palace could let in litigants while the king was putting on his shoes and clothes? If the topos of the unsleeping ruler had roots in the reality of lives in which only the night hours offered any possibility of getting paperwork done, how could that have affected the life of an illiterate? More pertinently still, how could we possibly have any real evidence for the personality of a Dark Age king, for his psychology, for his self? Several recent books on Charlemagne have abjured biography in favour of a political narrative or a set of linked thematic studies of the reign, precisely because their authors are convinced that all we can know is what this man did, and that his self remains hidden from us. In particular, we have virtually nothing from his hand.