arts, it had no vitality. In the first place these treatises gave only the
dry husks of rhetoric, the conventional analyses, the stock definitions.
In the second place rhetoric was little applied. The political life of
western Europe centered in the camp, not in the forum. The classical
tradition of trial by a large jury, as the Areopagus or the Centumviri,
had given place to trial before the regal or manorial court. Thus rhetoric
dried up and lost whatever reality it had possessed in imperial Rome.

But if the middle ages had no opportunity to apply rhetoric in its
function of persuasion in communal affairs, they did have real need of an
art of writing letters and of preparing lay or ecclesiastical documents,
such as contracts, wills, and records, and of preaching sermons. Thus in
the teaching of the schools, as well as in practice, the oration gave
place to the epistle and dictamen. "Dictare" was to write letters or
prepare documents. And the rhetorical treatise or "_ars rhetorica_" often
yielded to the "_ars prosandi_," or the "_ars dictandi_."[109]

A characteristic treatise of this sort is the _Poetria_ of the Englishman
John of Garland (c. 1270). In his introductory chapter John explains that
he has divided the subject into seven parts:

First is explained the theory of invention; then the manner of selecting
material; third, the arrangement and the manner of ornamentation; next,
the parts of a dictamen; fifth, the faults in all kinds of composition
(dictandi); sixth is arranged a treatise concerning rhetorical ornament
as necessary in meter as in prose, namely, the figures of speech and the
abbreviation and amplification of the material; seventh and last are
subjoined examples of courtly correspondence and scholastic dictamen,
pleasantly composed in verse and rhythms, and in diverse meters.[110]