A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  Alcuin and his circle

  From the year he joined the Frankish royal court, when he was about fifty, Alcuin passed much of the last twenty-two years of his life on the Continent. His advice was sought by both Frankish and Mercian churchmen. He was in England in 786, the year of church Councils in both Northumbria and Mercia, and again in Northumbria from 790 to 793.15 Back with the Carolingian court, at Frankfurt, in the following year, he kept in touch with news from home. For example, a little later we find him writing of the affront offered to God by King Eardwulf (‘the tyrant’), who is reported to have put away his wife and be living openly with his concubine. Considering that Charlemagne had repudiated a wife and kept six concubines, this seems a bit harsh on Eardwulf!16

  Alcuin’s was not an original mind (he adopted ‘Albinus’, from a second-century AD Greek summarizer of Plato, as his nickname); in fact Latin grammar was his chief expertise. But this suited the times. Charles was less interested in thinkers who could open new directions in philosophy, than scholars who could help run his programme for the revival and consolidation of classical learning. A master of Latin literature and correct written Latin he was ideally qualified for a top position at the palace school, ‘which soon became known as ‘the School of Master Albinus’. Since Alcuin was also a noted authority on orthodox Roman theology and church liturgy he possessed key skills, given that Rome was keenly interested in Charles’s plans in education and church organization – a continuation of the work of Alcuin’s English predecessors.

  Familiar with the conventions of courtly manners from childhood, Alcuin had quickly found himself at home in the palace school of the Frankish king. The king’s consort, together with their sons Charles, aged ten at Alcuin’s arrival, Pippin, five years old, and Louis, attended a class made up of sons of the nobility, sent by their fathers at the king’s request, and sometimes the fathers themselves. Charles himself never learnt to read or write but he did attend class when he could – we know that he heard the lessons (that is, lectiones or ‘readings’) given by the Italian grammarian Peter of Pisa.

  The Frankish court at this time, disdained as a semi-barbarian encampment by the opulent sophisticates at imperial Constantinople, was a remarkable experiment in terms of European cultural history. Charles, whose domains embraced much of the former Roman Empire in Europe, recruited an array of scholars, poets and theologians of diverse ethnic origins to a grand cultural project for the revival of Latin and ancient learning: as well as Alcuin, there were Italians, including Paulinus of Aquileia, the Spanish-born Theodulph, an ethnic Visigoth and the noted Lombard grammarian Paul the Deacon.

  Following his conquest of the Lombard kingdom in northern Italy in 774, Charles had been troubled by a short-lived rebellion, in which Paul and his brother, noblemen from Friuli and members of the court at Pavia had been leading spirits. Subject at first to an elegant form of house arrest at Charles’s court, Paul had eventually returned to Italy in the late 780s and settled into retirement at Monte Cassino where he devoted himself to his Historia Langobardorum (‘History of the Lombards’), working on it up to his death in 799. The idea for the work could have been sparked by a conversation or in correspondence with Alcuin, or by a reading of Bede’s History, which was widely diffused on the Continent. Certainly his book ‘accomplished for the Lombards what Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica had done for the English, by giving literary expression to a sense of national identity’.17

  The Carolingian court was a world of nicknames, puckishly distributed by Alcuin to royals and former pupils, all friends. Some seem obvious enough, like Candidus (Latin, ‘white’) for his English pupil and helper Hwita, who first came to the Continent around 793, or Columba (Latin, ‘the dove’) for the king’s delightful young daughter Rotruda; others were not so immediately obvious, such as his own of ‘Albinus’ or ‘Lucia’ for Charles’s sister Princess Gisela, abbess of Chelles. One would like to have known Fredegisus, one of his pupils who later joined the teaching staff and kept the Alcuin tradition alive in France, and was surely an impulsive individual: Alcuin always called him ‘Nathaniel’, the name of the disciple of whom Jesus once said, ‘we have here a man without guile.’ Angilbert, the young Frankish nobleman who passed through the palace school on his way to a distinguished career in the royal administration, was honoured as ‘Homer’ for his epic poem on the historic meeting between Charles and Pope Leo III. Arno, archbishop of Salzburg and ‘my dearest and closest friend’, was playfully dubbed the ‘Overseer Eagle’, a typical Alcuin pun, in fact a double pun. Like the Latin sourced ‘super visor’, the Greek word ‘episkopos’ from which the Old English biscop or bishop ultimately derives, literally means ‘over seer’, in the sense of ‘superintendent’, while the archbishop’s name was too close to the Old English earn, ‘eagle’ (modern English, erne) for his old friend to resist the wordplay. The image of the great lord of the air, high above the Salzach river plain, eyes peeled ready to swoop on any wrongdoer or malingerer in the cathedral’s business, leaps off the page.

  Playful and urbane, Alcuin’s joshing of his colleagues can mislead us – they were not schoolboys but men of parts and in some cases of importance in the cultural evolution of Europe. These nicknames, though, are frequently cited between the 790s and the 810s in the documentary sources of the Carolingian Renaissance. Asking why it should have been Alcuin in particular who distributed these names, Mary Garrison suggested that it was his ambivalent position at court, as one of authority though not of the establishment, that gave him a reserved status, rather as in certain tribal societies artists and shamans, although not elders, are accorded the respect associated with witchcraft.18 (It is surely intriguing in this context that in a 1990s French television dramatized series on the world of Charlemagne, Alcuin is featured in passing as a kind of Merlin figure encountered by Charlemagne in a woodland chapel.)

  The ‘Circle of Alcuin’ radiated its influence through Europe to Fulda and, later, to the great Irish-born philosopher John Scotus Erigena at the court of Charles the Bald and to the school of Auxerre in the early 900s. An important text from the period dealing with philosophy and logic, and known to scholars as ‘the Munich passages’, was very probably the work of ‘Candidus’; if true, it has been claimed this would make him the outstanding philosopher of his generation.19

  Everyone around the court knew that the king was nicknamed ‘David’, after the great king of Israel, warrior and poet, reputed author of the Psalms. Charles’s (dictated) letters reveal a sharp mind keen to debate serious issues and happy to correct textual faults in material sent to him. The year before Charles was to be crowned emperor by the pope, Alcuin wrote to ‘the most religious . . . King David’ and, among other things, thanks him ‘for having the book which I sent on your instructions read in your hearing and its errors noted and sent back for correction’. Another letter, from the king’s ‘old soldier’ – Alcuin was in his late sixties at the time – shows that the king’s thirst for learning could, at times, be rather trying. ‘A runner has just arrived with a sheet of questions urging this weak-witted old man to examine the heavens . . . to expound the erratic courses of the planets.’ Protesting that the movement of the planets through the zodiac is not really his subject, he at first suggests Charles refer to the writings of Bede, ‘the educator of our Land’, or Pliny the Younger, before relenting and agreeing that if he can be sent a copy of Pliny he’ll prepare some replies. We are left to guess as to what made the planetary movements of such pressing importance to Charles at this time, but it is entirely in keeping with what we know of that great man that he should send an express messenger to get the answer.

  For more than twenty years York scholar and Frankish monarch were in regular contact, often by letter. More than 300 of Alcuin’s letters survive (more than for any other Englishman of the Middle Ages, even Boniface). Since Alcuin often travelled with the peripatetic court and even once followed the king on campaign, their relations were generally close and, for the times, informal.
But on those rare occasions when Alcuin felt he must question royal policy, he was careful to use the greatest formalities of address: ‘To Charles, King of Germany, Gaul and Italy, the most excellent and devout lord’, runs the opening of a strong critique on the question of tithes. This ten per cent charge, levied on agricultural produce and income for the good of the church and clergy, was resented even in well-established Christian communities. When Charles imposed it on newly conquered territories and recent converts, Alcuin feared that resentment could threaten rebellion and apostasy. He urged the king to forego the levy: it was better to lose the tithe than endanger the Faith.

  News of the sack of Lindisfarne in June 793 prompted a long letter from Alcuin to Æthelred of Northumbria. He bemoans the desecration of St Cuthbert’s church, the spattered blood of its priests and the plunder taken by the pagans. But he writes more in anger than in sorrow about what he calls the worst atrocity since the English arrived in Britain nearly three hundred and fifty years earlier (clearly he accepts Bede’s date for the adventus saxonum of AD 449). In a Jeremiad that warns of worse to come if ways are not mended, he inveighs against ‘fornication, adultery and incest . . . even among nuns’, against ‘greed, robbery and judicial violence’, against luxurious dress and against the fashion for pagan hair style and beard trims.

  It appears that some clerics were so unprincipled as to hunt mammals with dogs! Soon after his elevation as archbishop of York, Eanbald, a pupil of Alcuin’s, received a letter of exhortation that would have earned the moral approval of today’s House of Commons. ‘Let not your companions’, he writes, ‘gallop hallooing across the fields after foxes’; while elsewhere he deplores the frivolous novices at Jarrow who, he hears, prefer to dig out foxes’ earths and go hare coursing rather than worship Christ.20 Alcuin, who like Boniface had heard reports of drunkenness among English monks, urges sobriety. Elsewhere a telling aside reveals that, while regulations as to the correct vestments for the religious offices might be disregarded, people scrupulously observed due order ‘of age and rank’ at the refectory dinner table. It is another reminder that the ranks of English monastic life were well staffed with members of the upper social classes.

  As to the actual conduct of the service in the chapel, he has much to say on music. First and foremost it should be sung according to the Roman rite. He, like his English predecessors in Europe, insisted on it. After his death, a cleric at the church of Metz remembered how as a boy Alcuin, ‘the wisest teacher of our whole country’, had taught his class the Roman (presumably Gregorian) chant. The boys would also have been told to sing in a disciplined manner, neither florid nor overloud, since Alcuin, like many another churchman, reckoned singers were all too ready to show off.

  Teacher and scholar

  Alcuin was one of the regular intimates participating in word games and verse exchanges at court, drafting correspondence for the king-emperor and taking a leading part in a public theological debate before Charles with a team of Spanish bishops. At this time, too, work began on assembling definitive written texts of the courses he had been teaching at the palace school for years, and much else beside.

  He wrote guides to orthography, grammar and rhetoric as well as aspects of astronomy, was passionate about punctuation and prolific in writing analyses of biblical texts. He set new standards for accuracy in the copying of texts in the scriptorium It has even been suggested that his meticulous rules for the pronunciation of Latin (in his Dialogus de Rhetorica) may have influenced the direction of the emerging French language.21 In the Romance-speaking areas of Europe, where Latin was evolving into the modern languages of French, Italian, Spanish and so forth, bad pronunciation, grammatical irregularities and slang idioms (‘vulgarisms’) were slipping into acceptability as ‘Latin’. Alcuin’s passion for rhetoric led him to one important and original development – the treatise addressed to the ruler linking rhetoric with the business of ruling. He was convinced that eloquence of speech was a tool by which the ruler could persuade men to do what was just and good. His treatise to Charles the Great on this theme was the first of many such works by scholars at courts of the Carolingian age.

  Towards the end of his career Alcuin seems to have provoked jealousy among colleagues. In a letter to his community in York in 795 we find Alcuin protesting that he did not go to Francia ‘for love of gold’ but for the ‘strengthening of catholic doctrine’. He did pretty well nevertheless. The revenues of no fewer than three religious houses (Ferrières, Maastricht and Troyes) were awarded to him, while the appointment as abbot of the immensely rich monastery of St Martin’s at Tours meant a comfortable, if busy, life. In office there for just eight years and in the declining years of his life, he strengthened the place’s reputation as a seat of learning, stocking the library with copies of ‘rare learned books which I had in my own land’ (that is, Northumbria). He writes to the emperor that everything he needs can be supplied from York and asks Charles to pay the expense of sending students north to ‘bring back the flowers of Britannia to Gaul . . . so that the garden of York may supply off-shoots of paradise-bearing fruit’, intended for what Alcuin called elsewhere the smoky roofs of Tours.

  During the seemingly placid career of a scholar, Alcuin had risen to a position of eminence in the business of state and influence over many of his fellow human beings: the head of religious houses, adviser to a king-emperor, and director of programmes and cultural institutions such as the schools of those houses. Writing in his The Carolingian Empire (Oxford, 1957), the German scholar H. Fichtenau commented that ‘Alcuin had crossed the English Channel with a single companion. In the end he was lord of many thousand human beings.’

  In April 799 the new pope, Leo III, who had created Charles ‘Patrician of the Romans’, had been forced by opponents who accused him of misdemeanours to flee the Holy City and seek Charles’s protection. In November 799 a commission appointed by Charles restored the pope at Rome. In April 800 the king visited Alcuin at Tours. We do not know what they discussed. Then in the autumn he went to Rome in person to ‘restore the state of the church’. It seems that at this time Charles may have been planning to assume the title of ‘emperor’ in the sense of ‘a streamlined king who ruled over several nations’.22 On Christmas Day of that year, 800, however, at mass in St Peter’s, as he rose from his knees, it was to find Leo placing a crown upon his head and the crowd hailing him as ‘Emperor of the Romans’. One assumes that Alcuin, a good churchman, approved the honour done to King ‘David’; the recipient may have been less pleased.

  Viking raids were to destroy much of the complex at Tours, including Alcuin’s tomb and epitaph, yet the cathedral school was one of Europe’s leading educational centres before the advent of universities in the twelfth century. As Louise Cochrane observed in her book Adelard of Bath: The First English Scientist, ‘The development of the cathedral schools in Europe, stem[med] from that founded for Charlemagne by Alcuin of York at Tours and a later one by Fulbert at Chartres.’23

  As he got older, Alcuin was subject to recurrent fits of illness, malaria has been suggested, and he may also have been troubled by a cataract. But he kept hard at work. In 800 he writes that the king, soon to be emperor, has charged him with a revision of the Old and New Testaments – in other words he was working on the text of St Jerome’s Latin Bible known as the Vulgate, completed some 300 years earlier. Over the centuries the text had become corrupt thanks to copyists’ errors and confusion over other old Latin versions. A major casualty had been punctuation, ‘which greatly improves the style of a sentence’ and, in Alcuin’s opinion, was as much in need of restoration as was fine scholarship and fine learning.

  The scriptorium at Tours was kept busy multiplying copies of the new Bible under Alcuin’s supervision (it seems to have reached England by the 820s). They surely followed the injunctions of the ‘General admonition’ (Admonitio generalis) issued by Charles in 789 for the better ordering of church and society within his dominions. The imprint of Alcuin’s concepts is to be
found everywhere in the document, both in language and in content.24 Typical is the instruction that when a new Gospel or service book is to be copied, the work must be entrusted to a trained man not a boy. The copyists wrote in the elegant and highly legible ‘Carolingian miniscule’ lettering, which would provide the model for some of the finest early printing types centuries later. Alcuin was responsible for the beautiful book design and reader-friendly page layout and ensured the distribution of the copies to monasteries and cathedral churches throughout the Frankish empire.

  Among Alcuin’s students were two young Germans, Einhard (770–840), the future biographer of Charles the Great, and Rabanus, a decade his junior. Aged nine, Einhard had entered the school at Fulda, founded by Boniface; in 791 he graduated, so to speak, to the palace school where Alcuin, its most prominent teacher, numbered the king and his family as well as young courtiers among his pupils. In later life Einhard recalled the great teacher as ‘a man most learned in every field’.25 Thus one of the most celebrated figures of the Carolingian Renaissance followed his entire educational career in establishments either inspired by the ideals of an English founder or conducted under the aegis of an English teacher. It is generally supposed that when the Welsh bishop Asser came to write his biography of King Alfred of Wessex he may have taken the idea for writing a biography of his royal master from Einhard’s book on Charles the Great. This would hardly be surprising, since both were in that wide circle of cultural exchange initiated by the English missions to the Continent.