CHAPTER III
The large bulk of Alcuin’s letters and other writings.—The main dates of his life.—Bede’s advice to Ecgbert.—Careless lives of bishops.—No parochial system.—Inadequacy of the bishops’ oversight.—Great monasteries to be used as sees for new bishoprics, and evil monasteries to be suppressed.—Election of abbats and hereditary descent.—Evils of pilgrimages.—Daily Eucharists.
We in the diocese of Bristol have a special right to study and to make much of the letters of Alcuin. Our own great historian, William of Malmesbury, had in the library of Malmesbury from the year 1100 and onwards an important collection of these letters, from which he quotes frequently in support of the historical statements which he makes. More than that, we know of some of the letters of Alcuin only from the quotations from them thus made by William in this diocese some 800 years ago. This is specially stated by Abbat Froben, of Ratisbon, who edited the letters of Alcuin 140 years ago.
The letters of Alcuin are addressed to an emperor, to kings, queens, popes, patriarchs, archbishops, dukes, and others; so that of Alcuin’s political importance there can be no question. As to his learning, William of Malmesbury pays him the great compliment of naming him along with our own Aldhelm and with Bede. “Of all the Angles,” he says,[75] “of whom I have read, Alcuin was, next to the holy Aldhelm and Bede, certainly the most learned.”
Alcuin was born in Northumbria in or about the year 735. He left England to live in France in 782, returned for a time in 792, and left finally in 793. He died in 804. We can thus see how he stands in regard of date to those with whom we have dealt in former lectures. Aldhelm and Wilfrith died in 709, only about a quarter of a century before Alcuin’s birth. Bede died, according to the usual statement[76], in 735, the year of Alcuin’s birth. Boniface was martyred in Holland in 755, when Alcuin was twenty years old.
As in the case of Gregory and of Boniface, who have been the subjects of the last two courses of lectures, the letters of Alcuin are the most important—or among the most important—sources of information for the history of the times. The letters are 236 in number, and they fill 373 columns of close small print in the large volumes of Migne’s series. The letters of Boniface are not half so numerous, and they occupy considerably less than one-third of the space in the same print.
The letters of Alcuin, great as is their number and reach, form but a small part of his writings. His collected works are six times as large as his letters. His commentaries and treatises on the Holy Scriptures are much more lengthy than his collected letters, more than two-thirds as long again. His dogmatic writings are not far from half as long again as his letters. His book on Sacraments and kindred subjects is about two-thirds as long as his letters. His biographies of saints, his poems, his treatises on teaching and learning, are all together nearly as long as the letters; and there is almost the same bulk of works which are attributed to him on evidence of a less conclusive character.
Put briefly, this was his life. He was a boy at my own school, the Cathedral School of York, a school which had the credit of educating, 800 years later, another boy who made a mark on history, Guy Fawkes. The head master in Alcuin’s time was Ecgbert, Archbishop of York and brother of the reigning king of Northumbria; and the second master was Albert, Ecgbert’s cousin, and eventually his successor in the chief mastership and in the archbishopric. Alcuin succeeded to the practical part of the mastership on Ecgbert’s death in 766, the new archbishop, Albert, retaining the government of the school and the chief part of the religious teaching. In 778 Alcuin became in all respects the head master of the school, and in the end of 780 Albert died, leaving to Alcuin the great collection of books which formed the famous library of York.
Alcuin had for some years travelled much on the continent of Europe, and he was well acquainted with its principal scholars. They were relatively few in number, learning having sunk very low on the continent, while in Northumbria it had been and still was at a very high level. Alcuin had also made acquaintance with Karl, not yet known as Karl der Grosse, Carolus Magnus, Charlemagne, the son of Pepin, king as yet of the Franks, emperor in the year 800, a man about seven years younger than Alcuin. On a visit to the continent in 781 he again met Karl, who proposed to him that he should enter his service as master of the school of his palace, and practically minister of education for all parts of the vast empire over which Karl ruled. In 782 he joined Karl, having obtained leave of absence from the Northumbrian king Alfweald, Archbishop Ecgbert’s great-nephew, and from the new archbishop, Eanbald I. From that time onwards he was Karl’s right-hand man, in matters theological as well as educational; and in some matters of supreme political importance too. The leave of absence lasted some nine or ten years; at the end of that time Alcuin came back for a short time, but he soon after terminated his official connexion with York, and spent the rest of his life in the dominions of Karl.
Archbishop Ecgbert, Alcuin’s master, had been a friend of the venerable Bede. The only occasion on which we know that Bede left his cloister was that of a visit to Ecgbert at York, shortly before Bede’s death, if he died in 735. We have it from Bede himself that he had promised another visit to York in the following year, but was too ill to carry out his promise. Failing the opportunity of long conversations on the state of the Province of York, which corresponded to the bishoprics of York, Lindisfarne, Hexham, and Whithern, Bede set down his thoughts on parchment or tablets, and sent them to his friend. This Letter of Bede to Ecgbert is by very far the most important document of those times which has come down to us; both because of the remarkable mass of information contained in it, which we get from no other source, and because of the large and broad views of ecclesiastical policy which it sets forth. It was no doubt the advice and warnings of Bede that led Ecgbert to create the educational conditions which developed the intellect of the most intellectual man of his times, the subject of these lectures. Inasmuch as it seems probable—indeed, is practically certain—that the distressful state of Northumbria was the final cause of Alcuin’s abandonment of his native land, it will be well to summarize the main points of Bede’s dirge. We should bear in mind the fact that we are reading a description by an ecclesiastic, a man keenly devoted to the monastic life; and that the date is that of the year of Alcuin’s birth. It tells us, therefore, something of the setting in which Alcuin found himself in early boyhood.
Ecgbert had only become Bishop of York in the year of Bede’s visit to him, 734. York was not as yet an Archbishopric; it was raised to that dignity in Ecgbert’s time. Some writers call Paulinus Archbishop, because a pall was sent to him by Gregory; but the pall did not reach England till after Paulinus had run away from York.
Bede thinks it necessary to urge Ecgbert very earnestly to be careful in his talk. He does not suppose that Ecgbert sins in this respect, but it is matter of common report that some bishops do; that they have no men of religion or continence with them, but rather such as indulge in laughter and jests, in revellings, drunkenness, and other pleasures of loose life; men who feast daily in rich banquets, and neglect to feed their minds on the heavenly sacrifice.
There were in 735 sixteen bishops’ sees in England, held in the south by Tatuin of Canterbury, Ingwald of London, Daniel of Winchester, Aldwin of Lichfield, Alwig of Lindsey, Forthere of Sherborn, Ethelfrith of Elmham[77], Wilfrid of Worcester, Wahlstod of Hereford, Sigga of Selsey, Eadulf of Rochester; and in the north by Ecgbert of York, Ethelwold of Lindisfarne, Frithobert of Hexham, and Frithwald of Whithern. We may, probably, narrow Bede’s censure to Lindisfarne and Hexham, if he really did, as some assume, refer to his own parts. As a Northumbrian myself, I think that a long-headed man like Bede, a Northumbrian by birth, more probably referred to bishops of the parts which we now know as the Southern Province. Alcuin’s letters, however, show that in his time there was much that needed improvement in the case of northern bishops as well as southern.
A bishop in those days had to do the main part of the teaching, and preaching, and ministering the Sacraments, throughout the diocese. Bede points out that Ecgbert’s diocese was much too large for one man to cover it properly with ministrations. He must, therefore, ordain priests, and appoint teachers to preach the Word of God in each of the villages; to celebrate the heavenly mysteries; and especially to attend to sacred baptism[78]. The persons so appointed must make it their essential business to root deep in the memory of the people that Catholic Faith which is contained in the Apostles’ Creed, and in like manner the Lord’s Prayer. Those of the people who do not know Latin are to say the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer over and over again in their native tongue; and this rule is not for the laity only, but also for clergy and monks who do not know Latin. For this purpose, Bede says he has often given translations of these two into English to uneducated priests; for St. Ambrose declared that all the faithful should say the Creed every morning, and the English practice was to chant the Lord’s Prayer very often. How much we of to-day would give for just one copy of Bede’s Creed and Lord’s Prayer in English![79]
Ecgbert’s position in the sight of God, Bede says, will be very serious if he neglects to do as he advises, especially if he takes temporal gifts or payments from those to whom he does not give heavenly gifts. This last point Bede presses home with affectionate earnestness upon the “most beloved Prelate”. “We have heard it reported,” he says, “that there are many villages and dwellings, on inaccessible hills and in deep forests, where for many years no bishop has been seen, no bishop has ministered; and yet no single person has been free from the payment of tribute to the bishop; and that although not only has he never come to confirm those who have been baptized, but there has been no teacher to instruct them in the faith or show them the difference between good and evil. And if we believe and confess,” he continues, “that in the laying on of hands the Holy Spirit is received, it is clear that that gift is absent from those who have not been confirmed. When a bishop has, from love of money, taken nominally under his government a larger part of the population than he can by any means visit with his ministrations in one whole year, the peril is great for himself, and great for those to whom he claims to be overseer while he is unable to oversee them.”
Ecgbert has, Bede tells him, a most ready coadjutor in the King of Northumbria, Ceolwulf, Ecgbert’s near relative, his first cousin, whom Ecgbert’s brother succeeded. The [arch]bishop should advise the King to place the ecclesiastical arrangements of the Northumbrian nation on a better footing. This would best be done by the appointment of more bishops. Pope Gregory had bidden Augustine to arrange for twelve bishops in the Northern Province, the Bishop of York to receive the pall as Metropolitan. Ecgbert should aim at that number. It may here be noted that in this year of grace 1908 there are still only nine diocesan bishops in the Northern Province, besides the archbishop, and five of these nine have been created in the lifetime of some of us. Bristol knows to its heavy cost that Ripon was the first of the five.
But Bede points out, and here we come to very interesting matter, that the negligence of some former kings, and the foolish gifts of others, had left it very difficult to find a suitable see for a new bishop. The monasteries were in possession everywhere. It may be remarked in passing that all over the Christian parts of the world monasteries existed, even in those early times, in very large numbers. We know the names, and the dates or periods of foundation, of no less than 1481 founded before the year 814, in various parts of the world; and the actual number was very much larger than that, from what we know of the facts, especially in the East. In the time of Henry VIII, besides the monasteries which had been suppressed by Wolsey, Fisher, and others, as also the large number of alien priories suppressed at an earlier date, and besides all the ecclesiastical foundations called hospitals and colleges, more than 600 monasteries remained in this land to be suppressed.
There being, then, no lands left to endow bishoprics, there was, in Bede’s opinion, only one remedy; that was, the summoning of a Greater Council, at which an edict should be issued, by pontifical and royal consent, fixing upon some great monastery for a new episcopal seat. To conciliate the abbat and monks, the election of the bishop-abbat should be left to them. If it should prove necessary to provide more property still for the bishop, Bede pointed out that there were many establishments calling themselves monasteries which were not worthy of the name. He would like to see some of these transferred by synodical authority for the further maintenance of the newly-created see, so that money which now went in luxury, vanity, and intemperance in meat and drink, might be used to further the cause of chastity, temperance, and piety. Here in Bristol, with Gloucester close at hand, we need no reminder of the closeness of the parallel between Bede’s advice in 735 to King Ceolwulf and the actual course taken in 1535 by King Henry, and carried to completion by him in 1540-2, in the foundation of six new bishoprics on the spoils of as many great monasteries. Nor need it be pointed out that Bede’s proposal to suppress small and ill-conditioned monasteries was a forecast of the original proposal of Henry VIII.
Bede then proceeds to speak with extreme severity of false monasteries. It appears that men bribed kings to make them grants of lands—professedly for monasteries—in hereditary possession, and paid moneys to bishops, abbats, and secular authorities, to ratify the grants by their signatures; and then they made them the dwellings of licentiousness and excess of all kinds. The men’s wives set up corresponding establishments. Bede urged the annulment of all grants thus misused: again we seem to hear a note prophetic of eight hundred years later. To so great a pitch had this gone, that there were no lands left for grants to discharged soldiers, sons of nobles, and others. Thus it came to pass that such men either went beyond sea and abandoned their own country, for which they ought to fight, or else they lived as they could at home, not able to marry, and living unseemly lives. If this was allowed to go on, the land would be unable to defend itself against the inroads of the barbarians. Bede’s prophecy to that effect came crushingly true in Alcuin’s time, not fifty years after it was written. And here again we have a remarkable forecast of Henry VIII’s avowed purpose in the suppression of monasteries, that he must have means to defend his land against invasion. Thus the three arguments of Henry VIII, namely, that lands and money were needed for more soldiers and sailors, that lands and money were needed for more bishoprics, and that many of the religious houses did not deserve that name, were carefully set out by one whom we may call a High-Church ecclesiastic, eight hundred years before Henry.
On two of the points mentioned by Bede in connexion with monasteries, it may be well to say a little more by way of illustration. The two points are, the hereditary descent of monasteries, and the principle on which the election of the abbat should proceed. To take the second first,—Bede is very precise on this point. He says that when a monastery is to be taken as the seat of a bishop, licence should be given to the monks to elect one of themselves to fill the double office of abbat and bishop, and to rule the monastery in the one character and the adjacent diocese in the other. We should have thought it would have been better to leave them free to elect some prominent churchman from the outside, than to limit their choice to one of themselves. And the exception for which arrangement was made points in the same direction of limitation. If they have not the right man in their own monastery, at least they must choose one from their own family, or order, to preside over them, in accordance with the decrees of the Canons. This strictness was traditional in Northumbria. The great founder of monastic institutions in the Northern Church, Benedict Biscop, who founded Monk Wearmouth in 674 and Jarrow in 685, was very decided about it. He would not have an abbat brought in from another monastery. The duty of the brethren, he said, when speaking to his monks on his own imminent decease, was, in accordance with the rule of Abbat Benedict the Great, and in accordance with the statutes of their own monastery of Wearmouth—which he had himself drawn up after consideration of the various rules on the Continent from the statutes of the seventeen monasteries which he liked best of all that he had seen—to inquire carefully who of themselves was best fitted for the post, and, after due election, have him confirmed as abbat by the benediction of the bishop. There is a great deal to be said in favour of this course, and there is a great deal to be said for more freedom of election. The case which comes nearest to it in our English life of to-day is that of the election of the Master of a College in one of the two Universities. In Cambridge the election—in two cases the appointment—is in every case open, in the sense that it is not confined to the Fellows of the College, and in very recent times there have been several cases of the election of a prominent man from another College, to the great advantage of the College thus electing.
The other point is of much wider importance, namely, the hereditary descent of monasteries and of their headship. Our Northumbrian abbat Benedict was very decided here also. The brethren must not elect his successor on account of his birth. There must be no claim of next of kin. He was specially anxious that his own brother after the flesh should not be elected to succeed him. He would rather his monastery became a wilderness than have this man as his successor, for they all knew that he did not walk in the way of truth. Benedict evidently feared that a practice of hereditary succession to ecclesiastical office might spring up. No doubt he had seen at least the beginning of this in foreign parts. It was no visionary fear, for in times rather later we have examples of ecclesiastical benefices, and even bishoprics, going from father to son, and that in days of supposed celibacy. We have plenty of examples of monasteries descending from mother to daughter later on in England; and in Bede’s own time he mentions without adverse remark that the Abbess of Wetadun (Watton, in East Yorkshire) persuaded Bishop John of Hexham to cure of an illness her daughter, whom she proposed to make abbess in her stead. Alcuin himself, as we have seen,[80] tells us quite as a matter of ordinary occurrence, not calling for any remark, that he himself succeeded hereditarily to the first monastery which he ruled, situated on Spurn Point, the southern promontory of Yorkshire. We cannot doubt that the evils naturally arising, in some cases at least, from hereditary succession to spiritual positions, had much to do with the intemperate suppression of the secular clergy and the enforcement of clerical celibacy. In considering the question as it concerned the times of Alcuin, we must bear in mind that we are dealing with times very long before the development of the idea of feudal succession.
It is interesting to note that the earliest manuscripts of the Rule of St. Benedict which are known to exist do not definitely lay down the precise rule that the person elected to an abbacy must be a member of the abbey or at least of the same order. The Rule was first printed in 1659 by a monk of Monte Cassino; and this print was carefully collated throughout with a manuscript of the thirteenth century at Fort Augustus for the edition published by Burns and Oates in 1886. Chapter 64 is as follows, taking the translation annexed to the Latin in that edition, though it does not in all cases give quite the force of the original.
“In the appointing[81] of an abbot, let this principle always be observed, that he be made abbot whom all the brethren with one consent in the fear of God, or even a small part of the community with more wholesome counsel, shall elect. Let him who is to be appointed be chosen for the merit of his life and the wisdom of his doctrine, even though he should be the last of the community. But if all the brethren with one accord (which God forbid) should elect a man willing to acquiesce in their evil habits, and these in some way come to the knowledge of the bishop to whose diocese that place belongs, or of the abbots or neighbouring Christians, let them not suffer the consent of these wicked men to prevail, but appoint[82] a worthy steward over the house of God, knowing that for this they shall receive a good reward, if they do it with a pure intention and for the love of God, as, on the other hand, they will sin if they neglect it.”
We hear a good deal in our early history of kings and great men renouncing the world and entering the cloister. Bede shows us the darker side of this practice. Ever since king Aldfrith died, he says, some thirty years before, there has not been one chief minister of state who has not provided himself while in office with a so-called monastery of this false kind, and his wife with another. The layman then is tonsured, and becomes not a monk but an abbat, knowing nothing of the monastic rule. And the bishops, who ought to restrain them by regular discipline, or else expel them from Holy Church, are eager to confirm the unrighteous decrees for the sake of the fees they receive for their signatures. Against this poison of covetousness Bede inveighs bitterly; and then he declares that if he were to treat in like manner of drunkenness, gluttony, sensuality, and like evils, his letter would extend to an immense length.
It may be well to mention here another religious practice which had two sides to it, the practice of going on pilgrimage. Anglo-Saxon men and women had a passion for visiting the tombs of the two princes of the Apostles, Peter, whose connexion with Rome is so shadowy up to the time of his death there, and Paul, their own Apostle, the teacher of the Gentiles, whose connexion with Rome is so solid a fact in the New Testament and in Church history. Bede tells us that in his times many of the English, noble and ignoble, laymen and clerics, men and women, did this. As a result of the relaxed discipline of mixed travel, a complaint came to England, soon after, that the promiscuous journeyings on pilgrimage led to much immorality, so that there was scarcely a town on the route in which there were not English women leading immoral lives.
There is one striking passage in Bede’s unique letter which shows us how great were the demands of the early Church upon the religious observances of the lay people; while it shows with equal clearness the inadequacy of the response made by the English of the time. The passage will complete our knowledge of the state of religion among our Anglian forefathers towards the end of Bede’s life. It refers to the bishop’s work among the people of the world, outside the monastic institutions. The bishop must furnish them with competent teachers, who shall show them how to fortify themselves and all they have against the continual plots of unclean spirits, by the frequent use of the sign of the Cross, and by frequent joining in Holy Communion. “It is salutary,” he says to Ecgbert, “for all classes of Christians to participate daily in the Body and Blood of the Lord, as you well know is done by the Church of Christ throughout Italy, Gaul, Africa, Greece, and the whole of the East. This religious exercise, this devoted sanctification, has, through the neglect of the teachers, been so long abandoned by almost all the lay persons of the province of Northumbria, that even the more religious among them only communicate at Christmas, Epiphany, and Easter. And yet,” he continues, “there are innumerable persons, innocent and of most chaste conversation, boys and girls, young men and virgins, old men and old women, who without any controversy could communicate on every Lord’s Day, and indeed on the birthdays of the holy apostles and martyrs, as you have seen done in the holy Roman and Apostolic Church.” The Church History of early times has a great deal of practical teaching for the church people of to-day.
If the life of religious people in the monasteries and in the world was thus tainted and slack, we can imagine what the ordinary secular life was likely to be. There was terrible force in Bede’s suggestion that a nation so rotten could never withstand a hostile attack of any importance. Archbishop Ecgbert certainly did all that he could to bring things into order; and he wisely determined that the very best thing he could do to pull things round was to get hold of the youth of the nation, and train them with the utmost care in the way that they should go. This leads us on to the rise or revival of the Cathedral School of York.