CHAPTER XVI
Examples of Alcuin’s style in his letters, allusive, jocose, playful.—The perils of the Alps.—The vision of Drithelme.—Letters to Arno.—Bacchus and Cupid.
A letter written by Alcuin in September, 799, may be taken as an extreme example of his allusive style. A good deal of interpretation is needed before the letter can be understood; it is a collection of riddles.
Ep. 121. A.D. 799.
The opening sentence runs thus: “The first letter to the first, and the fifteenth to the sixth. The number consecrated in steps to the number perfect in the works of God.”
The first letter is A, and thus the first words mean A(lcuin) to A(dalhard), Abbat of Corbie, or Arno, Archbishop of Salzburg; but inasmuch as A is described in the letter as gallus monasticus, and Arno was Aquila, we must understand that the Abbat of Corbie is meant. No other known A satisfies the conditions. The fifteenth letter is P, the sixth is F, and therefore we have P(ater) F(ilio), the father to the son. The Psalms of Degrees are fifteen, the day of completion of the works of God in creation was the sixth, and therefore the concluding words are only a repetition of “father to son”.
“Why does that brother come with empty hands? In his tongue he brought a Hail! to my ears; in his hands he brought nothing to my eyes. Thou who art seated at a dividing of the ways [Corbie], why hast thou demanded nothing certain of him who dwelleth in Maresa? The crows fly about the roofs of the houses and cry out; and the dove, nourished on the pavements of the church, is silent. I should have trusted that dove had he said anything about the eagle [Leo III] which lately deserted the roofs of the citadel of Rome to drink at the fountains of the Saxon land [the Pope had come to Paderborn] to see the lion [Karl]; or if our blackbird, flying between them, had demanded of the monastic cock [Adalhard] who rouses the brethren to their matin watch, that by means of him the sparrow [Alcuin] sitting alone upon the house top might know what is the convention between the lion and the eagle; and if the youth of the eagle, as the psalmist prophesies, is renewed[237] to pristine gladness; and if new dwellings grow up in the marshes of perfidy that were cleansed[238]; and if the lion, in pursuit of the ibex, meditates crossing the heights of the Alps.
“The sparrow hath his ears open. But I see that the proverbial wolf [this is said to mean the devil] in the fable[239] has taken away the cock’s voice; lest it happen that if he crowed, the apostolic denial[240] should be renewed in the city of his former power, and the last error be worse than the first.
“Why has love sinned, which has not seen Vale [fare thee well] written, while I hear that the partridges [messengers], running across the fields, have come to the dwelling [Corbie] of the cock. Perfect love driveth away fear. Perfect love with the sparkling pupils of the eyes sees everything, and with the clear intuition of piety will always find a fixed rule of wholesome counsel. It would seem that the cock is turned into a cuckoo, which is silent when the sun ascends into the summer constellation of the crab, while the nest-making sparrow at every season alike twitters on the smoky roofs.[241]
“That sparrow now in this September month flies to revisit his beloved nest[242], that he may feed his young[243], gaping with hungry beaks, with little grains of piety: desiring that some time on the banks of this river Loire, rich in fish, he may hear the voice of the cock sounding forth the Vale, and that he who with flapping of his wings rouses himself to matutinal melodies may come and exhort the sparrow in the midst of his young.”
At this point the letter changes its character, and we need not follow it further.
Ep. 16. A.D. 790.
Thus Alcuin could write a jocose letter, even quoting Scripture in that vein. Let us see another. He was detained in Britain at the end of the year 790 by an unexpected event, of which mention has already more than once been made. Ethelred, the king of Northumbria, had been deposed and kept in prison till the end of 790. Alcuin wrote to his pupil Joseph, in Gaul, to tell him that Ethelred had passed from prison to throne, from misery to majesty; and things were so unsettled that he did not like to leave for France. He was evidently not well supplied with money, food, or clothing. He begged Joseph to send him what was necessary for the sea voyage; also five pounds weight of silver which he had sent to his charge, and another five from his possessions in France; three garments, of goat-skin and of wool for the use of his attendants, lay and clerical, and of linen for his own use; also black and red cloaks of goat skin, if he could find such, and many pigments of sulphur and colours for pictures. Then he turns to the question of meat and drink. Quoting 2 Kings iv. 40, he exclaims, “‘O, thou man of God, there is death in the pot’, for [again quoting, from 1 Sam. ix. 7, and putting wine in place of bread] the wine ‘is spent in our vessels’: and [he adds] the acid beer of these parts makes havoc in our stomachs.”
Here is another example of his playfulness and lightness of touch.
Ep. 9. A.D. 783-6.
“To the most illustrious man Flavius Damoeta Albinus sends abundant greeting of perpetual peace.”
Ep. 12.
Ep. 101.
This was Riculfus, Archbishop of Mainz, whom in another letter he addresses as the great fisherman, probably because of piscatorial rights which he naturally had as a riparian proprietor. Alcuin himself—we may note—was a fisherman. He writes to Arno in 798, from Tours, that he does not know in which of two places he will be the next month, but whichever it was it would find him fishing. “I know not whether I shall play the diver on the banks of the Meuse and catch fish, or float on the waters of the Loire and catch salmon.” There are salmon now both in the Meuse and in the Loire; but the phrases in Alcuin’s letter seem to point to bottom-fishing on the Meuse and surface-fishing on the Loire. Alcuin learned to fish on the Ouse at York, of which he writes, as we have seen above[244], “Hanc piscosa suis undis interluit Usa.” We must return to Letter 9.
“I greatly rejoice in your welfare, and am much delighted with your loving present, sending you as many thanks as I have counted teeth in your gift. It is a wonderful animal, with two heads, and with sixty teeth, not of elephantine size but of the beauty of ivory. I am not terrified by the horror of this beast, but delighted by its appearance; I have no fear of its biting me with gnashing teeth. I am pleased with its fawning caresses, which smooth the hair of my head. I see not ferocity in its teeth; I see only the love of the sender.”
Carmen ccxix, ed. Quercet.
Alcuin afterwards made this ivory comb the subject of a poetic riddle:—
A beast has sudden come to this my house,
A beast of wonder, who two heads has got,
And yet the beast has only one jaw-bone.
Twice three times ten of horrid teeth it has.
Its food grows always on this body of mine,
Not flesh, not fruit. It eats not with its teeth,
Drinks not. Its open mouth shows no decay.
Tell me, Damoeta dear, what beast is this?
We can imagine the beauty of this ivory comb, with one row of sixty teeth,[245] the solid piece at the top being ornamented with a lion’s head at each end looking outwards. A hundred years later, the comb, if made in Northumbria, might have had a ridged top, with two bears’ heads, the muzzles looking inwards. It was, no doubt, this beautiful comb that played a large part in the miracles wrought by Alcuin after his death, as described at page 49.
Considering the frequent passings to and fro across the Alps in Alcuin’s time by Karl, and, indeed, by Alcuin himself, and the coming and going between Salzburg, Arno’s see, and Gaul, we should have expected more reference to the hardships of the way than we find in the letters of Alcuin.
In writing to Remedius or Remigius, the Bishop of Chur, or Coire, a place very well known now, he makes no reference to any difficulty in reaching the city. It was, as we know, a place of considerable importance, and it possesses to this day some very interesting Carolingian charters. The only local allusion which Alcuin makes in his various letters to Remedius informs us of the heavy tolls charged by those who held the passes, a matter about which our King Canute spoke so strongly to the Pope.
Ep. 213.
“By this letter I commend to your fatherly protection this merchant of ours, who is conveying merchandise to Italy. Let him have safe passage over the roads of your land in going and in returning. And in the defiles of the mountains let him not be troubled by your officers of custom, but by the freedom of your charity let him have free passage.”
The inconsiderable references which we do find to the difficulties of the way come chiefly in the addresses of his letters. Thus he addresses a letter to Arno, Archbishop of Salzburg, in these words:—
Ep. 91.
“To the eagle that flies across the Alps; goes swiftly over the plains; stalks through the cities; a humble inhabitant of the earth sends greeting.”
Ep. 129.
“To Paulinus, Patriarch of Aquileia.
“Four friends send greeting across the waters of the Alps in a ship laden with love.”
Ep. 200.
“To Peter, Archbishop of Milan.
“O that I had the wings of an eagle, that I might fly across the heights of the Alps swifter than the winds.”
In his Life of Willibrord,[246] cap. xxxii, he says:—
“The Alps of St. Maurice are exalted more felicitously by the blood of the Theban saints than by the height of their snows.”
Ep. 151.
To Arno.
“To my father, of most sweet love, the eagle prelate, a swan from across the sea sends wishes for perpetual health with the pen-feathers of holy affection.”
Ep. 134.
To Arno.
“To the eagle, of all the birds of the Alpine heights most dear, Albinus sends greeting.”
Ep. 126.
To Arno.
“A love which neither the cold of the Alps nor the heat of Italy can overthrow.”
Ep. 101.
To Arno.
“I long to hear when the eagle, flying high, transcends the summits of the Alps, and, wearied with flight, composes its wings in the parts of Rhetia.”
It will have been noticed that most of these are addressed to the Tyrol. It may be remarked that there are traditions of the presence of Karl in the far east of the Alps, especially in a valley about twenty miles due west of the city of Trent. Mr. D. W. Freshfield has printed[247] the long Latin inscription which gives an explanation of frescoes in the Church of San Stefano in Val Rendena, showing Karl and a Pope baptizing heathen. The inscription credits the district with having been full, in Karl’s time, of castles held by pagan lords or by Jews, who were converted or slain.
We have an interesting evidence of the sufferings endured in crossing the Alps in the later Anglo-Saxon times. It is well known that persons who granted charters of lands, under conditions, invoked desperate penalties on the heads of any who should attempt to alienate the lands or trifle with the conditions. In the reigns of Athelstane and Eadmund, under dates ranging from A.D. 938 to 946, a West Saxon scribe produced and employed frequently a new form and idea of curse. He made the royal and archiepiscopal signatories indulge in the pious and fervent wish that any one who endeavoured to violate the gift set forth in the charter might suffer from the cold blasts of the ice-fields and the pennine host of malignant spirits[248].
William of Malmesbury relates[249] the death of an Archbishop of Canterbury from cold in the passage of the Alps. When Odo died in 959, Aelfsin, the Bishop of Winchester, bought the archbishopric and behaved with mad violence. He stamped on the grave of Odo, addressing him as “worst of old men”, taunting him that he had got his desire (which Odo had always opposed), namely, the succession to the archbishopric. That night the departed Odo appeared to him in a dream and warned him of a speedy end. Aelfsin disregarded the warning, and set off to Rome for the pallium. On the way across the Alps he was overcome with cold. His feet were frost-bitten, and there was no remedy but to put them into the warm carcasses of disembowelled horses, these feet with which he had done violence to the grave of Odo. Even so he could not get warm, and he was frozen to death. His death made way for Dunstan, and he is not reckoned among the archbishops.
The misery of extreme cold was a familiar fact to the Northumbrians after the experiences of Benedict Biscop and others in crossing the Alps. It is brought out in a very graphic way in the description which Bede gives of the trance of one Drithelme[250], who had appeared to be dead for six hours. Among other remarkable visions of the other world, he came in his trance to a valley, on one side of which was piercing cold, and on the other unquenchable fire. The unhappy souls, tortured in the biting cold, leaped madly across for warmth into the flames. Then, scorched in the fearful heat, they sprang back again for coolness into the torturing cold. In that continual alternation of tortures their time was spent. Drithelme was wont ever after, in beating down his animal passions, to stand up to his neck in the river, even in winter with broken masses of ice dashing against him. And when one called to him from the bank, “I wonder, brother Drithelme, that you endure such cold,” he would reply, “I, at least, have seen worse cold than this.”
Here is a peep behind the scenes in connexion with the morals of a Pope, and an example of wisdom in burning letters that ought not to see the light. Alcuin is writing to Arno.
Ep. 127. A.D. 799.
“You were the third cause of my [proposed] journey. The first was that of the churches of Christ. The second was that of the lord king, because mourning in tears I left him; my desire being to inscribe on my soul a perpetual memory of the joy of his presence. The third was the longing to see the most sweet face of your dearness. But I am prevented from accomplishing that which I have strongly wished to accomplish. It will come to pass through your holy prayers, if it do but please Him without whom nothing good can be done.
“Your former letter[251], which reached us under your name, contained some complaints about the manner of life of the apostolic[252] and about the danger you were in when with him by reason of the Romans. Your clerk Baldric, as I suppose, brought it, bringing also a cope stitched together in the Roman fashion, a vestment of linen and wool. As I did not wish that your letter should fall into other hands, Candidus alone read it with me; and then I put it in the fire, lest any scandal should arise through carelessness on the part of the keeper of my papers....
“I would gladly write more, but the runner has your orders to get back quickly.”
Nothing could exceed the affectionateness of Alcuin’s letters to Arno, the Archbishop of Salzburg, to whose care in preserving the letters addressed to him we owe so much. Arno’s name recalled to Alcuin’s mind the early days when he saw hovering in the Yorkshire skies the great eagles that gave their Anglian name of earn (arn) to Arncliffe and other places. He always thought of him as the Arn, addressed him as the Aquila, the eagle.
Ep. 108. A.D. 798.
“To the Eagle, most noble of birds, the Goose, with strident voice, sends greeting.
“When I heard of you as winging your way from transalpine hills to your nest of sweetest quiet, a great repose shone suddenly forth upon my mind anxious on your account. My mind flew back, as from crashing storms, to a haven of placid peace. For love is wont to be joyful in prosperity and oppressed in adversity. Thus it is that the voice of the bride, bewailing the absence of the longed-for spouse, cries ‘I am wounded with love’.[253] For both are true: your love wounds, and it heals. One part of the wound inflicted by love remains an open sore, your longed-for face has not yet beamed upon the eyes of your lover. The anxiety of not knowing that you were well has been removed from my mind, but the hunger of the eyes is not yet appeased by the sight of your countenance. This Sorrow we trust may very soon be taken away, by the ministry of that grace which has deigned to remove the anxiety of mind by the arrival of your letters; and then he who desires both health and vision will be full of joy in the arrival of yourself.
“You have written to me of the religious life and justness of the lord apostolic[254], what great and unjust trials he suffers at the hands of the children of discord. I confess that I glow with great joy that the father of the churches sets himself about the service of God with pious and faithful mind, without guile. No wonder that justice suffers persecution in his person at the hands of evil men, when in our Chief, the fount of all goodness and justice, the God Christ, justice suffered persecution even unto death.”
After referring sympathetically to Arno’s complaints that his life has been a very unquiet one of late, by reason of much travelling, Alcuin continues:—
“There is one journey upon which I wish that you would enter. Would that I could see you praying in the venerable temple of blessed Martin our protector, that thy supplication and ours might restore my strength, that by Christ’s mercy the pious consolation of love might advance us both on the way of perpetual beatitude. How this may come about, let your providence consider. If the opportunity of the present year does not grant to us our will, by reason of the hindrance of affairs, may we meet in quiet times and at a quiet season, after Easter of next year, at St. Amand[255]. The frequent infirmity of my poor little body would make a long journey very fatiguing to me in the storms of winter.”
Arno could himself write a genial and affectionate letter. One of his letters to the Cuckoo[256] has been preserved:—
Ep. 287.
“Kartula dic: Cuculus valeat per saecula nostra. To the very dear bird the Cuckoo the Eagle sends greeting.
“Be mindful of thyself and of me. Do what I have enjoined, accomplish what you have promised. Be gentle and true to our father [Alcuin], obedient and devoted to God. Love Him who has raised thee from the mire and set thee to stand before princes. Stand like a man against your adversary; go higher, never lower; advance, never fall back....
“I have dipped my pen in love to write this letter. Rise, rise, most pleasing bird. The winter is passing away; the rains have gone; the flowers are showing on the earth; the time of song has come. Let your friends—that is, the angelic dignities—hear your voice. Your voice is sweet to them, may your appearance be fair in the eyes of the Lord thy God, who desires your presence.”
The Cuckoo’s enemy, against whom he was to fight manfully, was drink. He was evidently a very sweet and sympathetic singer at the frequent feasts,[257] and was not sufficiently careful in respect of strong drink. Alcuin’s Carmen 277 mourns in forty-eight lines the absence of the Cuckoo, gone they did not know where. Some of the lines are significant: “Ah me! if Bacchus has sunk him in that pestiferous vortex!” And again: “Alas! that impious Bacchus, I suppose, is entertaining him, Bacchus who desires to subvert all hearts. Weep for the Cuckoo, weep all for the Cuckoo. He left us in triumph, in tears he will return. Would that we had the Cuckoo, even in tears; for then with the Cuckoo we could weep.”
Though himself a judge of wine, with a decided preference for good and ripe wine, Alcuin was a determined advocate for strict temperance. Total abstinence was not his idea of temperance. Of another temptation of the physical senses he says surprisingly little; indeed, he hardly ever refers to it. In Carmen 260, To his brothers of York, a poem with a charming description of spring in its opening verses, he gives to the younger brethren a very direct warning on both of these physical temptations[258]:—
“Let not the tipsy Bacchus cast his fetters upon you, nor, noxious, wipe out the lessons engraved on your minds. Nor let that wicked Cretan boy, armed with piercing darts, drive you from the citadel of safety.”
The conversion of Arno into Aquila was very natural to a Yorkshireman. In several cases we can only guess at the Teutonic names which Alcuin translated into Latin; for example, Gallicellulus (Ep. 260). In two cases, at least, he translates into Greek. Cambridge men who remember with much affection their private tutor in Mathematics, William Walton, will remember his skill in thus rendering names; his Prosgennades still survives, known to the world as Atkinson. With Alcuin, Hechstan becomes Altapetra. The abbess Adaula evidently had a Teutonic name. Anthropos was his friend Monna. Stratocles had some such name as Heribercht. Epistle 282 is addressed, very near the end of his life, “to my best-loved friends in Christ, brother and son, Anthropos and Stratocles, the humble levite Alchuine sends greeting.” Epistle 283, of the same late date, is addressed “to my dearest son Altapetra, the levite Albinus sends greeting”. In the course of this letter to Hechstan, Alcuin sends greetings and requests for prayers to two friends whose names would not fall very easily into Latin, Scaest and Baegnod, the latter a common Anglo-Saxon name, usually in the form Beagnoth, with the final d aspirated. It occurs in runes on a knife in the British Museum, and is found in Kent and Wessex.