The document next to be examined refers to Northumbria, and, as it dates from the period immediately preceding the time of Charlemagne, it helps to bridge over the gulf between the Laws of Alfred and Ine.
Egbert, Archbishop of York, A.D. 750.
It is in the form of a Dialogue or set of questions put to Egbert, Archbishop of York, by his priests, with his answers thereto, and its date may be about A.D. 750.
Egbert, Archbishop of York, was an important figure in Anglo-Saxon history. The brother of Eadbert, the Northumbrian king, the recipient on his accession to his episcopal dignity of the remarkable letter of Bede describing the religious anarchy of his diocese, the founder of the great school at York, in which his pupil Alcuin was educated and from which he migrated to the Court of Charles the Great, Egbert was an important personage, and the centre of beneficent influence in the Northumbrian church and kingdom.
His Roman and clerical point of view.
Moreover, this document, so far as it goes and as regards the matters mentioned in it, deals with the questions raised by it avowedly from an ecclesiastical point of view. The great ecclesiastic comes down upon his diocese from a wider world. He had been educated and ordained deacon at Rome. And just as in the monastic rules of St. Benedict Roman weights and measures were adhered to, so when this archbishop has to speak of money matters, ignoring all local currencies, he still thinks and speaks and calculates in the terms of the Roman Imperial currency, and not in Anglo-Saxon sceatts and scillings, or in the thrymsas of Northumbrian usage.
The Dialogue contains several interesting clauses.
What to be the value of the oaths of clerics.
The first to be noticed is in answer to the question as to the value to be attached to the oaths of the bishop, priest, deacon, and monk. The reply is:—