Alcuin of York

by G. F. Browne

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]