Alcuin of York

by G. F. Browne

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.

CHAPTER IV

The school of York.—Alcuin’s poem on the Bishops and Saints of the Church of York.—The destruction of the Britons by the Saxons.—Description of Wilfrith II, Ecgbert, Albert, of York.—Balther and Eata.—Church building in York.—The Library of York.

It is usual to reckon the year 735 as the beginning of the great School of York, and Archbishop—or rather, as he then was, Bishop—Ecgbert as its originator. But it seems clear that we must carry its beginnings further back, and count as its originator a man who filled a much larger place in the world than even Ecgbert, archbishop as he became, and brother of the king as he was. When Wilfrith, the first Englishman to appeal to Rome, was put into the see of York by Theodore of Canterbury in 669, his chaplain and biographer, Stephen Eddi, tells of four principal works which, between that year and 678, his chief accomplished. The first was the restoration of the Cathedral Church of York, which had fallen into decay during the time when Lindisfarne was the seat of the Bishop of Northumbria. The second was the building of a noble church at Ripon for the people of the kingdom of Elmete, which Edwin, the first Christian king of Northumbria, had conquered from the Romano-Britons; corresponding to the West Riding of Yorkshire and parts of Lancashire, a portion of the great British kingdom of Rheged, at the court of which the bard Taliessin had sung. The fourth was the building of a still more noble church at Hexham, to be the ecclesiastical centre of the northern part of Northumbria, replacing Lindisfarne in that character. And the third in order was the establishment of a School, no doubt at York, as that was his episcopal seat, and he himself was the chief teacher. The world credits William of Wickham with the invention of the idea of a public school in the modern sense of the word; but seven hundred[83] years before him Wilfrith had grasped the idea and put it into practice at York. This is what his chaplain tells us. The secular chiefs, the noblemen, sent their sons to him to be so taught that when the time of choice came they would be found fit to serve God in the ministry, if that was their choice, or to serve the king in arms if they preferred that career. We must certainly reckon the year 676, or thereabouts, as the date of foundation of the school at York, Wilfrith as its founder, and its principle that of the modern public school, which is supposed to give an education so liberal that whatever career its alumnus prefers he will be found fitted for it. The first scholars of the school of York entered, some of them, the ministry, as learned clerks; others, the army, as fit to be soldiers. It was still so when I went to that school sixty-four years ago. The school is older than Winchester by seven hundred years, and older than Eton by seven hundred and sixty-five.[84] Bede’s strong appeal to Ecgbert led to the revival of the school after the natural decay from which good institutions suffer in times of ecclesiastical and civil disorder, and we date the continuous life of the school from him. It was an interesting coincidence, that men saw in the year 735 the revival of the school and the birth of its most famous pupil, assistant master, and head master. We may now turn to that man, whose early lot was cast in a state of society, lay and clerical, such as that described in scathing terms by Bede; and who was the first-fruits of the remedy which Bede had suggested. As a link between Bede and Alcuin we may have in mind a pretty little story about Bede which we find in a letter of Alcuin’s some fifty or sixty years after Bede’s death.

Ep. 274. Before A.D. 793.

Alcuin is writing to the monks of Wearmouth. He tells them how well he remembers what he saw at Wearmouth long years ago, and how much he was pleased with everything he saw. He encourages them to continue in the right way by reminding them of the virtues of their founders. “It is certain,” he writes, “that your founders very often visit the place of your dwelling. They rejoice with all whom they find keeping their statutes and living right lives; and they cease not to intercede for such with the pious judge. Nor is it doubtful that visitations of angels frequent holy places; for it is reported that our master and your patron the blessed Bede said, ‘I know that angels visit the canonical hours and the congregations of the brethren. What if they should not find me among the brethren? Would they not have to say, Where is Bede? Why does he not come with the brethren to the appointed prayers?’”