Alcuin of York

by G. F. Browne

In 766 Albert became archbishop. Like his immediate predecessors, he did much to beautify churches in the city. In this work Alcuin was one of his two right-hand men; and yet each detail which Alcuin gives is puzzling. He tells us that at the spot where the great warrior Edwin the king received the water of baptism, the prelate constructed a grand altar, which he covered with silver, precious stones, and gold, and dedicated under the name of St. Paul, the teacher of the world, whom the learned archbishop specially loved. There is a difficulty here. While it is certain that the church of stone of larger dimensions which Edwin and Paulinus began, to include the wooden oratory of St. Peter the place of Edwin’s baptism, was the church which Oswald completed and the first Wilfrith restored, as the Cathedral Church of York, there was no altar of St. Paul in the Cathedral Church in the middle ages. We should naturally have supposed that an altar so splendid as that which Albert constructed, at a spot so uniquely remarkable in the Christian history of Northumbria, would have been sedulously retained throughout all changes. The explanation may well be that not the size only but the level of the surface of the site has been greatly increased in the course of 1200 years. The herring-bone work of the walls of the early Anglian Church of York was found deep down below the surface when excavations were made after the fire of 1829, and at a later period in connexion with the hydraulic apparatus for the organ. Probably the altar of St. Paul, and the place of baptism, were down at that level, and were buried in the ruins of one fire after another, many feet below the present surface of the Minster Yard. My old friend Canon Raine, who edited the three volumes of the Historians of the Church of York, writing of the present crypt in his introduction to the first volume,[91] says, “In another peculiar place is the actual site, if I mistake not, of the font in which Edwin became a Christian.” Canon Raine was secretive in connexion with antiquarian discoveries, and from inquiries which I have made it is to be feared that the secret of this site died with him. All we can say is, that where that site was, there was this splendid altar[92] of St. Paul, mundi doctoris.

A more doubtful point is raised by Alcuin’s description of the building of a new and marvellous basilica, begun, completed, and consecrated, by Albert. Two of his pupils, Eanbald and Alcuin, were his ministers in the building, which was consecrated only ten days before his death. It was very lofty, supported on solid columns, with curved arches; the roofs and windows were fine; it was surrounded by many porches, porticoes, which were in fact side chapels; it contained many chambers under various roofs, in which were thirty altars with sundry kinds of ornament. Alcuin describes this immediately after describing the construction of the altar of St. Paul in what must have been the old Cathedral Church; but he does not say that the new church was on the old site, or that it replaced the Cathedral Church. Still, a church of that magnitude can only have been the chief church of the city. Simeon of Durham throws light upon the point by stating as the reason for building this new basilica, that the monasterium of York—that is, the Minster, as it has always been called[93]—was burned[94] on Monday, May 23, 741; and the Saxon Chronicle has the entry[95], “This year York was burned.” The balance of argument on this disputed point is that Albert did really build a new Cathedral Church in place of one that was burned while Alcuin was a boy. The investigations which have taken place show that in Anglo-Saxon times a basilica of really important dimensions was in existence, much larger than Edwin’s little oratory or Oswald’s stone building, and all points to its being the “marvellous basilica” which Eanbald and Alcuin built by order of Albert.

Alcuin makes several statements about church-building in York. In lines 195-198, he tells us that King Edwin caused a small building to be hurriedly erected, in which he and his could receive the sacred water of baptism. We should naturally suppose that it was by the side of water. In lines 219-222 he tells us that Paulinus built ample churches in his cities. Among them he names that of York, supported on solid columns; it remains, he says, noble and beautiful, on the spot where Edwin was laved in the sacred wave. In lines 1221-1228 he tells us first that Wilfrith II greatly adorned “the church”, evidently meaning his cathedral church, and then that he adorned with great gifts other churches in the city of York. In lines 1487-1505 he tells us that Albert took great care in the ornamentation of churches, and especially that at the spot of Edwin’s baptism he made a grand altar, which he covered with silver and gems and gold, and dedicated it under the name of Saint Paul whom he greatly loved. He made also, still it would seem at the same spot, another altar, covered with pure silver and precious stones, and dedicated it to the Martyrs and the Cross. As we have seen, there was no altar dedicated to St. Paul in the mediaeval Minster of York; but there was not an altar only but a small church—which remained as a parish church till very recent years—dedicated to Saint Crux. The parish of St. Crux is now absorbed in All Saints. Lastly, in lines 1506-1519 he describes the building of the great new basilica which Eanbald and himself built under the orders of Archbishop Albert. The conclusion appears to be that the new basilica—which probably became the cathedral church—did not stand on the site of Paulinus’s church, but was erected close by that specially sacred spot; and that both Paulinus’s stone oratory, beautified by Wilfrith II, with its added altars to St. Paul and St. Crux, and also the new and great basilica of Albert, are now absorbed in the vast area of the Minster of York.

Eanbald succeeded Albert in the archbishopric, and Alcuin succeeded Albert in the mastership of the School of York and in the ownership of the great library which for three generations had been got together at York. Alcuin tells us that it contained all Latin literature, all that Greece had handed on to the Romans, all that the Hebrew people had received from on high, all that Africa with clear-flowing light had given. Passing from the general to the particular, Alcuin names the authors whose works the library of York possessed. What we would give for even five or six of those priceless manuscripts! Of the Christian Fathers, he records a rather mixed list. They had Jerome, Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine, Athanasius, Orosius, Gregory the Great, Pope Leo, Basil, Fulgentius, Cassiodorus, and John Chrysostom. They had the works of the learned men of the English Church, our own Aldhelm of Malmesbury, and Bede; with them he names Victorinus and Boethius, and the old historians, Pompeius and Pliny, the acute Aristotle and the great rhetorician Tully. They had the poets, too, Sedulius, Juvencus, Alcimus[96], Clemens, Prosper, Paulinus, Arator, Fortunatus, Lactantius. They had also Virgil, Statius, and Lucan. They were rich in grammarians: Probus, Focas, Donatus, Priscian, Servius, Euticius, Pompeius, Comminianus. You will find, he says, in the library very many more masters, famous in study, art, and language, who have written very many volumes, but whose names it would be too long to recite in a poem. It may perhaps be a fair guess that he had used up all the names which he could conveniently get into dactyls and spondees for hexameter verse.

Two years after handing over to Alcuin the possession of this great library, and to Eanbald the archbishopric itself, Albert died. We may here remind ourselves of outstanding facts and dates. Alcuin, born in 735, had as a young man held the office of teacher in the School of York for some years. In 766 he had been promoted to a position which so far as teaching was concerned was practically that of Head Master. In 778 he became in the fullest sense the master of the school. In 780 he inherited the great collection of books which had been brought together by successive archbishops. In 782 he was called away to become the teacher of the School of the Palace of Karl, and director of the studies of the empire, still continuing to hold the office of master in name. In 792 he left England for the last time, and his official connexion with the school of York came to an end. He gave twenty years of his older life to the service of the Franks, and died in 804.

CHAPTER V

The affairs of Mercia.—Tripartite division of England.—The creation of a third archbishopric, at Lichfield.—Offa and Karl.—Alcuin’s letter to Athelhard of Canterbury; to Beornwin of Mercia.—Karl’s letter to Offa, a commercial treaty.—Alcuin’s letter to Offa.—Offa’s death.

Although Alcuin was a Northumbrian, and his interests were naturally with that kingdom, he was at one time of his life more intimately concerned with the affairs of Mercia. It seems, on the whole, best to deal first with that part, as it can be to a certain extent isolated from his correspondence with Northumbria, and from his life and work among the Franks. The special events in Mercian history with which he was concerned are in themselves of great interest. They are—(1) the personal and official dealings between Karl and the Mercian king, and (2) the creation and the extinction of a third metropolitical province in England, the archbishopric of Lichfield.

We have to accustom ourselves to the fact that the Heptarchy, that is, the division of England into seven independent kingdoms with seven independent kings, no longer existed in Alcuin’s time. The land was divided into three kingdoms, Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex. The rivers Thames and Humber were, roughly speaking, the lines dividing the whole land into three. Kent, to which we probably attach too much importance by reason of its being the first Christian kingdom, and of its having in its Archbishop the chief ecclesiastic of the whole land, was a conquered kingdom, the property at one time of Wessex, at another of Mercia. The South Saxons, our Sussex, had kings and dukes fitfully, and the territory was included in Wessex. The East Saxons, our Essex, had kings nominally, but belonged usually to Mercia. East Anglia was in a somewhat similar position, but held out for independence with much pertinacity and success till long after Alcuin’s time. The year 828, a quarter of a century after Alcuin’s death, saw the final defeat of Mercia by Ecgbert of Wessex, who had spent fifteen years in exile at the Court of Charlemagne in Alcuin’s time, from 787 to 802, when he succeeded to the vacant throne of Wessex by a very remote claim, as great-great-grand-nephew of the famous king Ina. No doubt he learned in those strenuous years, under the tutelage of Karl, the lessons of war which brought him into dominance here, another link between Karl and England which passes almost entirely unrecognized. The year 829 saw the peaceful submission of the great men of Northumbria to Ecgbert, at Dore, in Derbyshire, and their recognition of him as their overlord. The mistake of supposing that Ecgbert thus became sole king of England as a single kingdom is now exploded; but he was, roughly speaking, master of the whole, and as time went on the petty kings and kinglets disappeared. The time which this process occupied was not short. The thirty-first king of Northumbria was reigning in Ecgbert’s time, when his thegns made submission to Ecgbert; but fifteen more kings reigned in Northumbria, till Eadred expelled the last of them in 954. In like manner, we have the coins of some kings of East Anglia, and mention of other kings, as late as 905.