Alcuin of York

by G. F. Browne

That is a digression into times a hundred and a hundred and fifty years after Alcuin. In his time, as has been said, the Heptarchy had for practical purposes been consolidated into three main kingdoms, Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria.

This tri-partite arrangement of the seven kingdoms led to one of the most curious episodes of Alcuin’s time, and, indeed, of English history.

Offa, the ambitious king of Mercia, who reigned from 757 to 796, saw that there were two archbishoprics in England, one of which, Canterbury, was centred in a conquered kingdom; while the other, York, had only been created some twenty years before he began to reign. Bede had advised that the bishopric of York should be raised to an archbishopric, with Northumbria as its province, and on application made to the Pope the thing had been done. Each of the two archbishops, as Offa saw, received special recognition from the Pope in the grant of the pallium; a costly luxury, no doubt, but a luxury of honour and dignity, worth a good deal of money—which it certainly cost. There was no Emperor of the West in those days, some fourteen years before the elevation of Karl to an imperial throne; and the Pope was, by the mystery of his ecclesiastical position, and in the glamour of pagan Rome, the greatest personage in the then chaotic world of Western Europe.

Quite apart from the possession of the pallium, the constitutional position of an English archbishop was very great. In our days it is sometimes asked about a wealthy man, how much is he worth. In Anglo-Saxon times that question had a direct meaning and a direct answer. Men of all the higher grades at least had their money value, a very considerable value, which any one who put an end to any of them must pay. While the luxury of killing a bishop was as costly as killing an ealdorman, that is, an earl, an archbishop was as dear as a prince of the blood. The bishop or earl was worth 8000 thrimsas, the thrimsa being probably threepence, say five shillings of our money, or £2000 in all; that was what had to be paid for the luxury of killing a bishop; the archbishop or royal prince rose to 15000 thrimsas, nearly twice as much, say £3750 of our money; it does not sound quite enough to our modern ears. The king was put at £7500. For drawing a weapon in the presence of a bishop or an ealdorman, the fine was 100 shillings, say £100 of our money; in the case of an archbishop it was 150 shillings, half as much again. In the laws of Ina, for violence done to the dwelling and seat of jurisdiction of a bishop, the fine was 80 shillings, in the case of an archbishop 120, the same as in the case of the king. This was not the only point in which the archbishop was on the same level as the king; his mere word, without oath, was—as the king’s—incontrovertible. A bishop’s oath was equivalent to the oaths of 240 ordinary tax payers. In the case of the archbishop of Canterbury at the times of which we are speaking, there was added the fact that the royal family of Kent had retired to Reculver and left the archbishop supreme in the capital city, as the bishops of Rome had been left in Rome by the departure of the emperors to Constantinople. In Archbishop Jaenbert’s time the royal family of Kent practically came to an end, as a regnant family, at the battle of Otford, near Sevenoaks, in the year 774, when Mercia conquered Kent. Archbishop Jaenbert of Canterbury is said to have proposed that he should become the temporal sovereign of Kent, as well as its ecclesiastical ruler, after the then recent fashion of the bishop of Rome, and to have offered to do homage to Karl, king of the Franks, for the kingdom. If that was so, we can well understand the determination of the conquering and powerful Offa to abate the archbishop’s position and his pride.

Kent was but an outside annex of the Mercian kingdom proper. It had been subject to other kingdoms; it might be so subject again. The Lichfield bishopric was the real ecclesiastical centre of Offa’s kingdom, and he determined to have an archbishop of Lichfield, and to have him duly recognized by the Pope. A visit of two legates of the Pope, accompanied by a representative of the King of the Franks, in the year 785, gave the opportunity.[97] Offa had already punished Jaenbert by taking away all manors belonging to the See of Canterbury in Mercian territories; and he now proposed that the jurisdiction of Canterbury should be limited to Kent, Sussex, and Wessex, and that all the land of England between the Thames and the Humber should become a third metropolitical province, under the archiepiscopal rule of the bishop of Lichfield. The synod at which this proposal was made is described in the Saxon Chronicle as geflitfullic, quarrelsome-like; but in the end, Offa’s proposal was accepted. Pope Adrian gave his sanction and the pall. William of Malmesbury, with his usual skill and his wide experience, gives the explanation of this papal acquiescence in so violent a revolution in ecclesiastical matters: Offa, he says, obtained the papal licence by the gift of endless money, pecunia infinita, to the Apostolic See; which See, he adds, never fails one who gives money. That was the judgement of a historian after 250 years’ additional experience of the secret of Roman sanction. The Pope of the time, it should be said, was a man of much distinction, Adrian or Hadrian I, a friend of Offa and of Karl. We shall have a good deal to say about the grants of Karl, and of Pepin his father, to the papacy, in another lecture.

There is a letter extant[98] from Pope Adrian I to Karl, written before the creation of the Mercian archbishopric, in which the Pope says he has heard from Karl of a report that Offa had proposed to persuade him to eject Adrian from the Papacy, and put in his place some one of the Frankish race. The Pope professes to feel that this is absolutely false; and yet he says so much about it that it is quite clear he was anxious. Karl had told him that Offa had not made any such proposal to him, and had not had any thought in his mind except that he hoped Adrian would continue to govern the Church all through his time. The Pope adds that neither had he until that time heard of anything of the kind; and he does not believe that even a pagan would think of such a thing. Having said all this, in Latin much more cumbrous than Alcuin’s charmingly clear style, he enters upon a long declaration of his personal courage and confidence whatever happened. “If God be with us, who shall be against us.”

We must, I think, take it that there had been some hitch in negotiations between Offa and Adrian, and that Offa, with the outspoken vigour of a Mercian Angle, had in fact gone far beyond Henry VIII’s greatest threats, and had declared to his counsellors that if Adrian was not more pliable, he and Karl would make some one Pope who would have first regard to the wishes of the Angles and the Franks.

Ep. 43. 787-796.

Now it was Alcuin who had brought together Karl and Offa in the first instance, and had brought about their alliance. And on a later occasion when they quarrelled he made them friends again. We do not know what active part, if any, Alcuin took in the matter decided at the quarrelsome-like synod. But we have plenty of evidence that he highly approved of the reversal of Hadrian’s act by his successor Leo III, with the assent, and indeed on the request, of Offa’s successor Kenulf. He corresponded with Offa in a very friendly manner, as indeed Offa’s general conduct well deserved. Here is a letter from him, in response to a request from the king that he would send him a teacher. “Always desirous faithfully to do what you wish, I have sent to you this my best loved pupil, as you have requested. I pray you have him in honour until if God will I come to you. Do not let him wander about idle, do not let him take to drink. Provide him with pupils, and let your preceptors see that he teaches diligently. I know that he has learned well. I hope he will do well, for the success of my pupils is my reward with God.

“I am greatly pleased that you are so intent upon encouraging study, that the light of wisdom, in many places now extinct, may shine in your kingdom. You are the glory of Britain, the trumpet of defiance, the sword against hostile forces, the shield against the enemies.”