“Convey the letter of my littleness, with the most holy gift of divine Scripture and peaceful words of salutation, to my lord David. To him we owe as many thanks and praises for all his goodness to me and to my sons as this Book has syllables; to him may God give as many blessings as in this Book there are letters.”
The natural supposition is that Alcuin brought—or had sent—from York accurate copies of the Scriptures, from which he corrected the faulty manuscripts of France and Germany, to use modern names. Errors were due, probably, at least as much to mispronunciation on the part of the person who dictated to the writers, or to mis-hearing on their part, as to carelessness in transcribing. We have to remember that the practice was for one monk to read out word by word the sentence which the writers in the scriptorium were to take down, so that in this way twenty or thirty—it is said as many as two hundred—copies of a poem or a book could be written at the same time. This practice gave many opportunities for error.
We have at the British Museum a magnificent Bible, one of the largest manuscripts in existence, called Alcuin’s Bible. It contains 449 sheets of very fine parchment, 20 by 14½ inches. It was purchased for the Museum in 1836 for £750, the price asked at first being £12,000, reduced to £6,500 as “an immense sacrifice”. The story of its acquisition, and the question of its date and its connexion with Alcuin, were stated and discussed by Sir F. Madden in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1836, pages 358 to 363, 468 to 477, 580 to 587. That able archaeologist believed it to be of Alcuin’s own time, and, indeed, to be the very copy which Alcuin presented to Charlemagne in 801, on the completion of the recension which Karl had entrusted to him. The evidence in favour of this view is found on the last page of the MS., in some elegiac verses composed by Alcuin. The verses begin with an appeal from the book itself to its readers that it may be called a Pandect, and not a Bibliotheca,[233] and after eight more verses, in which it is called a Codex, they end as follows:—
Mercedes habeat, Christo donante, per aevum
Is Carolus qui iam scribere iussit eum.
Haec dator aeternus cunctorum, Christe, bonorum
Munera de donis accipe sancta tuis,
Quae Pater Albinus, devoto pectore supplex,
Nominis ad laudes obtulit ecce tui;