He then proceeds to urge that the adults of the conquered Huns shall not be baptized until they have first been carefully taught, “lest the ablution of sacred baptism of the body profit nothing.” On this subject of the baptism of the Huns a long report is found in a tenth-century collection of Alcuin’s letters, written by Paulinus the Patriarch of Aquileia, describing a discussion which took place at a meeting of bishops, or in the College of Bishops, summoned by King Pippin in the summer of this year 796.
Ep. 69.
In the autumn of 796, Alcuin again writes on the subject of tithes, this time addressing his friend[268] Megenfrid, the treasurer of the palace, and dealing not with the Huns, but with the Saxons. Alcuin writes to him as to one of the principal advisers of Karl, enters fully into the oft repeated argument about milk and strong meat, and arrives thus at his point.
“If the yoke easy and the burden light of Christ had been preached to this most hard race, the Saxons, as carefully as the rendering of tithes was required, and the legal penalties for the very smallest faults, it may be that they would not have abhorred the sacraments of baptism. As to those who are sent to teach them, sint praedicatores non praedatores, let them preach, not prey.”
Ep. 71.
In another letter of that autumn, he sends full advice to Arno, the bishop of Salzburg, as to the manner of teaching the faith to the Huns. In the course of this letter he reminds Arno that the wretched race of the Saxons has repeatedly lost the sacrament of baptism, because it never had in heart the foundation of the faith.
In the year 801 the news reached Charlemagne that one Isaac the Jew, whom he had sent four years before to the King of Persia, was returning, bringing with him an elephant and many other presents. He had got as far as Fez. Special arrangements were made for bringing the elephant across the sea, and he arrived at Spezzia in October, wintering at Vercelli because the Alps were already covered with snow. Eginhart thought the arrival of the elephant at Aix-la-Chapelle to be of sufficient importance to have the precise day named, the only event thus honoured in a year rather full of events. It was the twentieth of July; and the elephant’s name was Abulabaz. Under the year 810, another year full of important events, Eginhart records that Charlemagne heard of a sudden and successful raid of Northmen upon the Frisians; he set off in great haste, summoned all his forces from all parts, crossed the Rhine at Lippenheim, and waited there a few days for the troops to assemble. He had taken his favourite animal with him. While he was waiting, the elephant died suddenly. See [Appendix E].
The strange form of an elephant made it a frequent subject for the ornamentation of silk and woollen robes. We hear of silk pallia thus adorned in Charlemagne’s lifetime, and it is probable that in a stuff of this kind his body was clothed in the grave at Aachen. Alcuin’s great predecessor in learning, Aldhelm, had a chasuble of scarlet silk, wrought with black scrolls containing the representations of peacocks,[269] and this chasuble was preserved at Malmesbury in the time of William of Malmesbury, about 1140. The silk robes in which the body of St. Cuthbert was wrapped were ornamented with large circular spaces containing men on horseback with hawk and hound, and an island with trees, fishes, and eider ducks.
Plate VII