ALCUIN OF YORK

LECTURES DELIVERED IN THE CATHEDRAL
CHURCH OF BRISTOL IN 1907 AND 1908

BY THE
RIGHT REV. G. F. BROWNE
D.D., D.C.L., F.S.A.
BISHOP OF BRISTOL
FORMERLY DISNEY PROFESSOR OF ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

PUBLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE TRACT COMMITTEE.

LONDON:
SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE.
NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, W.C.; 43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.C.
BRIGHTON: 129, North Street.
New York: E. S. Gorham.
1908

PREFACE

No attempt has been made to correct the various forms of many of the proper names so as to make the spelling uniform. It is true to the period to leave the curious variations as Alcuin and others wrote them. In the case of Pope Hadrian, the name has been written Hadrian and Adrian indiscriminately in the text.

While Alcuin’s style is lucid, his habit of dictating letters hurriedly, and sending them off without revision if he had a headache, has left its mark on the letters as we have them. It has seemed better to leave the difficulties in the English as he left them in the Latin.

The edition used, and the numbering of the Epistles adopted, is that of Wattenbach and Dümmler, Monumenta Alcuiniana, Berlin 1873, being the sixth volume of the Bibliotheca Rerum Germanicarum.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ALCUIN OF YORK.

CHAPTER I

The authorship of the anonymous Life of Alcuin.—Alcuin’s Life of his relative Willibrord.—Willibrord at Ripon.—Alchfrith and Wilfrith.—Alcuin’s conversion.—His studies under Ecgbert and Albert at the Cathedral School of York.—Ecgbert’s method of teaching.—Alcuin becomes assistant master of the School.—Is ordained deacon.—Becomes head master.—Joins Karl.

The only Life of Alcuin which we possess, coming from early times, was written by a monk who does not give his name, at the command of an abbat whose name, as also that of his abbey, is not mentioned by the writer. We have, however, this clue, that the writer learned his facts from a favourite disciple and priest of Alcuin himself, by name Sigulf. Sigulf received from Alcuin the pet name of Vetulus, “little old fellow,” in accordance with the custom of the literary and friendly circle of which Alcuin was the centre. Alcuin himself was Flaccus; Karl the King of the Franks, and afterwards Emperor, was David; and so on. We learn further that the abbat who assigned to the anonymous monk the task of writing the Life was himself a disciple of Sigulf. Sigulf succeeded Alcuin as Abbat of Ferrières; and when he retired on account of old age, he was in turn succeeded by two of his pupils whom he had brought up as his sons, Adalbert and Aldric. The Life was written after the death of Benedict of Aniane, that is, after the year 823. Adalbert had before that date been succeeded by Aldric, and Aldric became Archbishop of Sens in the end of 829. The Life was probably written between 823 and 829 by a monk of Ferrières, by order of Aldric. Alcuin had died in 804. The writer of the Life had never even seen Alcuin; he was in all probability not a monk of Tours.

That is the view of the German editor Wattenbach as to the authorship and dedication of the Life. That learned man appears to have given inadequate weight to the writer’s manner of citing Aldric as a witness to the truth of a quaint story told in the Life. This is the story, as nearly as possible in the monk’s words:—

“The man of the Lord [Alcuin himself] had read in his youth the books of the ancient philosophers and the romances[1] of Vergil,[2] but he would not in his old age have them read to him or allow others to read them. The divine poets, he was wont to say, were sufficient for them, they did not need to be polluted with the luxurious flow of Vergil’s verse. Against this precept the little old fellow Sigulf tried to act secretly, and for this he was put to the blush publicly. Calling to him two youths whom he was bringing up as sons, Adalbert and Aldric, he bade them read Vergil with him in complete secrecy, ordering them by no means to let any one know, lest it come to the ears of Father Albinus [Alcuin]. But Albinus called him in an ordinary way to come to him, and then said: ‘Where do you come from, you Vergilian? Why have you planned, contrary to my wish and advice, to read Vergil?’ Sigulf threw himself at his feet, confessed that he had acted most foolishly, and declared himself penitent. The pious father administered a scolding to him, and then accepted the amends he made, warning him never to do such a thing again. Abbat Aldric, a man worthy of God, who still survives, testifies that neither he nor Adalbert had told any one about it; they had been absolutely silent, as Sigulf had enjoined.”

It seems practically impossible to suppose that the monk would have put it in this way, if Aldric had been the abbat to whom he dedicated the Life, or indeed the abbat of his own monastery. It is clear that the Life was written while Aldric was still an abbat, that is between 823 and 829; and it seems most probable that it was written by a monk of some other monastery for his own abbat. Nothing of importance, however, turns upon this discussion. It is a rather curious fact, considering the severity of Alcuin’s objection to Vergil being read in his monastery, that the beautiful copy of Vergil at Berne, of very early ninth-century date, belonged to St. Martin of Tours from Carolingian times, and was written there.[3]

Not unnaturally, the Life, written in and for a French monastery, does not give details of the Northumbrian origin of Alcuin. It makes only the statement usual in such biographies, that he sprang from a noble Anglian family. Curiously enough, we get such further details as we have from a Life of St. Willibrord written by Alcuin himself at the request of Archbishop Beornrad of Sens, who was Abbat of Epternach, a monastery of Willibrord’s, from 777 to 797.

“There was,” he writes, “in the province of Northumbria, a father of a family, by race Saxon, by name Wilgils, who lived a religious life with his wife and all his house. He had given up the secular life and entered upon the life of a monk; and when spiritual fervour increased in him he lived solitary on the promontory which is girt by the ocean and the river Humber (Spurn Point)[4]. Here he lived long in fasting and prayer in a little oratory dedicated to St. Andrew[5] the Apostle; he worked miracles; his name became celebrated. Crowds of people consulted him; he comforted them with the most sweet admonitions of the Word of God. His fame became known to the king and great men of the realm, and they conferred upon him some small neighbouring properties, so that he might build a church. There he collected a congregation of servants of God, moderate in size, but honourable. There, after long labours, he received his crown from God; and there his body lies buried. His descendants to this day hold the property by the title of his sanctity. Of them I am the least in merit and the last in order. I, who write this book of the history of the most holy father and greatest teacher Willibrord, succeeded to the government of that small cell by legitimate degrees of descent.”

Inasmuch as the book is dedicated to Beornrad by the humble Levite (that is, deacon) Alcuin, we learn the very interesting fact that Alcuin, born in 735, came by hereditary right into possession of the property got together by Wilgils, whose son Willibrord was born in 657. The dates make it practically almost certain that Wilgils was born a pagan. Alcuin informs us that he only entered upon marriage because it was fated that he should be the father of one who should be for the profit of many peoples. If Willibrord was, as Alcuin’s words mean, the only child of Wilgils, we must suppose that Alcuin was the great-great-great-nephew of Wilgils, allowing twenty-five years for a generation in those short-lived times.

Alcuin three times insists on the lawful hereditary descent of the ownership and government of a monastery. A second case is in his preface to this Life of Willibrord. The body of the saint, he says, “rests in a certain small maritime cell, over which I, though unworthy, preside by God’s gift in lawful succession.” A third case occurs also in this Life. “There is,” he says, “in the city of Trèves a monastery[6] of nuns, which in the times of the blessed Willibrord was visited by a very severe plague. Many of the handmaids of the Lord were dying of it; others were lying on their beds enfeebled by a long attack; the rest were in a state of terror, as fearing the presence of death. Now there is near that same city the monastery of that holy man, which is called Aefternac,[7] in which up to this day the saint rests in the body, while his descendants are known to hold the monastery by legitimate paternal descent, and by the piety of most pious kings. When the women of the above-named monastery heard that he was coming to this monastery of his, they sent messengers begging him to hasten to them.” He went, as the blessed Peter went to raise Tabitha; celebrated a mass for the sick; blessed water, and had the houses sprinkled with it; and sent it to the sick sisters to drink. Needless to say, they all recovered.

In two of these cases, the two in which Alcuin speaks of his own property, he uses the word succession, “by legitimate succession” in the one case, legitima successione, “through legitimate successions” in the other case, per legitimas successiones, the former no doubt referring to the succession from his immediate predecessor, the latter referring to the four, or five, steps in the descent from Wilgils to Alcuin. In the case of the monastery of Epternach he defines it from the other end, “from the legitimate handing-down,” traditione ex legitima, the piety of the most pious kings being called in to confirm the handing-down.

It is remarkable that Alcuin should thus go out of his way to insist upon the lawfulness of the hereditary descent of monasteries, when he knew well that his venerated predecessor Bede, following the positive principle of the founder of Anglian monasticism in Northumbria, Benedict Biscop, attributed great evils to such hereditary succession to the property and governance of monasteries. We shall see something of this when we come to the consideration of Bede’s famous letter to Ecgbert, written in or about the year of Alcuin’s birth.

It is probably not necessary to suppose that Alcuin intends to draw a distinction between the constitutional practice in Northumbria and that in the lands ruled by Karl, though it is a marked fact that he mentions the intervention of kings in the latter case and twice does not mention it in the former. Bede says so much about the bribes—or fees—paid to Northumbrian kings and bishops for ratification of first grants by their signatures, that we can hardly suppose there were no fees to pay on succession. We cannot press such a point as this in Alcuin’s Life of Willibrord, for he tells Beornrad in his Preface that he has been busy with other things all day long, and has only been able to dictate this book in the retirement of the night; and he urges that the work should be mercifully judged because he has not had leisure to polish it. The grammar of this dictated work needs a certain amount of correction; Alcuin did not always remember with what construction he had begun a sentence. In these days of dictated letters he has the sympathy of many in this respect.

Alcuin’s young relative Willibrord was sent away to Ripon, as soon as he was weaned, to the charge of the brethren there. Alchfrith, the sub-King of Deira under his father Oswy, had driven out the Irish monks whom he had at one time patronised at Ripon, and had given their possessions to Wilfrith. Under the influence of that remarkable man the little child came, still, in Alcuin’s phrase, only an infantulus. His father’s purpose in sending him to Ripon was twofold. He was to be educated in religious study and sacred letters, in a place where his tender age might be strengthened by vigorous discipline, where he would see nothing that was not honourable, hear nothing that was not holy. At Ripon he remained till he was twenty years of age, and then he passed across to Ireland, to complete his studies under Ecgbert, the great creator of missionaries. With Ecgbert he spent twelve years.

Now in the thirty-two years covered by that short narration, from 657 to 689, events of the utmost moment had occurred in Northumbria, and had mainly centered round Ripon. At the most critical juncture of these events Bede becomes suddenly silent. Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon version of Bede goes further, and omits the bulk of what Bede does say. A few words from Alcuin would have been of priceless value, and he, writing in France to a Frank, could have no national or ecclesiastical reason for silence on points which Bede and Alfred let alone. The whole of the variance between Oswy and his son and sub-King Alchfrith, on which Bede is determinedly silent, the only hint of which is preserved to us solely by the noble runes on the Bewcastle Cross, erected in 670 and still standing, which bid men pray for the “high sin” of Alchfrith’s soul[8]; the whole secret of the variance between Oswy and Wilfrith; of Oswy’s refusal to recognize Wilfrith’s consecration at Paris—with unrivalled magnificence of pomp—to the episcopal See of York; all this, and more, is included in the first thirteen years of Willibrord’s life at Ripon, and Ripon was the pivot of it all. Alcuin has no scintilla of a hint of anything unusual, not even when he mentions Ecgbert, the Northumbrian teacher, dwelling in Ireland, of whom we know from another source that he fled from Northumbria to safety in Ireland when Alchfrith and Wilfrith lost their power, and Alchfrith presumably lost his life. It is quite possible that if the head of the Bewcastle Cross were ever found[9] the runes on it might tell us just what we want to know. The illustration of this portion of the Cross given in Gough’s edition of Camden’s Britannia[10] was drawn in 1607, at which time English scholars could not read runic letters, and naturally could not copy them with perfect accuracy. Still, it is evident that the runes stand for rikaes dryhtnaes, apparently meaning ‘of the kingdom’s lord’, the copyist having failed to notice the mark of modification in the rune for u, which turned it into y.

Turning now to Alcuin himself, a remarkable story is told in the Life, evidently and avowedly on his authority. When he was still a small boy, parvulus, he was regular in attendance at church at the canonical hours of the day, but very seldom appeared there at night. What the monastery was in which he passed his earliest years we are not told; but inasmuch as no break or change is mentioned between the story to which we now turn and the description of his more advanced studies, which certainly indicates the Archiepiscopal School of York, we must understand that York was the scene of this occurrence.

“When he was eleven years of age, it happened one night that he and a tonsured rustic, one of the menial monks, that is, were sleeping on separate pallets in one cell. The rustic did not like being alone in the night, and as none of the rustics could accommodate him, he had begged that one of the young students might be sent to sleep in the cell. The boy Albinus was sent, who was fonder of Vergil than of Psalms. At cock-crow the warden struck the bell for nocturns, and the brethren got up for the appointed service. This rustic, however, only turned round onto his other side, as careless of such matters, and went on snoring. At the moment when the invitatory psalm was as usual being sung, with the antiphon, the rustic’s cell was suddenly filled with horrid spirits, who surrounded his bed, and said to him, ‘You sleep well, brother.’ That roused him, and they asked, ‘Why are you snoring here by yourself, while the brethren are keeping watch in the church?’ He then received a useful flogging, so that by his amendment a warning might be given to all, and they might sing, ‘I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most Highest,’[11] while their eyes prevented the night watches. During the flogging of the rustic, the noble boy trembled lest the same should happen to him; and, as he related afterwards, cried from the very bottom of his heart, ‘O Lord Jesus, if Thou dost now deliver me from the cruel hands of these evil spirits, and I do not hereafter prove to be eager for the night watches of Thy Church and the ministry of praise, and if I any longer love Vergil more than the chanting of psalms, may I receive a flogging such as this. Only, I earnestly pray, deliver me, O Lord, now.’ That the lesson might be the more deeply impressed upon his mind, as soon as by the Lord’s command the flogging of the rustic ceased, the evil spirits cast their eyes about here and there, and saw the body and head of the boy most carefully wrapped up in the bedclothes, scarce taking breath. The leader of the spirits asked, ‘Who is this other asleep in the cell?’ ‘It is the boy Albinus,’ they told him, ‘hid away in his bed.’ When the boy found that he was discovered, he burst into showers of tears; and the more he had suppressed his cries before, the louder he cried now. They had all the will to deal unmercifully with him, but they had not the power. They discussed what they should do with him; but the sentence of the Lord compelled them to help him to keep the vow which he had made in his terror. Accordingly they said, imprudently for their purpose, but prudently for the purpose of the Lord, ‘We will not chastise this one with severe blows, because he is young; we will only punish him by cutting with a knife the hard part of his feet.’ They took the covering off his feet. Albinus instantly protected himself with the sign of the Cross. Then he chanted with all intentness the twelfth psalm, ‘In the Lord put I my trust’; and then the rustic, half dead, the boy going before him with agile step, fled into the basilica to the protection of the saints.”

A cynical reader might suggest that the disciplinary officers of the School of York resorted in those early times to unusual methods of making an impression on a careless boy.

The Life proceeds to inform us that Alcuin was trained under the prelate Hechbert, whom we know as Ecgbert, Bishop and later Archbishop of York, 732 to 766. That learned man was a disciple of Bede. He had under his tuition a flock of the sons of nobles, some of whom studied grammar, others the liberal arts, others the divine scriptures.[12] They studied the doctrine set forth by “the holy apostle of the English, Gregory; by Augustine, his disciple; by holy Benedict[13]; also by Cuthbert and Theodore, who followed in all things [14]] of their first father and apostle[15]; and by the man most loved of the Lord, Bede the presbyter, Hechbert’s own preceptor.”

Then follows a very lifelike description of an ordinary day’s work, when no inevitable expedition came in the way, nor any high solemnity or great festival of the saints. “From dawn of day to the sixth hour, and very often to the ninth hour, Ecgbert lay on his couch and opened to his disciples such of the secrets of scripture as suited each. Then he rose, and betook himself to most secret prayer, offering first to the Lord fat burnt-offerings with the incense of rams, and afterward, following the example of the blessed Job, lest by chance his sons should slip into the pit of benediction,[16] offering the Body of Christ and the Blood for all. By this time the vesper hour was coming near, and, except in Lent, all through the year, winter and summer, he took with his disciples a meal, slight but fittingly prepared, not sparing the tongue of the reader, that both kinds of food might bring refreshment. Then you might see the youths piercing one another with shafts prepared, discussing in private what afterwards they are to shoot forth in proper order in public. Does it not seem to you that of this too it might be said,[17] “As an eagle provoketh her young ones to fly, fluttereth over them, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings”?

“Twice in the day did this father of the poor, this great lover and helper of Christ, pour out most secret prayer, watered from the most pure fountain of tears, both knees bent on the ground, hands long raised to heaven in the form of the Cross; once, namely, before taking food, and again before celebrating Compline with all his flock. Which ended, no one of his disciples ever dared commit his limbs to his bed without the master’s blessing laid upon his head.

“He loved all his disciples, but of all he loved Alcuin the most, for Alcuin more closely than any of them followed his example in act and deed. There were two special virtues in Alcuin—one, that he never did anything which he was not quite clear that his master’s approval covered; the other, that whatever devices and temptations the enemy brought to his mind, he told them all straight out to his master without any sense of shame. Thus it came to pass that any stimulus of lust which he ever felt was most gloriously conquered by this wonderful method, dashing the children of Babylon against the stones, bruising the head of the serpent with the heel. He was careful that against him the words of Christ should not be spoken—‘Every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved’; but rather that his lot should be with them of whom it is added—‘But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest that they are wrought in God.’ O true monk without the monk’s vow! how very seldom is thy example followed by one whose vow binds him to it[18].”

In the chapter from which these details are taken the author three times uses the name “Albinus” for his hero, in place of “Alchuinus” with which he began the chapter. Throughout the Life he much more often calls him Albin than Alcuin. We must probably understand that he was known from his boyhood by both names; and it is evident that Albin would be more easy to pronounce than Alcuin, and would not unnaturally be more generally used. On the other hand, it is quite possible that he himself elected to call himself Albin.

If Alcuin took the name Albinus from any English source, the source is not far to seek. The English nation owes to the original Albinus the first suggestion to Bede that he should write the Church History of the English race. Bede tells us this in the Preface to his great work; and we have it still more directly expressed in a letter from him to Albinus in which he speaks of the History as ad quam me scribendam iamdudum instigaveras, and of Albinus as semper amantissimus in Christo pater optimus. He was Abbat of St. Peter and St. Paul, Canterbury, a pupil of Theodore and Hadrian, the latter of whom he succeeded. He greatly helped Bede by sending him full details of the conversion of Kent, “as he had learned the same from written records and from the oral tradition of his predecessors.” Bede sent to him the completed copy of the History, that he might have it transcribed, and informs us that Albinus had no small knowledge of Greek, and knew Latin as well as his native tongue, English. Alcuin may well have taken his name of Albinus from one with whom he had so much in common, who died only two or three years before Alcuin’s birth.

If, on the other hand, Alcuin took the name from some foreign source, again we have not far to seek. In Karl’s first year as King of the Franks he gave a confirmatory charter to “the Monastery of St. Albinus, which is built near to the walls of Angers”. The Tour St. Aubin and the Rue St. Aubin are still to be found at Angers, at the extreme south-east corner of the ancient city. Little is known of this martyr Albinus, and in consequence the Acts of our St. Alban have been transferred to him. At Angers, as at Alcuin’s own Tours, there are remains of a great church of St. Martin; and, as was in early times the case at Tours, the Cathedral is dedicated to St. Maurice. It is possible that Alcuin took his name of Albinus from this local source, but it does not seem at all probable.

Alcuin’s supremacy in wisdom and other virtues caused jealousy among his fellow disciples. This went so far that they could not look at him with unclouded eye or address him with pleasant words. He consulted his master, who by this time was Elcbert (Archbishop of York, 767-78), known to Alcuin as Aelbert, and to us as Albert. The master advised him to try the effect of heaping coals of fire on their heads. He followed this advice, taking care that they should never hear from him a contrary word, and very often yielding to them when their arguments were unsound. This course of conduct he pursued until a complete change took place, and they all rejoiced to acknowledge in him the second master of their studies, next under Albert.

The Life relates at this point an interesting episode, in the description of which we may seem to hear Alcuin himself speaking to us:—

“Alcuin was reading the Gospel of St. John before the master, in company of his fellow disciples. He came to a part of the Gospel which only the pure in heart can comprehend—that part, namely, from where John says that he lay on the Lord’s breast, down to the point at which he relates that Jesus went with His disciples across the brook Cedron.[19] Inebriated with the mystical reading of the Gospel, suddenly, as he sat before the master’s couch, his spirit was carried away in ecstasy, and by those same who once in a ray of sunlight showed before the eyes of the most holy father Benedict the whole world, collected as it were in an enclosure, the whole world was now set before the eyes of Alcuin. And as he looked intently at what he saw, he saw the whole of the enclosure surrounded by a circle of blood. While he was held by this marvellous vision, his fellow disciples gazed at him in wonder, for the blood seemed to have left his face. They tried to rouse him, as one asleep; the noise they made attracted the attention of Albert, who looked at him for some time in silence, and then said, ‘Go on reading, my sons, do not disturb him; if he rests awhile he will be able to follow me more effectively when I expound the passage.’ When the reading was completed, and Albin came to himself again, the father told them all to go except Alcuin. When they were gone, he said, ‘What hast thou seen? I beg thee, do not hide it.’ Alcuin wished to keep secret what he had seen, fearing to fall into the pitfall of elation; so he said, ‘Why, my lord father?’ The blessed man said again, ‘Do not, my son, do not hide it from me. It is not from vain curiosity that I require this of you, but for your own good.’ Alcuin saw that he could not keep it secret, and he told, humbly, how he had seen the whole world. Then the father said to him, ‘See, my son, see that thou tellest not this vision to any but that one whom after my decease thou shalt hold to be the most faithful to thy person. And charge him to keep it secret up to the time of thy death.’ Acting on this counsel, he told it only to Sigulf[20] during his lifetime. If any one desires to know how the whole world could be seen in one enclosure, he may turn to the book of Dialogues of the holy Gregory[21]; and in the meantime he may know that it was not the heaven and the earth that were contracted into a small space, but the mind of the seer that was dilated, so that when rapt in the Lord he could without difficulty see everything that was under God. Perhaps some one inquiring further may ask why under this figure of an enclosure, or why surrounded by blood? He may know that the Blood of Christ surrounds the fold of the holy Church, so that from the rising of the sun to the setting thereof those who are redeemed by His Passion can say the words which, without doubt, dominated the mind of Albin when he read before the master: ‘O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is gracious, and His mercy endureth for ever.’[22] The whole world, then, is seen in one enclosure surrounded by the Blood of Christ; for all that the holy fathers have done and have written figuratively since the beginning of the world is unlocked by the Passion of Christ alone, who is the lion of the tribe of Juda, the root of David. But if by the encircled enclosure any should wish to be understood the life of his own carnal crimes surrounded by blood, thus shown to him that it may be trodden under foot by him, let that interpretation be left to his own judgement.”

Alcuin had been tonsured in early years. He was ordained deacon at York on the day of the Purification of the holy Mary, in or about the year 768. Elcbert, who had been for some time in bad health, felt that his death was drawing nigh, and he gave to Alcuin a sketch of the course of life which he wished him to pursue. The writer gives us a report of his actual words, stating that “they are now known”; this means, presumably, that here also Alcuin had communicated them to Sigulf, to be made public only after his death. They run thus:—“My will is that you go to Rome, and on the way back visit France.[23] For I know that you will do much good there. Christ will be the leader of your journey, guiding you and controlling you on your arrival, that you may demolish that most nefarious heresy which will attempt to set forth Christ as adoptive man, and that you may be the firmest defender and the clearest preacher of the faith in the Holy Trinity.[24] You will persevere in the land of your peregrination, illumining the souls of many.”

The holy father, Bishop Elcbert, after blessing him with the benedictions of his predecessor above named, migrated to God on the eighth day of November, 780. “The pious Albinus mourned with tears, as for his mother, and would not take comfort. Endowed in hereditary right with the holy benedictions of the fathers,[25] he took pains to multiply exceedingly the talent of his lord.[26] He taught many in Britain, and not few later in France. It was now that he associated with him a man dear to God, remarkable for the nobility of mind and of body, Sigulf, the presbyter, Warden of the Church of the City of York, to remain with him perpetually.[27] Sigulf had gone as a boy to France with his uncle Autbert the presbyter, and by him had been taken to Rome to learn the ecclesiastical order; he had then been sent to the city of Metz to learn chanting. There he worked hard for some time, in great poverty, but with much profit. After the holy man, his uncle, migrated to the Lord, he came back to his own land.” We can almost see and hear Sigulf getting these little facts about himself and his uncle incorporated in the Life of Alcuin.

“When the Almighty God willed to glorify France with spiritual riches, as already with earthly riches, granting to the land a King after His own heart, a man of faith, fortitude, love of wisdom, and ineffable beauty of body, namely Karl, most illustrious in these respects, He put it into the mind of Albinus that he should fulfil the counsel and command of his father Albert, by going to Rome and then visiting France.

“By the command of Eanbald I, the Archbishop of York, the successor of Elcbert, he went to Rome to obtain the pallium for the archbishop from the Apostolic—that is, Hadrian I. On his way back with the pallium he met King Karl in the city of Parma.[28] The king addressed him with great persuasiveness and many prayers, begging that after completing his embassage he would come and join him in France. The king had become acquainted with him some years before, for Alcuin had been sent on a legation to him by the archbishop of the time.”

We may interrupt our author’s narrative at this point to state that the fact and the date of this former visit to Karl are recorded in the Life of Hadrian I, as also the further fact, not here hinted at, that Karl on that occasion sent Alcuin on to Rome. “In the year 773 Karl sent to Hadrian an embassy, consisting of the most holy bishop George,[29] the religious abbat Uulfhard,[30] and the king’s favourite counsellor Albinus.”

We may now return to the author of the Life. He tells us, to quote his own words, that when Karl begged Alcuin to come to him, Alcuin desired to do what would be useful, and therefore asked permission of his own king, Alfwald, and of his archbishop, Eanbald I, to leave his mastership of the School of York. He obtained permission, but on condition that he should in time come back to them. Under Christ’s guidance he came to Karl. Karl embraced him as his father,[31] by whom he had been introduced to the liberal arts, in the study of which he could be somewhat cooled, but in his fervour he could never be too completely saturated with them. After Alcuin had spent some little time with him, he gave him two monasteries, that of Bethlehem, otherwise called Ferrières,[32] and that of St. Lupus[33] of Troyes.

CHAPTER II

Alcuin finally leaves England.—The Adoptionist heresy.—Alcuin’s retirement to Tours.—His knowledge of secrets.—Karl and the three kings his sons.—Fire at St. Martin’s, Tours.—References to the life of St. Martin.—Alcuin’s writings.—His interview with the devil.—His last days.

At length Alcuin felt that he ought not, without the authority of his own king and bishop, to desert the place in which he had been educated, tonsured, and ordained deacon. He asked leave of the great king to return to his fatherland. Karl received his request in a flattering manner. We may suppose that Alcuin retained an accurate recollection of the pleasant words and of his own answer, and reported them eventually to Sigulf, probably with a feeling that he had made a Yorkshire rejoinder to the king’s rather pointed balance-sheet. On a formal occasion such as this, they probably addressed each other as scholars, in the Latin tongue, so that in reading the Life we seem to hear them speaking the actual words reported. The manner of address we may take to be correctly represented.

“Karl. Illustrious master,—of earthly riches we have enough, wherewith it is our joy to honour thee. With thy riches, long desired by us and scarce anywhere found, we pray thee illumine us in the wealth of thy piety.

“Alcuin. My lord king,—I am not inclined to oppose thy will, when it shall have been confirmed by the authority of the canons. Endowed in my paternal country with no small heritage, I am delighted to fling it away and stand here a pauper, so that I may be of use to thee. Thy part is only this,—to obtain for me the permission of my own king and bishop.”

Karl was at last persuaded to let him go; but he was not satisfied until it was settled that when Alcuin came back again he would stay with him always.

Some years after he came back to Karl a second time, he was placed at the head of the Monastery of St. Martin of Tours. In a godly manner he ruled this with his other monasteries. He corrected the lives of those under him as far as he could. Some were untamed when they came under his rule, but he so bestirred himself that they became reasonable, of honest morals, and seekers after truth. That is the author’s statement. We shall hear more on the subject in the course of our study.

“Meantime the heresy hateful to God, which flourished in the parts of Spain, asserting that the Son of God is adoptive according to the flesh, is brought to the ears of Karl. The great king, in all things catholic, looked into this, and strove with all his might that the seed of the devil should be destroyed, and the tares completely eradicated from the wheat of God. Summoning to him Albinus his instructor from Tours, and the wretched Felix the constructor of this heresy from the parts of Spain, he collected a great synod of bishops in the imperial palace of Aix. Seated himself in the midst, he ordered Felix, who was most unwilling, to dispute in argument with the most learned Albinus on the nature of the Son of God according to the flesh. What silence reigned among the bishops! How clear and unanswerable, with the authority of Karl, was the master’s confession and defence of the faith! Felix tried to hide himself in all sorts of obscurities; Albinus pierced him with more and more darts, at such length that he ‘went through almost all the cities of Israel[34] till the Son of Man should come’. Little else was done from the second to the seventh day of the week. At length his stupidity was laid bare to all. The heresy was confuted by the whole of the bishops with apostolic authority. To himself alone his folly was foully hidden, up to the point when he read with lamentable voice the words of Cyril the martyr, turned against him by Albinus: That nature which was corrupted by the devil is exalted above the angels by the triumph of Christ, and is set down at the right hand of the Father. When he read this sentence, he at last testified by voice and by excessive weeping that he had found himself out, that he had acted impiously. Any one who thirsts to know this more perfectly should read the master’s letters to Felix and Elipantus, and theirs to him. He will then at once learn what he desires to know.

“By permission of Christ,” the biographer continues, “I have up to this point written a little about the early part of the Life of Albinus, facts that I have supposed to be not known to all. I have not thought of inserting in this little work facts about him which all know. From this point I shall attempt to trace to his last days my shaken reed of a pen, though it be with contemptible roughness.

“When he felt himself affected by old age, and increasingly by one infirmity,[35] he informed King Karl that he wished to retire from the world, as he had long had it in mind to do. He asked leave to live the monastic life, in accordance with the Rule of St. Benedict, at St. Boniface of Fulda,[36] and to distribute among his disciples the monasteries which had been granted to him, if that might be done. But the king, terrible and pious, with all regard for Alcuin’s request, denied the one part, while he received the other gladly. He begged that he would reside at Tours, in perfect quiet and in the greatest honour, and would not refuse to continue the spiritual care of Karl himself and of all the holy Church committed to him; the secular burdens which he had borne, the king, at his request, most willingly portioned out among his disciples. Albinus acted as the most wise king had asked, seeking what would be useful, not to himself but to many; and at Tours he awaited his last day. His manner of life was not inferior to the monastic life which he had desired. He abounded in fastings, in prayers, in mortification of the flesh, in almsgivings, in much celebration of psalms and masses,[37] and in the other virtues with which it is possible for human nature to be adorned. When he had fasted till evening, there very frequently was sent from heaven to his mouth such sweetness as no human speech could utter; whatever he then willed, he could dictate most rapidly without any effort, so that he could say,—I have loved, Lord, Thy commandments above gold and precious stone; how sweet are thy words unto my mouth, yea, sweeter than honey and the honeycomb. In his youth he had not loved the study of the Psalms so much as another kind of reading; in his old age he could never have too much of them. As has been described in the case of his master,[38] he poured forth most secret prayer during the day, with long extension of his hands in the form of a cross, and with much groaning, for he very rarely found tears. This practice he passed on to his disciples, of whom the most noble was Sigulf, ‘the little old fellow,’ and the magnanimous Withso[39]; after them, Fredegisus[40] and his companions. In his latest days there clung to him assiduously Raganard and Waldramn, who still survive; Adalbert of blessed memory, who was with him as much as he could, being at that time the son of Sigulf, afterwards a venerated father as Abbat of Ferrières; and many others, the names of all of whom I trust that Christ knows. These with all circumspection earnestly studied to do nothing in his presence with which he could find fault, and very often in his absence too. For they knew that he was in close communion with God, and was enlightened by His Spirit; and though with his bodily eyes he could no longer see clearly, from old age and infirmity, they feared that nothing which they did escaped his knowledge.

“Filled as he was with the Spirit, he foretold to some their future, as he did to Raganard about Osulf.[41] This Raganard had in his sleep a horrible vision, which it is better not to describe. He told it the next day to the father, in fear lest it referred to himself. The father knew that it referred not to Raganard but to Osulf. With great grief he spoke thus: ‘O Osulf, thou wretched one, how oft have I warned thee, how oft corrected! Much labour did I devote to thine uncle, that he should reform and begin to walk in the way of the commandments of God; and I told him that if he did not he would be smitten with the plague of leprosy; which thing happened to him. And to thee, my son, I predict of Osulf, of whom is this vision, that neither in this land, nor in the land of his birth, shall he die.’ The prediction was true; he died in Lombardy.

“This same Raganard, unknown to everybody, tried himself by vigils of too long duration and by an excess of abstinence; by this intemperance he fell into a most dangerous fever. Father Albinus came to visit him, and sent out of the house all except Sigulf. Then he rebuked Raganard thus: ‘Why hast thou tried to act so intemperately, without advice of any? I knew that thou didst wish to act thus, and therefore it was that I ordered thee to sleep in the dwelling in which I sleep. But thou didst immediately, when all were asleep, secretly light a candle, conceal it in a lantern, and going to that place didst watch through the whole night.’ And then all that he did there secretly, known to God alone, he told him of, and added:—‘When thou didst go with me to the refectory, and I bade thee drink wine, in the most crafty way thou didst say—I have drunk sufficiently, my lord father, with my uncle. But when thou didst come to thy uncle, and he too bade thee drink wine, thou didst say thou hadst drunk with me. Thy will was to delude us, and thou art deceived. When thou hast risen up from the fever, take thou care never to attempt anything of this kind again.’

“When Raganard heard this, he turned red, and was in great fear, knowing that he was caught. In wonder that his secret deeds could not escape the knowledge of Albinus, he asked how was this made known. To this day he bears witness that no man knew it before it was revealed; God alone. He repented, and for the rest of Alcuin’s life he never attempted anything of the kind without his advice and command.

“It very often happened that when messengers were coming to Alcuin from the king and other friends, while they were yet a long way off, he would tell of their coming and of the cause of their coming, what they brought with them, what they wished to take back. Certain disciples, when they heard him speak thus, set it down to the folly of an old man, till it was proved to be true. Benedict[42], the man of the Lord, who beyond all monks was bound in intimacy with Alcuin, used often to come to him from the parts of Gothia, to obtain advice for himself and his monks. On one occasion Benedict wished to come secretly, unknown to any one at Tours, so that Alcuin should not know till he stood in the doorway. When he was by no means near Tours, Albinus summoned an attendant, and said to him, ‘Hasten to meet Benedict in such and such a place, and tell him to come to me quickly.’ The messenger did as he was told, and on the third day arrived at the place, found Benedict there, and delivered his message. Astonished that his plan was discovered, Benedict went with all haste to Tours. When they had joyously kissed one another, Benedict, the reverend father, began suppliantly, ‘Lord father, who foretold to thee my arrival?’ He answered, ‘No man told me by word of mouth.’ Benedict asked again, ‘Who then, my lord? Perhaps thou hast heard in a letter from some one?’ He replied, ‘Of a truth, not in a letter.’ Again Benedict asked, ‘If neither from the words of any man, nor from any man’s letter, thou knewest this beforehand, pray, my father, in what way didst thou know it?—tell me.’ Albinus said, ‘Do not interrogate me further on this.’ There the matter ended. When the venerable man Benedict was minded to return, he asked Albinus to tell him in what special words he prayed, when he prayed for himself. Albinus said, ‘This is what I ask of Christ:—Lord, grant me to understand my sins, and to make true confession, and to do fitting penance; and grant unto me remission of my sins.’ The godly man Benedict said, ‘Let us add, my father, to this thy prayer, one word, namely this, after remission, save me.’ Albinus rejoiced, and said, ‘Let it be so, most reverent son, let it be so.’ Benedict then asked another question, would he tell him what were the words that silently moved his lips when he saw the Cross and bent before it? Albinus answered, ‘Thy Cross we adore, O Lord; Thy glorious Passion we recall. Have mercy on us, Thou Who didst die for us.’ Albinus then saw him on his way for a short distance, and sent him back rejoicing to his own place and people.”

The biographer next sets before us a remarkable picture of the four most important personages of the time.

“The great king and powerful emperor Karl, wishing to offer prayer and to have some mutually desired conversation with Alcuin, paid a visit to the tomb of the holy Martin at Tours, with his sons Charles, Pepin, and Louis. The emperor took Alcuin by the hand, and said to him privately, ‘My lord master, which of these sons of mine does it seem to thee that I shall have as my successor in this honour to which God has raised me, all unworthy?’ Alcuin turned his face towards Louis, the youngest of the three, and the most remarkable for his humility, on account of which he was regarded by many as of little account, and said, ‘In the humble Louis thou shalt have an illustrious successor.’ The emperor alone heard what he said. But when, later on, sitting on the spot where he wished to be buried, Alcuin saw these same three kings[43] enter the Church of St. Stephen for prayer, with head erect, and Louis with head bent, he said to those who stood by—‘Do you see that Louis is more humble than his brothers? You will most certainly see him the most exalted successor of his father.’ When with his own hand he administered to them the Communion of the Body of Christ and the Blood, the same Louis, most noted above all for humility, bent before the holy father and kissed his hand.[44] The man of the Lord said to Sigulf who stood by, ‘Whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. Certainly the Frankish land shall rejoice to have this man emperor after his father.’ That this has taken place, the biographer adds, we both see and rejoice.[45] They who seemed to be cedars are cast down, and the fruitful olive tree in the house of God is exalted.[46]

“The father Alcuin had with great care instructed Karl in liberal arts and in divine scripture, so that he became the most learned of all kings of the Franks who have been since the coming of Christ. He taught him, also, which of the Psalms he should sing throughout his whole life for various occasions; for times of penitence, with litany and entreaties and prayers; for times of special prayer; of praising God; of any tribulation; and for his being moved to exercise himself in divine praise. Any one who wishes to know all this may read it in the little book which he wrote to Karl on the principles of prayer.”[47]

At this point in his narrative the biographer relates the scrape into which “the little old fellow” got in connexion with his secret study of Vergil, already described on [page 2]. As a further instance of Alcuin’s remarkable knowledge of what was going on, he adds the interesting little story about a present of wine to Cormery which will be found on p. 223. Then comes the following amusing account, with its revelation of a dislike of Karl’s favourites the foreigners, a dislike which Eginhard thus frankly reports in his vivid picture of the great King,[48] “He loved foreigners, and took great pains to attract them to him and to maintain them, so much so that the multitude of them not unreasonably seemed a heavy burden, not to the palace only but to the kingdom. His greatness of mind, however, was such, that he was not troubled by a burden of this kind; indeed even great inconveniences he regarded as compensated by the praise won by liberality and by the reward of good report.”

This is the story. The presbyter Aigulf[49], an Anglo-Saxon[50] himself too, came to Tours to visit the father. When he was standing at the door of Alcuin’s dwelling, there happened to be four of the brethren of Tours talking together. When they saw him, they said one to another, not imagining that he knew anything of their language, “Here’s a Briton, or a Scot[51], come to see that other Briton inside. O God, deliver this monastery from these Britons! Like bees coming back to the mother-bee, these all come to this man of ours!” What would we not give to have this in the words in which they spoke it, instead of in the author’s Latin. The presbyter went into Alcuin’s dwelling, and, after other matters, told him what he had heard. “Do you know which they are?” Alcuin asked. “Indeed I do not. I could not for shame look at them when they said that.” Alcuin said, “I am sure I know who they are.” He called in some of the brethren by name, and said, “These are they.” Greatly grieved by their folly, Alcuin yet spared them, saying, “May Christ, the Son of God, spare them.” Then he gave them each a cup of wine to drink, and without severity sent them away. Aigulf afterwards made diligent inquiry, and found that they were the right men. We of to-day may remark that Alcuin evidently knew the characters of his pupils; but his ideas of discipline differed from ours. We should not have let them know that we had heard personal remarks of that kind; and we should not have given them glasses of wine. We may remember the words of Archbishop Temple to Bishop Creighton, when the Bishop had received the late Mr. John Kensit for an interview at Fulham, and had given him tea. “It was all right to receive the man; but you shouldn’t ha’ given him tea.”

As we have seen, the biographer on the whole confines himself to those parts of Alcuin’s Life which were not of common knowledge. But there was one story of sufficient importance in his judgement to be related at length, although it was well known. We may well take the same view, and be grateful to our author for having departed from his self-imposed limitations.

“I ought not”, he writes, “to pass over in silence one fact which many know. The Keeper of the Sepulchre of St. Martin, who provided the wax and all the vestments which pertained to the basilica itself, entering with a lighted candle the sacristy where they were kept, fixed the candle on a spike, and when he left he forgot to take it with him. He locked the door and went away. The burning candle fell upon some wax and sent a great flame which set fire to the vestments hanging on the pegs; and the vestments sent the flame up to the roof.[52] When the warden saw this, he fled with the key to another monastery.[53] People rushed from all sides; they beat at the door, but all their efforts failed to burst it open. The clerks threw out of the windows any valuables they had in their abode. The Church of St. Martin was denuded of some vestments, and no one expected anything but the burning of the whole monastery. The roof was all stripped of lead. Albinus came; he was now blind. He asked what was being done. One of his disciples, his ‘little old fellow’, said, ‘Come away, father, or you will be killed by the lead they are throwing down or burned to death.’ When Albinus was willing to go, Vetulus said to him, ‘My lord father, go to the sepulchre of the lord Martin, and intercede for us.’ Albinus did as was suggested, and when he got to the place, he stretched himself on the ground in the form of a cross, and uttered groans heavenward. As soon as Albinus cast himself on the ground, in some wonderful and incredible way the whole fire was put out, as completely as if extinguished by a great river. When the clerks saw this, they rushed in joyous stupefaction to the spot where Albinus lay prostrate before the sepulchre of St. Martin, in the form of a cross, praying to God for them. They raised him from the ground, blessing God who through the prayers of Albinus had saved the whole monastery of Saint Martin from being consumed by fire. These be thy worthy examples, holy Martin, who once when thou wouldest escape the fire couldest not; turned to God in prayer thou hast extinguished this fire that threatened us. Lofty of a truth is the faith that by its ardour can extinguish globes of fire. Nor is it a matter of wonder that the elements leave their proper force at the prayers and commands of Albinus, since he rests in the heart of Him who loves them that love Him, and permits them not to be singed by the flame when they walk in fire. Thee in these we adore, Thee we glorify, Thee we laud, who, as Thou hast deigned to make promises to Thy servants who keep Thy commandments, hast shown them forth most clearly by Thy works in Thine own Albinus. Thou hast said, O Christ Jesus, whatsoever ye shall ask of Me in My name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.”

It will have been noticed that this passage from the Life attributes to St. Martin a failure to prevent the progress of a fire. The reference appears at first sight to be to the eleventh chapter of the Life of St. Martin by Sulpicius Severus[54], written some four hundred years before the fire here described, and published in the lifetime of St. Martin, whom Severus had visited at Tours for the special purpose of learning the facts of his life.

“In a certain town, Martin set fire to a very ancient and famous pagan shrine. A house was attached to the walls of the temple, and the wind blew the globes of fire on to this house. When Martin saw this, he climbed rapidly to the roof of the house, and faced the flames. Then you would see the flame turn back in a marvellous manner against the force of the wind, the two elements fighting the one against the other. Thus by the virtue of Martin the fire operated only where it was bidden.”

This is the only account in the Life of St. Martin to which the remark in the text could apply. But, as a matter of fact, the occasion referred to was quite different from this. The little story is an interesting example of the keenness of criticism in those very early times, and of the need of immediate corrections.

The contemporary readers of the Life were well aware of the fact that Martin himself was once half-burned. Knowing this, they fastened on the passage quoted, and spoke in a depreciatory way of Martin. They asked how could he be so great as to prevent houses being burned, if he was not great enough to prevent himself from being set on fire and nearly burned to death. These depreciatory remarks came to the ears of Sulpicius, and the very next day[55], he sat down and wrote a letter to the presbyter Eusebius, to tell the actual facts of the other story with which unfavourable comparison has been made. The facts were as follows:—

The saint was visiting his diocese in midwinter. A bed had been prepared for him in a vestry, which was warmed by a fire below the floor. The pavement was rough and dilapidated. They had made for the saint a specially soft and comfortable bed of straw, but his practice was to sleep on the bare ground. Not being able to endure the blandient comfort of the straw, he threw it away and slept on the ground. By midnight the fire below had got at the straw through the crevices in the pavement, and Martin awoke to find the vestry full of fire. Then came, as he told Sulpicius, the temptation of the devil. Martin tried to escape, instead of turning to prayer. He rushed to the door and struggled with the bolt, in vain. The flames caught his dress and set it on fire. He fell down, and then remembered to pray. The flames felt the change and spared him. The monks, who had heard the fire crackling and roaring, burst open the door and looked for his dead body; they found him safe and sound. He confessed to Sulpicius, not without groaning, that the devil had for the time overcome him. In these modern times, to lie down on the floor is a common precaution against being smothered by the smoke in a burning room.

This Life of St. Martin is very interesting reading. It is too tempting to give the substance of the chapter previous to the one given above. The saint was at his usual work of destroying a very ancient temple. When he had accomplished this, he set to work to fell a pine-tree which stood near. The chief priest and the pagan crowd drew the line at that, and would not allow it. Martin told them there was nothing worthy of worship in a piece of wood; it was dedicated to a demon and it must come down. Thereupon a crafty pagan, seeing his way to getting rid of this objectionable destroyer of temples, and regarding the sacred tree as well lost for such a gain, proposed a bargain. “If you have sufficient confidence in your God whom you say you serve, we will ourselves cut down the tree, and it shall fall upon you; if your Lord is with you, as you say, you will escape with your life.” The bargain was struck on both sides. The tree leaned in a certain direction, so that there was no doubt where it would fall. Martin was tied by the rustics in the right place, and they began to cut with their axes. The tree began to nod, leaned more and more to the precise spot they had selected. At last they had cut deep enough; the crash of the rending trunk was heard; the monks turned pale; the saint raised his hand and made the sign of the cross; at the moment a whirlwind came and blew the tree far to one side.

We must now return to the life of St. Martin’s faithful follower, Alcuin.

“This also must be mentioned to the praise of the Lord, that very frequently many infirm people, when they came to Albinus and received his benediction with faith, recovered bodily health. On a certain occasion, as is reported by some of the chief authorities, a poor man came, having his eyesight obstructed by a grievous dimness. He reached the door of the outer dwelling of Albinus, and begged that water be given him with which his eyes might be bathed; for he said it had been revealed to him that if he could wash his eyes with some of it he would recover his sight.[56] Unknown to Albinus, some of the water in which he had washed his own face and eyes was secretly given to the poor man who begged for water. The poor man bathed his eyes with the water, in full faith; the dimness disappeared, and he recovered his clearness of sight. We, too, are enlightened by thy sweat, father, and the sins of our souls are washed by thy pious doctrine. Thou, too, didst scarce see anything with thy bodily sight, but wast always engaged in lightening the eyes of others; and those whom thou couldest not enlighten in bodily presence thou didst in absence instruct by letters, writing many things profitable to the whole church.

“For at the request of Karl he wrote a most useful book on the Holy Trinity; also on rhetoric, dialectic, and music. He wrote to Gundrad on the nature of the soul. At the most honourable request of the ladies Gisla and Rotruda, he composed a remarkable book on the Gospel of St. John, partly his own and partly taken from the holy Augustine. He wrote also on four Epistles of Paul, to the Ephesians, to Titus, to Philemon, and to the Hebrews;[57] to Fredegisus on the Psalms;[58] to Count Wido[59] homilies on the principal vices and virtues; to his own Sigulf very useful notes on Genesis; on the Proverbs of Solomon, on Ecclesiastes, on the Song of Songs clearly, briefly, indescribably. Under the names Frank and Saxon[60] he wrote a most able book on grammar in the form of question and answer. He collected two volumes of homilies from many works of the Fathers. He wrote on orthography. On the 118th Psalm (our 119th) he wrote with a pen of gold. There are many other writings in which any one who reads and studies them attentively will find no small edification, as in the letters which he wrote to many persons. In these and like works he spent the remainder of his days, living on earth the life of heaven. Preparing himself in his latest days for the coming of the Son of Man, that he might go in with Him to the wedding, he washed every night his couch with tears,[61] always fortifying himself with the intercessions of the saints, whose solemnities he regularly celebrated, lest he should be pierced by any darts of the ancient enemy, who never could steal into his dwelling so secretly as not to be at once detected by him and driven out by the sign of the Cross.

“On a certain night, when he desired to pour forth prayer in secret after his wont, with chanting of Psalms, he was oppressed by very heavy sleep. But he rose from his couch, and put on his cape; and when again he was oppressed with sleep, he took off all his clothes except his shirt and drawers. The sleepiness continuing, he took a censer, and going to the place where fire was kept burning, he filled it with live coal and put incense on it, and a sweet odour filled the chamber. In that hour the devil presented himself to him in bodily form, as it were a large man, very black and misshapen and bearded, hurling at him darts of blasphemy. ‘Why dost thou act the hypocrite, Alcuin?’[62] he asked. ‘Why dost thou attempt to appear just before men, when thou art a deceiver and a great dissimulator? Dost thou suppose that for these feignings of thine Christ can hold thee to be acceptable?’ But the soldier of Christ, invincible, standing with David in the tower[63] builded for an armoury, wherein there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men, said with a heavenly voice, ‘The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear? He is the strength of my life; of whom then shall I be afraid? Hear my crying, O Lord; incline thine ear to my calling, my King and my God, for unto Thee do I make my prayer.’ With these and other verses of the Psalms the enemy was at length put to flight; Albinus completed his prayer and went to rest.[64] At that time only one of his disciples, Waltdramn by name, who is still alive, was watching with him; he saw all this from a place of concealment, a witness of this thing that took place.”

St. Martin himself once had a meeting with the devil[65]. There came into his cell a purple light, and one stood in the midst thereof clad in a royal robe, having on his head a diadem of gold and precious stones, his shoes overlaid with gold, his countenance serene, his face full of joy, looking like anything but the devil. The devil spoke first. “Know, Martin, whom you behold. I am Christ. I am about to descend from heaven to the world. I willed first to manifest myself to thee.” Martin held his tongue. “Why dost thou doubt, Martin, whom thou seest? I am Christ.” Then the Spirit revealed that this was the devil, not God, and he answered, “The Lord Jesus did not predict that He would come again resplendent with purple and diadem. I will not believe that Christ has come, except in the form in which He suffered, bearing the stigmata of the Cross.” Thereupon the apparition vanished like smoke, leaving so very bad a smell that there was no doubt it was the devil. “This account I had from the mouth of Martin himself,” Sulpicius adds.

“The father used a little wine, in accordance with the apostle’s precept, not for the pleasure of the palate, but by reason of his bodily weakness.[66] In every kind of way he avoided idleness; either he read, or he wrote, or he taught his disciples, or he gave himself to prayer and the chanting of Psalms, yielding only to unavoidable necessities of the body. He was a father to the poor, more humble than the humble, an inviter to piety of the rich, lofty to the proud, a discerner of all, and a marvellous comforter. He celebrated every day many solemnities of masses[67] with honourable diligence, having proper masses deputed for each day of the week. Moreover, on the Lord’s day, never at any time after the light of dawn began to appear did he allow himself to slumber, but swiftly preparing himself as deacon with his own priest Sigulf he performed the solemnities of special masses till the third hour, and then with very great reverence he went to the public mass. His disciples, when they were in other places, especially when they assisted ad opus Dei, carefully studied that no cause of blame be seen in them by him.

“The time had come when Albinus had a desire to depart and be with Christ. He prayed with all his will that if it might be, he should pass from the world on the day on which the Holy Spirit was seen to come upon the apostles in tongues of fire, and filled their hearts. Saying for himself the vesper office, in the place which he had chosen as his resting-place after death, namely, near the Church of St. Martin, he sang through the evangelic hymn of the holy Mary with this antiphon[68], ‘O Key of David, and sceptre of the house of Israel, who openest and none shutteth, shuttest and none openeth, come and lead forth from the house of his prison this fettered one, sitting in darkness and the shadow of death.’ Then he said the Lord’s Prayer. Then several Psalms—Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks. O how amiable are Thy dwellings, Thou Lord of hosts. Blessed are they that dwell in Thy house. Unto Thee lift I up mine eyes. One thing I have desired of the Lord. Unto Thee, O Lord, will I lift up my soul.

“He spent the season of Lent, according to his custom, in the most worthy manner, with all contrition of flesh and spirit and purifying of habit. Every night he visited the basilicas of the saints which are within the monastery of St. Martin,[69] washing himself clean of his sins with heavy groans. When the solemnity of the Resurrection of the Lord was accomplished, on the night of the Ascension he fell on his bed, oppressed with languor even unto death, and could not speak. On the third day before his departure he sang with exultant voice his favourite antiphon, ‘O key of David,’ and recited the verses mentioned above. On the day of Pentecost, the matin office having been performed, at the very hour at which he had been accustomed to attend masses, at opening dawn, the holy soul of Albinus is[70] released from the body, and by the ministry of the celestial deacons, having with them the first martyr Stephen and the archdeacon Laurence, with an army of angels, he is led to Christ, whom he loved, whom he sought; and in the bliss of heaven he has for ever the fruition of the glory of Him whom in this world he so faithfully served.”

The Annals of Pettau enable us to fill in some details of Alcuin’s death. Pettau was not far from Salzburg, and therefore the monastery was likely to be well informed. Arno of Salzburg, Alcuin’s great admiration and his devoted personal friend, would see to it that in his neighbourhood all ecclesiastics knew the details. The seizure on the occasion of his falling on his bed was a paralytic stroke. It occurred, according to the Annals from which we are quoting, on the fifth day of the week on the eighth of the Ides of May, that is, on May 8; but in that year, 804, Ascension Day fell on May 9, so that for the eighth of the Ides we must read the seventh of the Ides. The seizure took place at vesper tide, after sunset. He lived on till May 19, Whitsunday, on which day he died, just as the day broke.

“On that night,” to return to the Life, “above the church of the holy Martin there was seen an inestimable clearness of splendour, so that to persons at a distance it seemed that the whole was on fire. By some, that splendour was seen through the whole night, to others it appeared three times in the night. Joseph the Archbishop of Tours testified that he and his companions saw this throughout the night. Many that are still sound in body testify the same. To more persons, however, this brightness appeared in the same manner, not on that but on a former night, namely, on the night of the first Sunday after the Ascension.

“At that same hour there was displayed to a certain hermit in Italy the army of the heavenly deacons, sounding forth the ineffable praises of Christ in the air; in the midst of whom Alchuin[71] stood, clothed with a most splendid dalmatic, entering with them into heaven to minister with perennial joy to the Eternal Pontiff. This hermit on that same day of Pentecost told what he had seen to one of the brethren of Tours, who was making his accustomed way to visit the thresholds of the Apostles.[72] The hermit asked him these questions,—‘Who is that Abbat that lives at Tours, in the monastery of the holy Martin? By what name is he called? And was he well in body when you left?’ The brother replied, ‘He is called Alchuin, and he is the best teacher in all France. When I started on my way hither, I left him well.’ The solitary made rejoinder, with tears, that he was indeed enjoying the very happiest health; and he told him what he had seen at day-break that day. When the brother got back to Tours, he related what he had heard.

“Father Sigulf, with certain others, washed the body of the father with all honour, and placed it on a bier. Now Sigulf had at the time a great pain in the head, but being by faith sound in mind, he found a ready cure for his head. Raising his eyes above the couch of the master, he saw the comb[73] with which he was wont to comb his head. Taking it in his hands he said, ‘I believe, Lord Jesus, that if I combed my head with this my master’s comb, my head would at once be cured by his merits.’ The moment he drew the comb across his head, that part of the head which it touched was immediately cured, and thus by combing his head all round he lost the pain completely. Another of his disciples, Eangist by name, was grievously afflicted with immense pain in his teeth. By Sigulf’s advice he touched his teeth with the comb, and forthwith, because he did it in faith, he received a cure by the merits of Alchuin.

“When Joseph, the bishop of the city of Tours, a man good and beloved of God, heard that the blessed Alchuin was dead, he came to the spot immediately with his clerks, and washing Alchuin’s eyes with his tears, he kissed him frequently. He advised, moreover, using wise counsel, that he should not be buried outside, in the place where the father himself had willed, but with all possible honour within the basilica of the holy Martin, that the bodies of those whose souls are united in heaven should on earth lie in one home. And thus it was done. Above his tomb was placed, as he had directed, a title which he had dictated in his lifetime, engraved on a plate of bronze let into the wall.”[74]

The simple epitaph, apart from the title, ran thus:—

“Here doth rest the lord Alchuuin the Abbat, who died in peace on the fourteenth of the Kalends of June. When you read, O all ye who pass by, pray for him and say, The Lord grant unto him eternal rest.”

CHAPTER III

The large bulk of Alcuin’s letters and other writings.—The main dates of his life.—Bede’s advice to Ecgbert.—Careless lives of bishops.—No parochial system.—Inadequacy of the bishops’ oversight.—Great monasteries to be used as sees for new bishoprics, and evil monasteries to be suppressed.—Election of abbats and hereditary descent.—Evils of pilgrimages.—Daily Eucharists.

We in the diocese of Bristol have a special right to study and to make much of the letters of Alcuin. Our own great historian, William of Malmesbury, had in the library of Malmesbury from the year 1100 and onwards an important collection of these letters, from which he quotes frequently in support of the historical statements which he makes. More than that, we know of some of the letters of Alcuin only from the quotations from them thus made by William in this diocese some 800 years ago. This is specially stated by Abbat Froben, of Ratisbon, who edited the letters of Alcuin 140 years ago.

The letters of Alcuin are addressed to an emperor, to kings, queens, popes, patriarchs, archbishops, dukes, and others; so that of Alcuin’s political importance there can be no question. As to his learning, William of Malmesbury pays him the great compliment of naming him along with our own Aldhelm and with Bede. “Of all the Angles,” he says,[75] “of whom I have read, Alcuin was, next to the holy Aldhelm and Bede, certainly the most learned.”

Alcuin was born in Northumbria in or about the year 735. He left England to live in France in 782, returned for a time in 792, and left finally in 793. He died in 804. We can thus see how he stands in regard of date to those with whom we have dealt in former lectures. Aldhelm and Wilfrith died in 709, only about a quarter of a century before Alcuin’s birth. Bede died, according to the usual statement[76], in 735, the year of Alcuin’s birth. Boniface was martyred in Holland in 755, when Alcuin was twenty years old.

As in the case of Gregory and of Boniface, who have been the subjects of the last two courses of lectures, the letters of Alcuin are the most important—or among the most important—sources of information for the history of the times. The letters are 236 in number, and they fill 373 columns of close small print in the large volumes of Migne’s series. The letters of Boniface are not half so numerous, and they occupy considerably less than one-third of the space in the same print.

The letters of Alcuin, great as is their number and reach, form but a small part of his writings. His collected works are six times as large as his letters. His commentaries and treatises on the Holy Scriptures are much more lengthy than his collected letters, more than two-thirds as long again. His dogmatic writings are not far from half as long again as his letters. His book on Sacraments and kindred subjects is about two-thirds as long as his letters. His biographies of saints, his poems, his treatises on teaching and learning, are all together nearly as long as the letters; and there is almost the same bulk of works which are attributed to him on evidence of a less conclusive character.

Put briefly, this was his life. He was a boy at my own school, the Cathedral School of York, a school which had the credit of educating, 800 years later, another boy who made a mark on history, Guy Fawkes. The head master in Alcuin’s time was Ecgbert, Archbishop of York and brother of the reigning king of Northumbria; and the second master was Albert, Ecgbert’s cousin, and eventually his successor in the chief mastership and in the archbishopric. Alcuin succeeded to the practical part of the mastership on Ecgbert’s death in 766, the new archbishop, Albert, retaining the government of the school and the chief part of the religious teaching. In 778 Alcuin became in all respects the head master of the school, and in the end of 780 Albert died, leaving to Alcuin the great collection of books which formed the famous library of York.

Alcuin had for some years travelled much on the continent of Europe, and he was well acquainted with its principal scholars. They were relatively few in number, learning having sunk very low on the continent, while in Northumbria it had been and still was at a very high level. Alcuin had also made acquaintance with Karl, not yet known as Karl der Grosse, Carolus Magnus, Charlemagne, the son of Pepin, king as yet of the Franks, emperor in the year 800, a man about seven years younger than Alcuin. On a visit to the continent in 781 he again met Karl, who proposed to him that he should enter his service as master of the school of his palace, and practically minister of education for all parts of the vast empire over which Karl ruled. In 782 he joined Karl, having obtained leave of absence from the Northumbrian king Alfweald, Archbishop Ecgbert’s great-nephew, and from the new archbishop, Eanbald I. From that time onwards he was Karl’s right-hand man, in matters theological as well as educational; and in some matters of supreme political importance too. The leave of absence lasted some nine or ten years; at the end of that time Alcuin came back for a short time, but he soon after terminated his official connexion with York, and spent the rest of his life in the dominions of Karl.

Archbishop Ecgbert, Alcuin’s master, had been a friend of the venerable Bede. The only occasion on which we know that Bede left his cloister was that of a visit to Ecgbert at York, shortly before Bede’s death, if he died in 735. We have it from Bede himself that he had promised another visit to York in the following year, but was too ill to carry out his promise. Failing the opportunity of long conversations on the state of the Province of York, which corresponded to the bishoprics of York, Lindisfarne, Hexham, and Whithern, Bede set down his thoughts on parchment or tablets, and sent them to his friend. This Letter of Bede to Ecgbert is by very far the most important document of those times which has come down to us; both because of the remarkable mass of information contained in it, which we get from no other source, and because of the large and broad views of ecclesiastical policy which it sets forth. It was no doubt the advice and warnings of Bede that led Ecgbert to create the educational conditions which developed the intellect of the most intellectual man of his times, the subject of these lectures. Inasmuch as it seems probable—indeed, is practically certain—that the distressful state of Northumbria was the final cause of Alcuin’s abandonment of his native land, it will be well to summarize the main points of Bede’s dirge. We should bear in mind the fact that we are reading a description by an ecclesiastic, a man keenly devoted to the monastic life; and that the date is that of the year of Alcuin’s birth. It tells us, therefore, something of the setting in which Alcuin found himself in early boyhood.

Ecgbert had only become Bishop of York in the year of Bede’s visit to him, 734. York was not as yet an Archbishopric; it was raised to that dignity in Ecgbert’s time. Some writers call Paulinus Archbishop, because a pall was sent to him by Gregory; but the pall did not reach England till after Paulinus had run away from York.

Bede thinks it necessary to urge Ecgbert very earnestly to be careful in his talk. He does not suppose that Ecgbert sins in this respect, but it is matter of common report that some bishops do; that they have no men of religion or continence with them, but rather such as indulge in laughter and jests, in revellings, drunkenness, and other pleasures of loose life; men who feast daily in rich banquets, and neglect to feed their minds on the heavenly sacrifice.

There were in 735 sixteen bishops’ sees in England, held in the south by Tatuin of Canterbury, Ingwald of London, Daniel of Winchester, Aldwin of Lichfield, Alwig of Lindsey, Forthere of Sherborn, Ethelfrith of Elmham[77], Wilfrid of Worcester, Wahlstod of Hereford, Sigga of Selsey, Eadulf of Rochester; and in the north by Ecgbert of York, Ethelwold of Lindisfarne, Frithobert of Hexham, and Frithwald of Whithern. We may, probably, narrow Bede’s censure to Lindisfarne and Hexham, if he really did, as some assume, refer to his own parts. As a Northumbrian myself, I think that a long-headed man like Bede, a Northumbrian by birth, more probably referred to bishops of the parts which we now know as the Southern Province. Alcuin’s letters, however, show that in his time there was much that needed improvement in the case of northern bishops as well as southern.

A bishop in those days had to do the main part of the teaching, and preaching, and ministering the Sacraments, throughout the diocese. Bede points out that Ecgbert’s diocese was much too large for one man to cover it properly with ministrations. He must, therefore, ordain priests, and appoint teachers to preach the Word of God in each of the villages; to celebrate the heavenly mysteries; and especially to attend to sacred baptism[78]. The persons so appointed must make it their essential business to root deep in the memory of the people that Catholic Faith which is contained in the Apostles’ Creed, and in like manner the Lord’s Prayer. Those of the people who do not know Latin are to say the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer over and over again in their native tongue; and this rule is not for the laity only, but also for clergy and monks who do not know Latin. For this purpose, Bede says he has often given translations of these two into English to uneducated priests; for St. Ambrose declared that all the faithful should say the Creed every morning, and the English practice was to chant the Lord’s Prayer very often. How much we of to-day would give for just one copy of Bede’s Creed and Lord’s Prayer in English![79]

Ecgbert’s position in the sight of God, Bede says, will be very serious if he neglects to do as he advises, especially if he takes temporal gifts or payments from those to whom he does not give heavenly gifts. This last point Bede presses home with affectionate earnestness upon the “most beloved Prelate”. “We have heard it reported,” he says, “that there are many villages and dwellings, on inaccessible hills and in deep forests, where for many years no bishop has been seen, no bishop has ministered; and yet no single person has been free from the payment of tribute to the bishop; and that although not only has he never come to confirm those who have been baptized, but there has been no teacher to instruct them in the faith or show them the difference between good and evil. And if we believe and confess,” he continues, “that in the laying on of hands the Holy Spirit is received, it is clear that that gift is absent from those who have not been confirmed. When a bishop has, from love of money, taken nominally under his government a larger part of the population than he can by any means visit with his ministrations in one whole year, the peril is great for himself, and great for those to whom he claims to be overseer while he is unable to oversee them.”

Ecgbert has, Bede tells him, a most ready coadjutor in the King of Northumbria, Ceolwulf, Ecgbert’s near relative, his first cousin, whom Ecgbert’s brother succeeded. The [arch]bishop should advise the King to place the ecclesiastical arrangements of the Northumbrian nation on a better footing. This would best be done by the appointment of more bishops. Pope Gregory had bidden Augustine to arrange for twelve bishops in the Northern Province, the Bishop of York to receive the pall as Metropolitan. Ecgbert should aim at that number. It may here be noted that in this year of grace 1908 there are still only nine diocesan bishops in the Northern Province, besides the archbishop, and five of these nine have been created in the lifetime of some of us. Bristol knows to its heavy cost that Ripon was the first of the five.

But Bede points out, and here we come to very interesting matter, that the negligence of some former kings, and the foolish gifts of others, had left it very difficult to find a suitable see for a new bishop. The monasteries were in possession everywhere. It may be remarked in passing that all over the Christian parts of the world monasteries existed, even in those early times, in very large numbers. We know the names, and the dates or periods of foundation, of no less than 1481 founded before the year 814, in various parts of the world; and the actual number was very much larger than that, from what we know of the facts, especially in the East. In the time of Henry VIII, besides the monasteries which had been suppressed by Wolsey, Fisher, and others, as also the large number of alien priories suppressed at an earlier date, and besides all the ecclesiastical foundations called hospitals and colleges, more than 600 monasteries remained in this land to be suppressed.

There being, then, no lands left to endow bishoprics, there was, in Bede’s opinion, only one remedy; that was, the summoning of a Greater Council, at which an edict should be issued, by pontifical and royal consent, fixing upon some great monastery for a new episcopal seat. To conciliate the abbat and monks, the election of the bishop-abbat should be left to them. If it should prove necessary to provide more property still for the bishop, Bede pointed out that there were many establishments calling themselves monasteries which were not worthy of the name. He would like to see some of these transferred by synodical authority for the further maintenance of the newly-created see, so that money which now went in luxury, vanity, and intemperance in meat and drink, might be used to further the cause of chastity, temperance, and piety. Here in Bristol, with Gloucester close at hand, we need no reminder of the closeness of the parallel between Bede’s advice in 735 to King Ceolwulf and the actual course taken in 1535 by King Henry, and carried to completion by him in 1540-2, in the foundation of six new bishoprics on the spoils of as many great monasteries. Nor need it be pointed out that Bede’s proposal to suppress small and ill-conditioned monasteries was a forecast of the original proposal of Henry VIII.

Bede then proceeds to speak with extreme severity of false monasteries. It appears that men bribed kings to make them grants of lands—professedly for monasteries—in hereditary possession, and paid moneys to bishops, abbats, and secular authorities, to ratify the grants by their signatures; and then they made them the dwellings of licentiousness and excess of all kinds. The men’s wives set up corresponding establishments. Bede urged the annulment of all grants thus misused: again we seem to hear a note prophetic of eight hundred years later. To so great a pitch had this gone, that there were no lands left for grants to discharged soldiers, sons of nobles, and others. Thus it came to pass that such men either went beyond sea and abandoned their own country, for which they ought to fight, or else they lived as they could at home, not able to marry, and living unseemly lives. If this was allowed to go on, the land would be unable to defend itself against the inroads of the barbarians. Bede’s prophecy to that effect came crushingly true in Alcuin’s time, not fifty years after it was written. And here again we have a remarkable forecast of Henry VIII’s avowed purpose in the suppression of monasteries, that he must have means to defend his land against invasion. Thus the three arguments of Henry VIII, namely, that lands and money were needed for more soldiers and sailors, that lands and money were needed for more bishoprics, and that many of the religious houses did not deserve that name, were carefully set out by one whom we may call a High-Church ecclesiastic, eight hundred years before Henry.

On two of the points mentioned by Bede in connexion with monasteries, it may be well to say a little more by way of illustration. The two points are, the hereditary descent of monasteries, and the principle on which the election of the abbat should proceed. To take the second first,—Bede is very precise on this point. He says that when a monastery is to be taken as the seat of a bishop, licence should be given to the monks to elect one of themselves to fill the double office of abbat and bishop, and to rule the monastery in the one character and the adjacent diocese in the other. We should have thought it would have been better to leave them free to elect some prominent churchman from the outside, than to limit their choice to one of themselves. And the exception for which arrangement was made points in the same direction of limitation. If they have not the right man in their own monastery, at least they must choose one from their own family, or order, to preside over them, in accordance with the decrees of the Canons. This strictness was traditional in Northumbria. The great founder of monastic institutions in the Northern Church, Benedict Biscop, who founded Monk Wearmouth in 674 and Jarrow in 685, was very decided about it. He would not have an abbat brought in from another monastery. The duty of the brethren, he said, when speaking to his monks on his own imminent decease, was, in accordance with the rule of Abbat Benedict the Great, and in accordance with the statutes of their own monastery of Wearmouth—which he had himself drawn up after consideration of the various rules on the Continent from the statutes of the seventeen monasteries which he liked best of all that he had seen—to inquire carefully who of themselves was best fitted for the post, and, after due election, have him confirmed as abbat by the benediction of the bishop. There is a great deal to be said in favour of this course, and there is a great deal to be said for more freedom of election. The case which comes nearest to it in our English life of to-day is that of the election of the Master of a College in one of the two Universities. In Cambridge the election—in two cases the appointment—is in every case open, in the sense that it is not confined to the Fellows of the College, and in very recent times there have been several cases of the election of a prominent man from another College, to the great advantage of the College thus electing.

The other point is of much wider importance, namely, the hereditary descent of monasteries and of their headship. Our Northumbrian abbat Benedict was very decided here also. The brethren must not elect his successor on account of his birth. There must be no claim of next of kin. He was specially anxious that his own brother after the flesh should not be elected to succeed him. He would rather his monastery became a wilderness than have this man as his successor, for they all knew that he did not walk in the way of truth. Benedict evidently feared that a practice of hereditary succession to ecclesiastical office might spring up. No doubt he had seen at least the beginning of this in foreign parts. It was no visionary fear, for in times rather later we have examples of ecclesiastical benefices, and even bishoprics, going from father to son, and that in days of supposed celibacy. We have plenty of examples of monasteries descending from mother to daughter later on in England; and in Bede’s own time he mentions without adverse remark that the Abbess of Wetadun (Watton, in East Yorkshire) persuaded Bishop John of Hexham to cure of an illness her daughter, whom she proposed to make abbess in her stead. Alcuin himself, as we have seen,[80] tells us quite as a matter of ordinary occurrence, not calling for any remark, that he himself succeeded hereditarily to the first monastery which he ruled, situated on Spurn Point, the southern promontory of Yorkshire. We cannot doubt that the evils naturally arising, in some cases at least, from hereditary succession to spiritual positions, had much to do with the intemperate suppression of the secular clergy and the enforcement of clerical celibacy. In considering the question as it concerned the times of Alcuin, we must bear in mind that we are dealing with times very long before the development of the idea of feudal succession.

It is interesting to note that the earliest manuscripts of the Rule of St. Benedict which are known to exist do not definitely lay down the precise rule that the person elected to an abbacy must be a member of the abbey or at least of the same order. The Rule was first printed in 1659 by a monk of Monte Cassino; and this print was carefully collated throughout with a manuscript of the thirteenth century at Fort Augustus for the edition published by Burns and Oates in 1886. Chapter 64 is as follows, taking the translation annexed to the Latin in that edition, though it does not in all cases give quite the force of the original.

“In the appointing[81] of an abbot, let this principle always be observed, that he be made abbot whom all the brethren with one consent in the fear of God, or even a small part of the community with more wholesome counsel, shall elect. Let him who is to be appointed be chosen for the merit of his life and the wisdom of his doctrine, even though he should be the last of the community. But if all the brethren with one accord (which God forbid) should elect a man willing to acquiesce in their evil habits, and these in some way come to the knowledge of the bishop to whose diocese that place belongs, or of the abbots or neighbouring Christians, let them not suffer the consent of these wicked men to prevail, but appoint[82] a worthy steward over the house of God, knowing that for this they shall receive a good reward, if they do it with a pure intention and for the love of God, as, on the other hand, they will sin if they neglect it.”

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?’”

To us in England, and especially to those of us who are North-countrymen, nothing that Alcuin wrote has a higher interest than his poem in Latin hexameters on the Bishops and Saints of the Church of York. By the Church of York Alcuin evidently meant the Church of Northumbria, although his account of the prelates dwells chiefly on the archbishops of his time. Considering his long sojourn in France, it was fitting that the manuscript of this famous poem should be discovered at a monastery near Reims, the monastery of St. Theodoric, or Thierry according to the later spelling. A great part of the poem is in the main a versification of Bede’s prose history of the conversion of the North to Christianity, and an adaptation of Bede’s metrical life of St. Cuthbert. On this account the French transcriber from the original omitted about 1100 of the 1657 lines of which the poem consists, and only about 550 lines were originally printed by Mabillon in the Acta Sanctorum. When our own Gale was preparing to publish it, he got the missing verses both from the St. Theodoric MS. and also from a MS. at Reims itself. Both manuscripts disappeared long ago, probably in the devastations of the French Revolution[85].

The poem describes the importance of York in the time of the Roman occupation of Britain, the residence, as Alcuin tells us, of the dukes of Britain, and of sovereigns of Rome. York was, in fact, the imperial city; it shared with Trèves the honour of being the only imperial cities north of the Alps. He speaks eloquently of its beautiful surroundings, its flowery fields, its noble edifices, its fertility, its charm as a home. This part of the poem inclines the reader to settle in favour of York the uncertainty as to the place of Alcuin’s birth. One graphic touch, and the use of a special Latin name for the river Ouse which flows through the middle of the city, goes to the heart of those who in their youth have fished in that river—

Hanc piscosa suis undis interluit Usa.

He goes on to speak of the persistent inroads of the Picts after the withdrawal of the Roman troops. Inasmuch as the sixth legion was quartered at York, and all of the other three legions in Britain were withdrawn before the sixth, it may be claimed that York was the last place effectively occupied by the Roman troops. This indeed is in itself probable, since York was in the best position for checking the attempts of the Picts to reach the central and southern parts of Britain. He describes how the leaders of the Britons sent large bribes to a warlike race, to bring them over to protect the land, a race, he says, called from their hardness Saxi, as though Saxons meant stones.[86] The eventual conquest of the Britons by the Saxons evidently had Alcuin’s full sympathy. The Britons were lazy; worse than that, they were wicked; for their sins they were rightly driven out, and a better race entered into possession of their cities. We would give a great deal to have had from Alcuin a few words of tradition about some details of the occupation of York by the Angles, and of the fate of the British inhabitants. Alcuin’s words would suggest that their fate was a cruel one, but we do not know anything of it from any source whatsoever. One of his remarks strikes us as curious, considering that the Britons were Christians and their conquerors were pagan: the expulsion, he says, was the work of God, that a race might enter into possession who should keep the precepts of the Lord. Clearly Alcuin held a brief for his ancestors of some five generations before his birth. He writes also in a rather lordly way of the kingdom of Kent, as though Northumbria was the really important province in the time of King Edwin, as indeed it unquestionably was. Edwin was the most prominent personage in England, the Bretwalda, at the time of the conversion of Northumbria. All that Alcuin says of Edwin’s young wife Ethelburga, and of the kingdom of Kent whence she came, is this: “He took from the southern parts a faithful wife, of excellent disposition, of illustrious origin, endowed with all the virtues of the holy faith.” We shall have, at a later stage, to remark upon the silence with which Wessex also was treated by Alcuin.

It is quite true that the facts of the greater part of the poem are taken from Bede. But it is of much interest to note the selection which Alcuin made. Of the kings, he writes of Edwin, Oswald, Oswy, Ecgfrith, and Aldfrith, omitting mention of the sub-kings, several of whom were connected with constitutional difficulties. Of the bishops, he writes of Paulinus, Wilfrith, Cuthbert, Bosa, and John, mentioning Aidan only incidentally, but with the epithet “most holy”. He avoids all controversial topics in writing of Wilfrith. There is just one word of reference to Wilfrith’s many disturbances, in connexion with the only mention Alcuin makes here of Rome: Wilfrith, he says, was journeying to Rome, compulsus, being driven to go there. It is worthy of remark that of the hundred and sixty-eight lines which Alcuin gives to his account of Wilfrith, he devotes nine to Wilfrith’s vision, in which the name of the Blessed Virgin played so large a part. It was Wilfrith’s chaplain, Eddi, who recorded this, not Bede, who is very reticent about Wilfrith. Michael appeared to Wilfrith at a crisis in a serious illness, and announced that he was sent by the Almighty to inform him that he would recover. The message went on to explain that this was due to the merits and prayers of the holy mother Mary, who from the celestial throne had heard with open ears the groans, the tears (sic)[87], and the vows of the companions of Wilfrith, and had begged for him life and health. Stephen Eddi gives a highly characteristic ending to the message, which Alcuin omits. “Remember,” the archangel said, “that in honour of St. Peter and St. Andrew thou hast built churches; but to the holy Mary, ever Virgin, who intercedes for thee, thou hast reared none. This thou must amend, by dedicating a church to her honour.” The church which he had built for St. Peter was at Ripon, that for St. Andrew was at Hexham; we have still in each case the confessio, or crypt for relics, which he built under those churches. In obedience to the vision, Wilfrith now built a church of St. Mary by the side of the church of St. Andrew at Hexham. This present generation has seen a noble restoration and completion of the abbey church of Hexham.[88]

It is scarcely necessary to remark upon this grouping together of churches dedicated to various saints. At Malmesbury, under St. Aldhelm, there were six churches on the hill in one group, St. Andrew, St. Laurence, St. Mary, St. Michael, St. Peter and St. Paul, and the little Irish basilica of Maildulf.

Alcuin mentions also the missionary zeal of the Northumbrian church, beginning with the early Ecgbert, who on the expulsion of Wilfrith left Ripon, and lived for the rest of his life in Ireland as a trainer of missionaries. Besides him, Alcuin names as English missionaries Wibert, Wilbrord, the two Hewalds, Suidbert, and Wira.

So far Alcuin copied Bede and Eddi. In the last 442 lines of his poem he gives us information which we do not find elsewhere, dealing in some detail with Bishop Wilfrith II and Archbishops Ecgbert, Albert, and Eanbald, of York. Wilfrith II resigned the bishopric of York in the year of Alcuin’s birth, after holding it for fourteen years. A delightful account of him had been handed down to Alcuin’s time. He was to all acceptable, venerable, honourable, lovable. He took great pains in improving and beautifying the ornaments of his church, covering altar and crosses with silver plates, gilded. Other churches in the city he beautified in like manner. He was zealous in multiplying the congregations; following the precepts of the Lord; careful in doctrine; bright in example. Liberal with hand and mouth, he fed the minds of the studious and the bodies of the needy. In the end he retired and spent his latest years in contemplation.

Of Ecgbert, the succeeding bishop, Alcuin writes in terms of the highest praise. He was evidently more of a ruler than the second Wilfrith had been, and could be very severe with evil men. He had a love for beautiful things, and added much to the treasures of the church, special mention being made of silk hangings with foreign patterns woven in. It was to him that Bede wrote the striking letter which we have analysed above. He was of the royal house of Northumbria, and one of his brothers succeeded to the throne while Ecgbert was archbishop. The bishop had taken Bede’s advice, had sought and obtained from Rome the pallium, as the sign of metropolitical position. Curiously enough, Alcuin makes no reference to this, the most important ecclesiastical step of the time, another silence on his part which may have hid feelings he did not wish to express. He does mention the pall, but only as a matter of course, in comparing the two brothers, the prelate and the king; the one, he says, bore on his shoulder the palls sent by the Apostolic, the other on his head the diadems of his ancestors. He draws a charming picture of the two brothers working together for the country’s good, each in his own sphere,

The times were happy then for this our race,

When king and prelate in lawful concord wielded

The one the church’s laws, the other the nation’s affairs.

We have seen how slight a reference Alcuin makes to the fact of the pall from Rome. He appears to have held a very moderate view of its importance to the end of his life. His letter to the Pope, Leo III, in the year 797, conveying a request that the pall might be granted to the newly-consecrated Archbishop of York, Eanbald II, is an important document. After referring to his letter of the previous year, congratulating Leo on his accession, he proceeds as follows, curiously enough not mentioning by name the archbishop or his city or diocese. He is writing from his home in France.

Ep. 82.

“And now as regards these messengers—who have come from my own fatherland and my own city, to solicit the dignity of the sacred pall, in canonical manner and in accordance with the apostolic precept of the blessed Gregory who brought us to Christ—I humbly pray your pious excellency that you receive benignantly the requests of ecclesiastical necessity. For in those parts the authority of the sacred pall is very necessary, to keep down the perversity of wicked men and to preserve the authority of holy church.”

That is a remarkably limited statement of the need for the pall, when we remember the tremendous claims made for it in later times. And it is the more remarkable because Alcuin is evidently making the most persuasive appeal he could construct; he would certainly state the case in its strongest terms when addressing the one man with whom it finally rested to say yes or no. He seems to say clearly that to have the pall was bonum et utile for the archbishop, for the purposes which he names; he says nothing, because apparently he knows nothing, of its affecting, one way or another, the archbishop’s plenary right, in virtue of his election and consecration, to consecrate bishops, ordain priests, and rule his province and his diocese.

Alcuin digresses from the series of archbishops to deal with the saints of the Church of York, of times near to and coinciding with his own. Of the former, he naturally takes Bede, and he takes no other. To Bede he gives only thirty-one lines, but he does not stint his praise. Six of the thirty-one lines are devoted to Bede’s abbat, Ceolfrith, who took from Wearmouth as a present to the Pope the famous Codex Amiatinus, now at Florence,[89] and died and was buried at Langres. From Alcuin’s poem we learn that Ceolfrith’s body was eventually brought back to Northumbria, and this enables us to accept William of Malmesbury’s statement that King Edmund, on an expedition to the north, obtained the relics of Ceolfrith among many others, and had them safely buried at Glastonbury.

Of the saints who lived on to the time of Alcuin’s own manhood he takes two, and we are rather surprised at his selection. The one is Balther, the occupant of the Bass Rock, known later as Baldred of the Bass; the other is the anchorite Eata. Both, indeed, were anchorites, the one at Tyningham and on the Bass, the other at Cric, which is said to be Crayke in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Baldred died in 756, and Eata in 767. At Thornhill, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, there is a sepulchral monument, one of three with inscriptions in early Anglian runes, in memory of one Eata, who is described as Inne, which some have guessed to mean a hermit.[90] On the strength of this guess they have claimed that Thornhill was the place of burial of Alcuin’s Eata. To Balther Alcuin gives more than twice as many lines as to Bede; to us this seems a remarkably disproportionate treatment. There is a considerable amount of uncertainty about Balther, and Alcuin’s lines leave the uncertainty without solution. The events which he connects with the anchorite Balther, as one of the saints of the Northumbrian Church, are really connected with an earlier Balther, of the time of St. Kentigern, a saint of the ancient British Church of Cumbria. The death of this Balther is placed in 608; and in any case he was before the first formation of the Christian Church among the Northumbrian Angles. Simeon of Durham puts the death of Balther in 756, and this fits in well with Alcuin’s statements; but we may most probably suppose that there was an earlier Balther and a later, and that the legendary events of the life of the earlier have been transferred to the life of the later. Alcuin certainly understood that his Balther was Balther of the Bass.

It is when Alcuin comes to Archbishop Albert that he really lets himself go. Ecgbert had in fact established the eminence of the great School of York, and had himself acted as its chief governor and its religious teacher. But Alcuin does not even refer to that in his account of Ecgbert. The praise of the school goes all to the credit of Ecgbert’s cousin, his successor in the mastership and eventually in the archbishopric, Albert. Eight lines of laudatory epithets Alcuin bestows upon Albert, before proceeding to detail; his laudation fitly culminates in what all ages have regarded as high praise, non ore loquax sed strenuus actu—not a great talker, but a strenuous doer.

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.

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.”

It is only fair to Offa to say that this was not mere flattery. It is clear that in the eyes of Karl and Alcuin, Offa was the one leading man in the whole of England, the most powerful Englishman of his time, and of all the kings and princes the most worthy.

To Athelhard, the archbishop of Canterbury,[99] who succeeded Jaenbert, Lichfield still being the chief archbishopric, Alcuin wrote a remarkable letter, considering the humiliation of the archbishopric:—

Ep. 28. A.D. 793.

“Be a preacher; not a flatterer. It is better to fear God than man, to please God than to fawn upon men. What is a flatterer but a fawning enemy? He destroys both,—himself and his hearer.

“You have received the pastoral rod and the staff of fraternal consolation; the one to rule, the other to console; that those who mourn may find in you consolation, those who resist may feel correction. The judge’s power is to kill; thine, to make alive....

“Remember that the bishop[100] is the messenger of God most high, and the holy law is to be sought at his mouth, as we read in the prophet Malachi.[101] A watchman[102] is set at the highest place; whence the name episcopus, he being the chief watchman,[103] who ought by prudent counsel to foresee for the whole army of Christ what must be avoided and what must be done. These, that is the bishops[104], are the lights of the holy church of God, the leaders of the flock of Christ. It is their duty actively to raise the standard of the holy cross in the front rank, and to stand intrepid against every attack of the hostile force. These are they who have received the talents, our King the God Christ having gone with triumph of glory to His Father’s abode; and when He comes again in the great day of judgement they shall render an account....

“Admonish most diligently your fellow-bishops[105] to labour instantly in the word of life, that they may appear before the judge eternal, glorious with multifold gain. Be of one mind in piety, constant in equity. Let no terror of human dignity separate you, no blandishments of flattery divide you; but join together in unity in firm ranks of the fortress of God. Thus will your concord strike terror into those who seek to speak against the Truth; as Solomon says,[106] ‘When brother is helped by brother, the city is secure.’

“Ye are the light of all Britain, the salt of the earth, a city set on a hill, a candle high on a candlestick....

“Our ancestors, though pagans, first as pagans possessed this land by their valour in war, by the dispensation of God. How great, then, is the reproach, if we, Christians, lose what they, pagans, acquired. I say this on account of the blow which has lately fallen upon a part of our island, a land which has for nearly 350 years been inhabited by our forefathers. It is read in the book of Gildas[107], the wisest of the Britons, that those same Britons, because of the rapine and avarice of the princes, the iniquity and injustice of the judges, the sloth and laxity of the bishops, and the wicked habits of the people, lost their fatherland. Let us take care that those vices do not become the custom with us in these times of ours.... Do you, who along with the Apostles have received from Christ the key of the kingdom of heaven, the power of binding and loosing, open with assiduous prayer the gates of heaven to the people of God. Be not silent, lest the sins of the people be imputed to you: for of you will God require the souls which you have received to rule. Let your reward be multiplied by the salvation of those in your charge. Comfort those who are cast down, strengthen the humble, bring back to the way of truth those who wander, instruct the ignorant, exhort the learned, and confirm all by the good examples of your own life. Chastise with the pastoral rod those who are contumacious and resist the truth; support the others with the staff of consolation. And, if you are unanimous, who will be able to stand against you?”

Ep. 14. A.D. 790.

Alcuin could be exceedingly outspoken in his letters, as we have seen. But he could also be very cautious, even—perhaps we should say especially—in a matter on which he felt deeply. In a letter to the Irish teacher Colcu he remarks that he did not know what he might have to do next. The reason was that something of a dissension, diabolically inflamed, had arisen between Karl and Offa, the Mercian king, and had gone so far that each forbade entry to the other’s merchants. “Some tell me,” he says, “that I am to be sent to those parts to make peace.”

The reason for the quarrel was a curious one. Karl had proposed that his son Charles should marry one of Offa’s daughters. Offa had made a supplementary proposal that his son Ecgfrith should marry Karl’s daughter Bertha. This is said to have been considered presumptuous by Karl, and he showed his annoyance by breaking off the friendly relations which had existed between them.

It would appear that Alcuin’s attitude was suspected by the Mercian king to be unfavourable to the English view of the quarrel, and the presbyter Beornwin, to whom Alcuin had written a letter not known to have survived, was set to write to him a fishing letter, in which it would seem that he suggested unfriendliness on Alcuin’s part. Alcuin’s reply is a non-committal document.

Ep. 15. A.D. 790.

“I have received the sweet letters of your love...

“Would that I were worthy to preach peace, not to sow discord; to carry the standard of Christ, not the arms of the devil. I should never have written to you if I had been unwilling to be at peace with you and to remain firm as we began in Christ.

“Of a truth I have never been unfaithful to King Offa, or to the Anglian nation. As to the utmost of my power I shall faithfully keep the friends whom God has given me in France, so I shall those whom I have left in my own country....

“As time or opportunity affords, my very dear brother, urge ever the will of God upon all persons: on the king, persuasively; on the bishops, with due honour; on the chief men, with confidence; on all, with truth. It is ours to sow; it is God’s to fructify.

“And let no suspicion of any dissension between us remain. Let us not be of those of whom it is said: I am not come to send peace but a sword. Let us be of those to whom it is said: My peace I give unto you, My peace I leave with you.

“I have written a very short letter, for a few words to a wise man suffice.”

The dissension was rather one-sided, for it appears that Offa continued to write friendly letters to Karl. In the end, Karl replied in a more than friendly letter, which is on many accounts well worth reproducing entire. It is the earliest extant commercial treaty with an English kingdom. The date is 796, four years before he became emperor.

Ep. 57. A.D. 796.

“Charles, by the grace of God King of the Franks and Lombards and Patricius of the Romans, to his dearest brother the venerated Offa, King of the Mercians, wishes present prosperity and eternal beatitude in Christ. To keep with inmost affection of heart the concord of holy love and the laws of friendship and peace federated in unity, among royal dignities and the great personages of the world, is wont to be profitable to many. And if we are bidden by our Lord’s precept to loose the tangles of enmity, how much more ought we to be careful to bind the chains of love. We therefore, my most loved brother, mindful of the ancient pact between us, have addressed to your reverence these letters, that our treaty, fixed firm in the root of faith, may flourish in the fruit of love. We have read over the epistles of your brotherliness, which at various times have been brought to us by the hands of your messengers, and we desire to answer adequately the several suggestions of your authority.” It is clear that there were a good many of Offa’s letters unanswered.

“First, we give thanks to Almighty God for the sincerity of catholic faith which we find laudably expressed in your pages; recognizing that you are not only very strong in protection of your fatherland, but also most devoted in defence of the holy faith.

“With regard to pilgrims, who for the love of God and the health of their souls desire to visit the thresholds of the blessed Apostles, as has been customary”—here again we see the reason of the reputation of Rome—“we give leave for them to go on their way peaceably without any disturbance, carrying with them such things as are necessary. But we have ascertained that traders seeking gain, not serving religion, have fraudulently joined themselves to bands of pilgrims. If such are found among the pilgrims, they must pay at the proper places the fixed toll; the rest will go in peace, free from toll.

“You have written to us also about merchants. We will and command that they have protection and patronage in our realm, lawfully, according to the ancient custom of trading. And if in any place they suffer from unjust oppression, they may appeal to us or our judges, and we will see that pious justice is done. And so for our merchants; if they suffer any injustice in your realm, let them appeal to the judgement of your equity. Thus no disturbance can arise among our merchants.”

Karl evidently felt that the next point was the most difficult of all to handle successfully. He had given shelter and countenance to Mercians who had fled from Offa, and sought protection at his court. Ecgbert, who afterwards conquered Mercia, was among the exiles from Wessex.

“With regard to the presbyter Odberht, who on his return from Rome desires to live abroad for the love of God, not coming to us to accuse you, we make known to your love that we have sent him to Rome along with other exiles who in fear of death have fled to the wings of our protection. We have done this in order that in the presence of the lord apostolic and of your illustrious archbishop—in accordance, as your notes make known to us, with their vow—their cause may be heard and judged, so that equitable judgement may effect what pious intercession could not do. What could be safer for us than that the investigation of apostolic authority should discriminate in a case where the opinion of others differs?”

This is a typical example of the use made of a pope when monarchs disagreed.

“With regard to the black stones which your reverence earnestly solicited to have sent to you, let a messenger come and point out what kind they are that your mind desires. Wherever they may be found, we will gladly order them to be given, and their conveyance to be aided.” [108]

Then comes in very skilfully a complaint that the Mercians have been exporting to France cloaks of inadequate length.

“But, as you have intimated your desire as to the length of the stones, our people make demand about the length of cloaks, that you will order them to be made to the pattern of those which in former times used to come to us.

“Further, we make known to your love that we have forwarded to each of the episcopal sees in your kingdom, and that of king Æthelred [of Northumbria, again no mention of Wessex], a gift from our collection of dalmatics and palls, in alms for the lord apostolic Adrian[109], our father, your loving friend, praying you to order intercession for his soul, not in doubt that his blessed soul is at rest, but to show faith and love towards a friend to us most dear. So the blessed Augustine has taught that pious intercessions of the church should be made for all, asserting that to intercede for a good man is profitable to him that intercedes.” That is a remarkable way of putting it.

“From the treasure of secular things which the Lord Jesus of gratuitous pity has granted to us, we have sent something to each of the metropolitan cities. To thy love, for joy and giving of thanks to Almighty God, we have sent a Hunnish belt and sword and two silk palls, that everywhere among a Christian people the divine clemency may be preached, and the name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be for ever glorified.”

The Hunnish belt and sword and silk robes were part of the great spoil which Karl took in the year 795 when he conquered the Huns, destroyed their army, and put their prince to flight. The spoil included fifteen wagons loaded with gold and silver, and palls of white silk, each wagon drawn by four oxen. Karl divided the plunder between the churches and the poor.[110]

The gifts of Karl to the king and bishops of Northumbria were withdrawn under sad conditions, to which we must return in the next lecture. This is what Alcuin wrote to Offa, immediately after Karl’s letter was written:—

Ep. 58. A.D. 796.

“Your reverend love should know that the lord King Charles has often spoken to me of you in a loving and trusting manner. You have in him an entirely most faithful friend. Thus he sent messengers to Rome for the judgement of the lord apostolic and Ethelhard the archbishop. To your love he sent gifts worthy. To the several episcopal sees he sent gifts in alms for himself and the lord apostolic, that you might order prayers to be offered for them. Do you act faithfully, as you are wont to do with all your friends.

“In like manner he sent gifts to King Æthelred and his episcopal sees. But, alas for the grief! when the gifts and the letters were in the hands of the messengers, the sad news came from those who had returned from Scotia[111] by way of you, that the nation had revolted and the king [Æthelred] was killed. King Charles withdrew his gifts, so greatly was he enraged against the nation—‘that perfidious and perverse nation,’ as he called them, ‘murderers of their own lords,’ holding them to be worse than pagans. Indeed, if I had not interceded for them, whatever good thing he could have taken away from them, whatever bad thing he could have contrived for them, he would have done it.

“I was prepared to come to you with the king’s gifts, and to go back to my fatherland.” This was from three to four years later than his latest visit to our shores. “But it seemed to me better, for the sake of peace for my nation, to remain abroad. I did not know what I could do among them, where no one is safe, and no wholesome counsel is of any avail. Look at the very holiest places devastated by pagans, the altars fouled by perjuries, the monasteries violated by adulteries, the earth stained with the blood of lords and princes. What else could I do but groan with the prophet,[112] ‘Woe to the sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers; they have forsaken the Lord, and blasphemed the holy Saviour of the world in their wickedness.’ And if it be true, as we read in the letter of your dignity, that the iniquity had its rise among the eldermen, where is safety and fidelity to be hoped for if the turbid torrent of unfaithfulness flowed forth from the very place where the purest fount of truth and faith was wont to spring?

“But do thou, O most wise ruler of the people of God, most diligently bring thy nation away from perverse habits, and make them learned in the precepts of God, lest by reason of the sins of the people the land which God has given us be destroyed. Be to the Church of Christ as a father, to the priests of God as a brother, to all the people pious and fair; in conversation and in word moderate and peaceable; in the praise of God always devout; that the divine clemency may keep thee in long prosperity, and may of the grace of its goodness deign to exalt, dilate, and crown to all eternity, with the benefaction of perpetual pity, thy kingdom—nay, all the English.

“I pray you direct the several Churches of your reverence to intercede for me. Into my unworthy hands the government of the Church of St. Martin has come. I have taken it not voluntarily but under pressure, by the advice of many.”

Offa died in the year in which this letter was written, and his death brought great changes in Mercia. Excellent as Offa had in most ways been, we have evidence that the Mercian people were by no means worthy of the fine old Mercian king. In reading the letter which contains this evidence, we shall see that Offa had a murderous side of his character. In those rude days, chaos could not be dealt with under its worse conditions by men who could not at a crisis strike with unmitigated severity.

CHAPTER VI

Grant to Malmesbury by Ecgfrith of Mercia.—Alcuin’s letters to Mercia.—Kenulf and Leo III restore Canterbury to its primatial position.—Gifts of money to the Pope.—Alcuin’s letters to the restored archbishop.—His letter to Karl on the archbishop’s proposed visit. Letters of Karl to Offa (on a question of discipline) and Athelhard (in favour of Mercian exiles).

Before proceeding to examine Alcuin’s letter to a Mercian nobleman on the death of Offa and his son Ecgfrith, it should be remarked that we of the diocese of Bristol must not allow the mention of this poor young king Ecgfrith to pass without our acknowledgement for a deed of justice done. When Offa defeated the West Saxon king at Bensington, he took possession of a good deal of the border land, including two tracts of land which King Cadwalla of Wessex had given to Malmesbury, namely Tetbury in Gloucestershire and Purton in Wilts. William of Malmesbury naturally reports the iniquity of Offa in thus pillaging the abbey which was the home of William’s life and studies. Offa gave Tetbury to the Bishop of Worcester. Purton was the subject of a deed by Ecgfrith during his reign of a few months. The deed has remarkable interest for us in this diocese, in that it is doubly dated; first as in the seven hundred and ninety-sixth year from the Incarnation, and next, with a very interesting recognition of our own Aldhelm, due to the fact that the theft had been from Aldhelm’s own Malmesbury, “in the eighty-seventh year from the passing of father Aldhelm.” The deed restores land of thirty-five families at Piritune, on the east side of Braden Wood, to the abbat and brethren of Malmesbury, for the repose of the soul of his father Offa who had taken it from them, and in order that the memory of Ecgfrith might always be preserved in their prayers. As a sort of unimportant afterthought he adds that the abbat and brethren have given him two thousand shillings of pure silver, probably as many pounds of our money. The deed was signed by Athelhard of Canterbury, not by Lichfield. The reason no doubt is that Tetbury and Purton are south of the Thames, and so outside the Province of Lichfield and within the diminished Province of Canterbury.

When the death of Offa’s son, the youthful Ecgfrith, king of Mercia, occurred in this same year 796 in which year his father Offa had died,[113] and a distant cousin Kenulf succeeded, Alcuin, as has been said, wrote a very serious letter to one of the chief officers of Mercia.

Ep. 79. A.D. 797.

“These are times of tribulation everywhere in the land; faith is failing; truth is dumb; malice increases; and arrogance adds to your miseries. Men are not content to follow in the steps of our early fathers, in dress, or food, or honest ways. Some most foolish man thinks out something unsuited to human nature, and hateful to God; and straightway almost the whole of the people set themselves busily to follow this above all.

“That most noble youth [Ecgfrith] is dead; not, as I think, because of his own sins alone, but also because the vengeance of his father’s bloodshedding has reached the son. For you know best of all how much blood the father shed that the kingdom might be safe for the son. It proved to be the destruction, not the confirmation, of his reign.

“Admonish the more diligently your new king [Kenulf], yes, and the king of Northumbria [Ardwulf] too, that they keep in touch with the divine piety, avoiding adulteries; that they do not neglect their early wives[114] for the sake of adulteries with women of the nobility, but under the fear of God have their own wives, or by consent live in chastity. I fear that Ardwulf, the king of my part of the country, will soon[115] have to lose the kingdom because of the insult which he has offered to God in sending away his own wife, and, it is said, living openly with a concubine. It seems that the prosperity of the English is nearly at an end; unless indeed by assiduous prayers, and honest ways, and humble life, and chaste conversation, and keeping the faith, they win from God to keep the land which God of His free gift gave to our forefathers.”

With this letter we may fitly compare the letter which Alcuin wrote to the king himself, Kenulf, who had thus unexpectedly succeeded. It begins in a complimentary manner, but it is a very faithful letter. It carefully recognizes the inconsistencies of Offa’s life, inconsistencies which appear to have characterized the best rulers in those times, very rude and violent times, when one occasion and another seemed to demand ruthless treatment.

Ep. 80. A.D. 797.

“To the most excellent Coenulf, King of the Mercians, the humble levite Albinus wishes health.

“Your goodness, moderation, and nobility of conduct, are a great joy to me. They are befitting to the royal dignity, which excels all others in honour, and ought to excel also in perfectness of conduct, in fairness of justice, in holiness of piety. The royal clemency should go beyond that of ordinary men, as we read in ancient histories, and in holy Scripture where it is said[116]—Mercy and truth exalt a throne; and in the Psalms it is said[117] of Almighty God—All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth. The more a man shines forth in works of truth and mercy, the more has he in him of the image of the divine.

“Have always in mind Him who raised thee from a poor position and set thee as a ruler over the princes of His people. Know that thou art rather a shepherd, and a dispenser of the gifts of God, than a lord and an exactor.

“Have always in mind the very best features of the reign of your most noble predecessor Offa; his modest conversation; his zeal in correcting the life of a Christian people. Whatever good arrangements he made in the kingdom to thee by God given, let your devotion most diligently carry out; but if in any respect he acted with greed, or cruelty, know that this you must by all means avoid. For it is not without cause that that most noble son of his survived his father for so short a time. The deserts of a father are often visited on a son.

“Have prudent counsellors who fear God; love justice; seek peace with friends; show faith and holiness in pious manner of life.

“For the English race is vexed with tribulations by reason of its many sins. The goodness of kings, the preaching of the priests of Christ, the religious life of the people, can raise it to the height of its ancient honour; so that a blessed progeny of our fathers may deserve to possess perpetual happiness, stability of the kingdom, and fortitude against any foe; that the Church of Christ, as ordained by holy fathers, may grow and prosper. Always have in honour, most illustrious ruler, the priests of Christ; for the more reverently you are disposed to the servants of Christ, and the preachers of the word of God, the more will Christ, the King pious and true, exalt and confirm your honour, on the intercession of His saints.”

When Kenulf, this distant cousin of Ecgfrith, came to the throne, he looked into the matter of the archbishopric of Lichfield, and he took a view adverse to Offa’s action. He wrote to Pope Leo III a letter,[118] in which he put the points very clearly. His bishops and learned men had told him that the division of the Province of Canterbury into two provinces was contrary to the canons and apostolical statutes of the most blessed Gregory, who had ordered that there should be twelve bishops under the archbishop of the southern province, seated at London. On the death of Augustine of Canterbury, it had seemed good to all the wise men of the race, the Witangemote, that not London but Canterbury should be the seat of the Primacy, where Augustine’s body lay. King Offa, by reason of his enmity with the venerable archbishop Jaenbert and the people of Kent, set to work to divide the province into two. The most pious Adrian, at the request of the said king, had done what no one before had presumed to do, had raised the Mercian prelate to the dignity of the pallium. Kenulf did not blame either of them; but he hoped that the Pope would look into the matter and make a benign and just response. He had sent an embassy on the part of himself and the bishops in the previous year by Wada the Abbat; but Wada, after accepting the charge, had indolently—nay foolishly—withdrawn. He now sent by the hands of a presbyter, Birine, and two of his officers, Fildas and Cheolberth, a small present, out of his love for the Pope, namely, 120 mancuses,[119] some forty to fifty pounds, say not far off £1000 of our time.

Pope Leo addressed his reply to king Kenulf, his most loved bishops, and most glorious dukes. It was a difficult letter to write, for Kenulf had been very frank about the uncanonical action of Hadrian the Pope. Leo answered this part of Kenulf’s letter by stating that his predecessor had acted as he had done (1) because Offa had declared it to be the universal wish, the petition of all, that the archbishopric should be divided into two; (2) because of the great extension of the Mercian kingdom; (3) for very many causes and advantages. He, Leo, now authorized the departure from Pope Gregory’s order in so far as this, that he recognized Canterbury, not London, as the chief seat of archiepiscopal authority. He declared that Canterbury was the primatial see, and must continue and be viewed as such. I cannot find in his letter a definite declaration that he annuls the act of his predecessor, but that is the effect of the letter; nor does he declare that Lichfield is no longer an archbishopric. Kenulf, as we have seen, had sent him, out of his affection for him, a gift of 120 mancuses. But he reminded the king that Offa had bound his successors to maintain the gift to the Pope, in each year, of as many mancuses as there are days in the year, namely, he says, 365, as alms to the poor, and as an endowment for keeping in order the lamps [in the churches]. This is much more likely than the shadowy gifts of Ina, king of Wessex, to have been the origin of Peter’s Pence, a sum of money collected in England, at first fitfully and eventually year by year, and sent out to the Pope. The money was collected in the parishes of each diocese down to the time of the Reformation. It is a regular item in the churchwardens’ accounts of the earlier years of Henry VIII. Only a fixed amount of the whole sum collected was sent to the Pope, the balance being used for repairs in the several dioceses. We have a list prepared by a representative of a late mediaeval Pope giving £190 6s. 8d. as the amount received by him for the year, corresponding roughly to a normal 300 marks a year.

Offa’s money for the Pope went of course from Mercia. When Wessex became predominant, Ethelwulf, the son of Ecgbert and father of Alfred, made large gifts to Rome, and left by will 300 mancuses, 100 in honour of St. Peter, specially for filling with oil all the lamps of his apostolic church on Easter Eve and at cock crow, 100 in honour of St. Paul, in the same terms and for the same purpose in respect of the basilica of St. Paul, and 100 for the Pope himself. King Alfred also sent presents to Rome. From 883 to 890 there are four records of gifts from Wessex. After 890 we have no such record in Alfred’s reign; and in Alfred’s will there is no mention of the spiritual head of the Church of the West.

We learn from our own great historian, William of Malmesbury, that Kenulf wrote two later letters to Leo on this subject, and he gives us Leo’s reply.[120] Athelhard, the Pope says, has come to the holy churches of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, to fulfil his vow of prayer and to inform the Pope of his ecclesiastical mission. He tells the king that by the authority of St. Peter, the chief of the apostles, whose office though unworthily he fills, he gives to Athelhard such prelatical authority that if any in the province, whether kings, princes, or people, transgress the commands of the Lord, he shall excommunicate them till they repent. Concerning the jurisdiction which the archbishops of Canterbury had held, as well over bishops as over monasteries, of which they had been unjustly deprived, the Pope had made full inquiry, and now placed all ordinations and confirmations on their ancient footing, and restored them to him entire. Thus did Pope Leo III condemn the injustice of Pope Hadrian I. We had better have managed our own affairs, instead of paying to foreigners infinite sums of money to mismanage them.

Before we leave this strange episode of the creation of an archbishopric of Lichfield, it is of special local interest to us in Bristol, and to the deanery of Stapleton, that the chief Mercian prelate, Higbert of Lichfield, signed deeds relating to Westbury upon Trym and Aust on Severn, above the archbishop of Canterbury. This was in 794. Offa the king signed first, Ecgferth, the king’s young son, second, and then Hygeberht; Ethelhard of Canterbury coming fifth in one and fourth in the other. The first deed gave from the king to his officer Ethelmund, in 794, four cassates of land at the place called Westbury, in the province of the Huiccians, near the river called Avon, free of all public charges except the three which were common to all, namely, for the king’s military expeditions, for the building of bridges, and for the fortification of strongholds.[121] The other deed restores to the see of Worcester (Wegrin) the land of five families at Aust, which the duke Bynna had taken without right, it being the property of the see of Worcester. To make all safe, six dukes made the sign of the cross at the foot of this deed, which is, as we all know, the origin of the modern phrase ‘signing’ a deed or a letter. The dukes included Bynna himself.

Ep. 85. A.D. 797.

Alcuin wrote a very wise letter to Athelhard of Canterbury on the occasion of the restoration of the primacy. He advised that penance should be done. Athelhard and all the people should keep a fast, he for having left his see, they for having accepted error. There should be diligent prayers, and alms, and solemn masses, everywhere, that God might wipe out what any of them had done wrong. The archbishop was specially urged to bring back study into the house of God, that is, the conventual home of the monks and the archbishop, with its centre, the cathedral church. There should be young men reading, and a chorus of singers, and the study of books, in order that the dignity of that holy see might be renewed, and they might deserve to have the privilege of electing to the primacy.

“The unity of the Church, which has been in part cut asunder, not as it seems for any reasonable cause but from grasping at power, should, if it can be done, be restored in peaceful ways; the rent should be stitched up again. You should take counsel with all your bishops, and with your brother of York, on this principle, that the pious father Higbert of Lichfield be not deprived of his pall during his lifetime, but the consecration of bishops must come back to the holy and primal see. Let your most holy wisdom see to it that loving concord exist among the chief shepherds of the churches of Christ.”

Ep. 171. A.D. 801.

With regard to the remark of Alcuin that Athelhard should do penance for having left his see, it may be explained that Alcuin had in vain advised Athelhard not to leave England on the restoration of the primacy to Canterbury. Athelhard persisted in visiting Rome, and informed Alcuin that he had commenced the journey. Alcuin thereupon wrote this:—“Return, return, holy father, as soon as your pious embassy is finished, to your lost sheep. As there are two eyes in the body, so I believe and desire that you two, Canterbury and York, give light throughout the breadth of all Britain. Do not deprive your country of its right eye.”

Then Alcuin gives a very significant hint that the ways of the clergy of England are not good enough for France, and they had better not let Charlemagne see anything of that kind.

“If you come to the lord king, warn your companions, and especially the clergy, that they acquit themselves in an honourable manner, in all holy religion, in dress, and in ecclesiastical order; so that wherever you go you leave always an example of all goodness. Forbid them to wear in the presence of the lord king ornaments of gold or robes of silk; let them go humbly clad, after the manner of servants of God. And through every district you must pass with peace and honest conversation, for you know the manner and custom of this Frankish race.”

Nothing could make more clear the commanding position held by Alcuin than this exceedingly free counsel from a deacon to the Primate of England. We may quote portions of yet another letter giving the same impression.

Ep. 190. A.D. 802.

In a letter to Athelhard after his safe return to England and a favourable reception which he had reported to Alcuin, Alcuin congratulated the archbishop on the restoration to its ancient dignity of the most holy see of the first teacher of our race. By divine favour, the members now once more cohered in unity with the proper head, and natural peace shone forth between the two chief prelates of Britain, and one will of piety and concord was vigorous under the two cities of metropolitans. “And now,” he writes, “now that you have received the power to correct and the liberty to preach, fear not, speak out! The silence of the bishop is the ruin of the people.”

It is an interesting fact that we have a letter which Alcuin wrote to Karl, introducing to him this same archbishop on the very journey of which he so decidedly disapproved.

Ep. 172. A.D. 801.

“To the most greatly desired lord David the king, Flaccus his pensioner wishes eternal health in Christ.

“The sweetness of your affection, and the assurance of your approved piety, very often urge me to address letters to your authority, and by the office of syllables to trace out that which bodily frailty prevents my will from accomplishing. But novel circumstances compel me now to write once more, that the paper may bring the affection of the heart, and may pour into the ears of your piety the prayers which never have been in vain in the presence of your pity. Nor do I believe that my prayers for your stableness and safety are vain in the sight of God, for the divine grace gladly receives the tears which flow forth from the fount of love[122].

“I have been informed that certain of the friends of your Flaccus, Edelard to wit, Metropolitan of the See of Dorobernia and Pontiff of the primatial see in Britain, and Ceilmund[123] of the kingdom of the Mercians, formerly minister of king Offa, and Torhcmund[124] the faithful servant of king Edilred, a man approved in faith, strenuous in arms, who has boldly avenged the blood of his lord, desire to approach your piety[125]. All of these have been very faithful to me, and have aided me on my journey; they have also aided my boys as they went about hither and thither. I pray your best clemency to receive them with your wonted kindness, for they have been close friends to me. I have often known bishops religious and devoted in Christ’s service, and men strong and faithful in secular dignity, to be laudable to your equity; for there is no doubt that all the best men, approved by their own conscience, love good men, being taught by the example of the omnipotent God who is the highest good. And it is most certain that every creature that has reason has by His goodness whatever of good it has, the Very Truth saying, ‘I am the light of the world. He that followeth me walketh not in darkness but shall have the light of life.’ John viii. 12.”

Before we leave Mercian affairs and the relations between Karl and Offa, it may be of interest to give a letter[126] from Karl to Offa which will serve to show the extreme care he took in order to maintain ecclesiastical discipline, and the severity of that discipline. That a man with all the affairs of immense dominions on his hands should have made time to produce such a letter on such a point seems very worthy of note. Karl’s statement of his titles shows that this is an early letter.

“Karl, by the grace of God king of the Franks and Defender of the Holy Church of God, to his loved brother and friend Offa greeting.

“That priest who is a Scot[127] has been living among us for some time, in the diocese of Hildebold, Bishop[128] of Cologne. He has now been accused of eating meat in Lent. Our priests refuse to judge him, because they have not received full evidence from the accusers. They have, however, not allowed him to continue to reside there, on account of this evil report, lest the honour in which the priesthood is held should be diminished among ignorant folk, or others should be tempted by this rumour to violate the holy fast. Our priests are of opinion that he should be sent to the judgement of his own bishop, where his oath was taken.

“We pray your providence to order that he transfer himself as soon as conveniently may be to his own land, that he may be judged in the place from which he came forth. For there also it must be that the purity in manners and firmness in faith and honesty of conversation of the Holy Church of God are diligently kept according to canonical sanction, like a dove perfect and unspotted, whose wings are as of silver and the hinder parts should shine as gold.

“Life, health, and prosperity be given to thee and thy faithful ones by the God Christ for ever.”

A letter which Karl wrote to Athelhard of Canterbury begging him to intercede for some exiles, sets forth his style and title very differently[129], evidently at a later date.

It bears very directly upon one of the complaints which, as we have seen, Offa had made in letters to Karl; namely, the shelter afforded at Karl’s court to fugitives from Mercia.

“Karl, by the grace of God king of the Franks and Lombards and Patrician of the Romans, to Athilhard the archbishop and Ceolwulf his brother bishop, eternal beatitude.

“In reliance on that friendship which we formed in speech when we met, we have sent to your piety these unhappy exiles from their fatherland; praying that you would deign to intercede for them with my dearest brother king Offa, that they may be allowed to live in their own land in peace, without any unjust oppression. For their lord Umhrinsgstan[130] is dead. It appeared to us that he would have been faithful to his own lord if he had been allowed to remain in his own land; but, as he used to say, he fled to us to escape the danger of death, always ready to purge himself of any unfaithfulness. That reconciliation might ensue we kept him with us for a while, not from any unfriendliness.

“If you are able to obtain peace for these his fellow tribesmen, let them remain in their fatherland. But if my brother gives a hard reply about them, send them back to me uninjured. It is better to live abroad than to perish, to serve in a foreign land than to die at home. I have confidence in the goodness of my brother, if you plead strenuously with him for them, that he will receive them benignantly for the love that is between us, or rather for the love of Christ, who said, Forgive and it shall be forgiven you.

“May the divine piety keep thy holiness, interceding for us, safe for ever.”

It was a skilful stroke of business on Karl’s part to send the men over to the charge of the archbishop, which amounted to putting them in sanctuary. If he had kept them in France and written to beg that they might be allowed to return, it would have been much easier for Offa to say no. And if he had sent them direct to Offa in the first instance, they would probably never have got out of his clutches at all.

CHAPTER VII

List of the ten kings of Northumbria of Alcuin’s time.—Destruction of Lindisfarne, Wearmouth, and Jarrow, by the Danes.—Letters of Alcuin on the subject to King Ethelred, the Bishop and monks of Lindisfarne, and the monks of Wearmouth and Jarrow.—His letter to the Bishop and monks of Hexham.

We must now turn to Alcuin’s native kingdom of Northumbria, over whose evil fortunes he grieved so greatly in the home of his adoption.

I do not know how better some idea can be formed of the political chaos to which Northumbria was reduced in the time of Alcuin than by reading a list of the kings of that time. It is a most bewildering list.

All went well so long as Eadbert, the brother of Archbishop Ecgbert, reigned. He was the king of Alcuin’s infancy and boyhood and earliest manhood. His reign lasted from 737 to 758, when he retired into a monastery. He was the 21st king, beginning with Ida who created the kingdom in 547. He was succeeded by (22) Oswulf his son, who was within a year slain by his household officers, July 24, 759, and was succeeded on August 4 by (23) Ethelwald, of whose parentage we do not know anything. In 765 he was deprived by a national assembly, and (24) Alchred was placed on the throne, a fifth cousin of the murdered Oswulf, and therefore of the royal line. In 774 he was banished, and went in exile to the king of the Picts, being succeeded by (25) Ethelred, the son of his deprived predecessor Ethelwald. Ethelred reigned from 774 to 779, when in consequence of cruel murders ordered by him he was driven out, and (26) Alfwold, son of (22) Oswulf, and therefore of the old royal line, succeeded. Alfwold was murdered in 788, and was succeeded by (27) Osred, the son of (24) Alchred, sixth cousin of his predecessor, and therefore of the royal line. After a year he was deposed and tonsured, and was eventually put to death in 792 by (25) Ethelred, who had recovered the throne lost by his expulsion in 779. He was killed in 796 in a faction fight, after he had put to death the last two males, so far as we know, of the royal line of Eadbert, Ælf and Ælfwine, sons of (26) Alfwold. Simeon of Durham tells us (A.D. 791) that they were persuaded by false promises to leave sanctuary in the Cathedral Church of York; were taken by violence out of the city; and miserably put to death by Ethelred in Wonwaldrenute. He was succeeded by (28) Osbald, of unknown parentage, but a patrician of Northumbria; he only reigned twenty-seven days, fled to the king of the Picts, and died an abbat three years later, in 799. He was succeeded by (29) Eardulf, a patrician of the blood royal,[131] who had been left for dead by (25) Ethelred, but had recovered when laid out for burial by the monks of Ripon. He had the fullest recognition as king; was consecrated at the great altar of St. Paul in York Minster on May 26, 796, by Archbishop Eanbald. In his reign Alcuin died. In 806 he was driven out by (30) Elfwald, of unknown parentage, but by the help of the Emperor Charlemagne he was restored in 808. He died in 810, and was succeeded by his son (31) Eanred, who was the last king but one of the royal house, and the last independent king of Northumbria, dying in 840, and being succeeded by his son (32) Ethelred II, expelled in 844, restored in the same year, and killed sine prole in 848.

This, as has been said, is a most bewildering list. It is, however, convenient to have it stated at length, inasmuch as several of these kings are named in a noteworthy manner in the letters of Alcuin. To emphasize the view that Alcuin took of the state of Northumbria, the list just given may be summarized thus, it being borne in mind that every king who reigned in Alcuin’s time after Eadbert’s death in 758 is included in the summary. Oswulf, murdered 759; Ethelwald, deprived 765; Alchred, banished 774; Ethelred, expelled 779; Alfwold, murdered 788; Osred, deposed 789; Ethelred, killed by his own people, 796; Osbald, expelled 797; Eardulf, expelled 806.

The Venerable Bede had said in his letter to Archbishop Ecgbert in 735 that unless some very great change for the better was made in all walks of life in Northumbria, that country would find its men quite unable to defend it successfully if an invasion took place. We have seen that so far as the reigning persons were concerned, the change was for the worse; we have now to see how bitterly true Bede’s prophecy, or rather his calculation of the necessary consequences, proved to be. We are taken in thought to the year 793, not quite sixty years after Bede’s letter. One excellent reign had lasted twenty-one years, the next eight reigns averaged four and a half years, and all ended in violence.

Higbald, the eleventh Bishop of Lindisfarne, 780-803, takes us back nearly to the best times of that specially Holy Isle. Ethelwold, 724-40, his next predecessor but one, was the bishop under whom King Ceolwulf, to whom Bede dedicated his famous work the Ecclesiastical History of the English Race, became a monk. It was this king-monk that taught the monks of Lindisfarne to drink wine and ale instead of the milk and water prescribed by their Scotic founder, Aidan. His head was preserved in St. Cuthbert’s coffin. Ethelwold’s immediate predecessor was Eadfrith, 698-721, who wrote that glorious Evangeliarium which is a chief pride of England, the Lindisfarne Gospels. To Bishop Eadfrith and his monks Bede dedicated his Life of St. Cuthbert, between whom and Eadfrith only one bishop had intervened. The entry at the end of the Lindisfarne Gospels connects Ethelwold and Eadfrith with the production and binding of that noble specimen of the earliest Anglian work. Put into modern English it runs thus:—

“Eadfrith, bishop of the church of Lindisfarne, he wrote this book at first, for God and St. Cuthbert and all the saints that are in the island, and Ethelwald, the bishop of Lindisfarne island, he made it firm outside and bound it as well as he could.”

The entry proceeds to tell that Billfrith, the anchorite, wrought in smith’s work the ornaments that were on the outside with gold and gems and silver overlaid, a treasure without deceit. And Aldred, the presbyter, unworthy and most miserable, glossed it in English, and made himself at home with the three parts, the Matthew part for God and St. Cuthbert, the Mark part for the bishop—unfortunately it is not said for which of the bishops, the Luke part for the brotherhood. Only one bishop came between Ethelwold, who bound this priceless treasure, and Higbald, to whom we now turn.

The Saxon Chronicle has under the year 787 this entry:—“In this year King Beorhtric [of Wessex] took to wife Eadburg, daughter of King Offa. In his days came three ships of the Northmen from Haurthaland [on the west coast of Norway]. And the sheriff rode to meet them there, and would force them to the king’s residence, for he knew not what they were. And there they slew him. These were the first ships of Danish men that sought the land of the English race.”

They soon came again, this time not to the coast of Wessex, but to the coast easiest of access from their own land. In 793 this is the entry in the Saxon Chronicle:—

“In this year dire forewarnings came over the land of Northumbria and pitifully frightened the people, violent whirlwinds and lightnings, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. These tokens mickle hunger soon followed, and a little after that, in this same year, on the sixth of the ides of January [January 8] the harrying of heathen men pitifully destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne through rapine and manslaughter.”

In the next year, 794, it is said:—

“The heathen ravaged among the Northumbrians, and plundered Ecgferth’s minster at Donmouth [Wearmouth]; and there one of their leaders was slain, and also some of their ships were wrecked by a tempest, and many of them were there drowned, and some came to shore alive and men soon slew them off at the river mouth.”

Wattenbach and Dümmler make the ruin of Lindisfarne take place not on January 8 but on June 8. The Saxon Chronicle has Ianr. in both of the MSS. which name the month. There is only one other entry in the year 793, and it follows this,—“And Sicga [who had murdered King Alfuold] died[132] on the 8th of the Kalends of March,” that is, February 22. It is clear that these two events took place at the end of 793, the years at that time ending with March, and January, not June, was the month of ruin.

The twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow are described as Ecgferth’s minster, because King Ecgfrith of Northumbria, 670-85, gave land to Benet Biscop to found a monastery at the mouth of the Don, now called the Wear, and some years later another portion of land for the twin monastery of St. Paul, Jarrow. Later in Biscop’s life he purchased two additional pieces of land from the next king, Aldfrith, giving for the first two royal robes, or palls, made all of silk, worked in an incomparable manner, which he had bought in Rome. For the second, a much larger piece, he gave to the king a manuscript collection of geographical writings, of beautiful workmanship. We in the south-west must always remember that Benedict Bishop first brought his vast ecclesiastical treasures to the court of Wessex, but finding his royal patron dead went up north with them. But for the death of the King of Wessex, we should have had Wearmouth and Jarrow here as well as Malmesbury, Bede as well as Aldhelm, and it may be Alcuin too.

We have letters of Alcuin to King Ethelred, to Higbald the Bishop of Lindisfarne, and to the monks of the twin monastery of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, on this catastrophe. The letter to Ethelred comes first:—

Ep. 22. A.D. 793.

“To my most loved lord King Ethelred and all his chief men the humble levite Alchuine sends greeting.

“Mindful of your most sweet affection, my brothers and fathers and lords honourable in Christ; deeply desiring that the divine mercy may preserve to us in long-lived prosperity the fatherland which that mercy long ago gave to us with gratuitous freedom; I therefore, comrades most dear, whether present, if God allow it, by my words, or absent by my writings under the guidance of the divine spirit, do not cease from admonishing you, and by frequent repetition to convey to your ears, you who are citizens of the same fatherland, those things which are known to pertain to the safety of this earthly realm and to the blessedness of the heavenly home; so that things many times heard may grow into your minds with good result. For what is love to a friend if it keeps silence on matters useful to the friend? To what does a man owe fidelity if not to his country? To whom does a man owe prosperity if not to its citizens? By a double relationship we are fellow-citizens of one city in Christ, that is as sons of Mother Church and of one native country. Let not therefore your humanity shrink from accepting benignly what my devotion seeks to offer for the safety of our land. Think not that I am charging faults against you: take it that I aim at warding off penalties.”