A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (28 page)

Common in early English monasticism, the ‘confraternity’ was extended into a support network and bonding in the mission field. The letters of Boniface and Alcuin contain many examples of bishops, abbots and even kings included in their prayer families. There is also an excellent letter from Æthelberht II of Kent (725–62) to Boniface in which he mentions a saintly kinswoman of his and recalls how she told him Boniface had agreed to remember her in his prayers. He then asks if the saint would do the same
service for him and draws attention to a couple of extremely valuable gifts he is sending with the bearer. Only in the last paragraph does he come to the point – a request for a quite specific and very clearly described type of falcon, which he is sure the churchman should be able to find without too much difficulty.

It was no doubt through his connections with the ‘societies’ between Ferrières and York that Abbot Lupus first got wind of the famous victory of Aclea won by Æthelwulf of Wessex over the Danes in the year 851. At the time the abbot was in desperate need of lead for the roof of his abbey’s church of St Peter and was clearly well aware of the lead mines of Devon, by this time part of Wessex. He wrote to praise the king for God’s grace in granting him the victory, praises him for his fabled generosity and offers him the chance of benefiting his soul by sending a sizeable supply of roofing material. He signed off not as abbot of Ferrières but of St Judoc’s, knowing the English sentimental attachment to this saint. (In the early tenth century, when King Edward the Elder of Wessex had completed the building of his splendid New Minster at Winchester, the relics of the saint were translated there from across the Channel – as was recorded in the
liber vitae
of the Minster.) The links between England and the Continent forged in the era of the Anglo-Saxon missions would stretch across the centuries.

Distinguished guests expected and received distinguished treatment. On their journey to Rome in 855 the boy Prince Alfred of Wessex and the royal entourage of his father, King Æthelwulf, crossed the Channel to Quentovic where they were handsomely received at St Judoc’s; from there they were escorted to the court of Charles the Bald at Soissons. After the mandatory exchange of diplomatic gifts, their host provisioned them for the onward journey and sent them under escort to the borders of his kingdom.
¹⁴
From there the way was through the lands of Charles’s older brother, Emperor Lothar. The well-mounted column with its escort of household warriors passed unmolested along roads where bandits
would pick off less well-protected travellers. It would have been well worth their attentions. Æthelwulf’s treasure-house of gifts to St Peter included the sword of a warrior inlaid with gold and a crown of pure gold, four pounds in weight. Fortunately the successors to the Fisherman of Galilee have never had trouble in accommodating such largesse. The populace in general, cleric and lay, were treated to a distribution of gold and silver. Great men liked to make their mark at Rome and one imagines the West Saxon monarch succeeded.

Alcuin and his circle

From the year he joined the Frankish royal court, when he was about fifty, Alcuin passed much of the last twenty-two years of his life on the Continent. His advice was sought by both Frankish and Mercian churchmen. He was in England in 786, the year of church Councils in both Northumbria and Mercia, and again in Northumbria from 790 to 793.
¹⁵
Back with the Carolingian court, at Frankfurt, in the following year, he kept in touch with news from home. For example, a little later we find him writing of the affront offered to God by King Eardwulf (‘the tyrant’), who is reported to have put away his wife and be living openly with his concubine. Considering that Charlemagne had repudiated a wife and kept six concubines, this seems a bit harsh on Eardwulf!
¹⁶

Alcuin’s was not an original mind (he adopted ‘Albinus’, from a second-century
AD
Greek summarizer of Plato, as his nickname); in fact Latin grammar was his chief expertise. But this suited the times. Charles was less interested in thinkers who could open new directions in philosophy, than scholars who could help run his programme for the revival and consolidation of classical learning. A master of Latin literature and correct written Latin he was ideally qualified for a top position at the palace school, ‘which soon became known as ‘the School of Master Albinus’. Since Alcuin was also a
noted authority on orthodox Roman theology and church liturgy he possessed key skills, given that Rome was keenly interested in Charles’s plans in education and church organization – a continuation of the work of Alcuin’s English predecessors.

Familiar with the conventions of courtly manners from childhood, Alcuin had quickly found himself at home in the palace school of the Frankish king. The king’s consort, together with their sons Charles, aged ten at Alcuin’s arrival, Pippin, five years old, and Louis, attended a class made up of sons of the nobility, sent by their fathers at the king’s request, and sometimes the fathers themselves. Charles himself never learnt to read or write but he did attend class when he could – we know that he heard the lessons (that is,
lectiones
or ‘readings’) given by the Italian grammarian Peter of Pisa.

The Frankish court at this time, disdained as a semi-barbarian encampment by the opulent sophisticates at imperial Constantinople, was a remarkable experiment in terms of European cultural history. Charles, whose domains embraced much of the former Roman Empire in Europe, recruited an array of scholars, poets and theologians of diverse ethnic origins to a grand cultural project for the revival of Latin and ancient learning: as well as Alcuin, there were Italians, including Paulinus of Aquileia, the Spanish-born Theodulph, an ethnic Visigoth and the noted Lombard grammarian Paul the Deacon.

Following his conquest of the Lombard kingdom in northern Italy in 774, Charles had been troubled by a short-lived rebellion, in which Paul and his brother, noblemen from Friuli and members of the court at Pavia had been leading spirits. Subject at first to an elegant form of house arrest at Charles’s court, Paul had eventually returned to Italy in the late 780s and settled into retirement at Monte Cassino where he devoted himself to his
Historia Langobardorum
(‘History of the Lombards’), working on it up to his death in 799. The idea for the work could have been sparked by a conversation or in correspondence with Alcuin, or by a reading of
Bede’s
History
, which was widely diffused on the Continent. Certainly his book ‘accomplished for the Lombards what Bede’s
Historia ecclesiastica
had done for the English, by giving literary expression to a sense of national identity’.
¹⁷

The Carolingian court was a world of nicknames, puckishly distributed by Alcuin to royals and former pupils, all friends. Some seem obvious enough, like Candidus (Latin, ‘white’) for his English pupil and helper Hwita, who first came to the Continent around 793, or Columba (Latin, ‘the dove’) for the king’s delightful young daughter Rotruda; others were not so immediately obvious, such as his own of ‘Albinus’ or ‘Lucia’ for Charles’s sister Princess Gisela, abbess of Chelles. One would like to have known Fredegisus, one of his pupils who later joined the teaching staff and kept the Alcuin tradition alive in France, and was surely an impulsive individual: Alcuin always called him ‘Nathaniel’, the name of the disciple of whom Jesus once said, ‘we have here a man without guile.’ Angilbert, the young Frankish nobleman who passed through the palace school on his way to a distinguished career in the royal administration, was honoured as ‘Homer’ for his epic poem on the historic meeting between Charles and Pope Leo III. Arno, archbishop of Salzburg and ‘my dearest and closest friend’, was playfully dubbed the ‘Overseer Eagle’, a typical Alcuin pun, in fact a double pun. Like the Latin sourced ‘super visor’, the Greek word ‘
episkopos
’ from which the Old English
biscop
or bishop ultimately derives, literally means ‘over seer’, in the sense of ‘superintendent’, while the archbishop’s name was too close to the Old English
earn
, ‘eagle’ (modern English, erne) for his old friend to resist the wordplay. The image of the great lord of the air, high above the Salzach river plain, eyes peeled ready to swoop on any wrongdoer or malingerer in the cathedral’s business, leaps off the page.

Playful and urbane, Alcuin’s joshing of his colleagues can mislead us – they were not schoolboys but men of parts and in some cases of importance in the cultural evolution of Europe. These nicknames,
though, are frequently cited between the 790s and the 810s in the documentary sources of the Carolingian Renaissance. Asking why it should have been Alcuin in particular who distributed these names, Mary Garrison suggested that it was his ambivalent position at court, as one of authority though not of the establishment, that gave him a reserved status, rather as in certain tribal societies artists and shamans, although not elders, are accorded the respect associated with witchcraft.
¹⁸
(It is surely intriguing in this context that in a 1990s French television dramatized series on the world of Charlemagne, Alcuin is featured in passing as a kind of Merlin figure encountered by Charlemagne in a woodland chapel.)

The ‘Circle of Alcuin’ radiated its influence through Europe to Fulda and, later, to the great Irish-born philosopher John Scotus Erigena at the court of Charles the Bald and to the school of Auxerre in the early 900s. An important text from the period dealing with philosophy and logic, and known to scholars as ‘the Munich passages’, was very probably the work of ‘Candidus’; if true, it has been claimed this would make him the outstanding philosopher of his generation.
¹⁹

Everyone around the court knew that the king was nicknamed ‘David’, after the great king of Israel, warrior and poet, reputed author of the Psalms. Charles’s (dictated) letters reveal a sharp mind keen to debate serious issues and happy to correct textual faults in material sent to him. The year before Charles was to be crowned emperor by the pope, Alcuin wrote to ‘the most religious . . . King David’ and, among other things, thanks him ‘for having the book which I sent on your instructions read in your hearing and its errors noted and sent back for correction’. Another letter, from the king’s ‘old soldier’ – Alcuin was in his late sixties at the time – shows that the king’s thirst for learning could, at times, be rather trying. ‘A runner has just arrived with a sheet of questions urging this weak-witted old man to examine the heavens . . . to expound the erratic courses of the planets.’ Protesting that the movement of the
planets through the zodiac is not really his subject, he at first suggests Charles refer to the writings of Bede, ‘the educator of our Land’, or Pliny the Younger, before relenting and agreeing that if he can be sent a copy of Pliny he’ll prepare some replies. We are left to guess as to what made the planetary movements of such pressing importance to Charles at this time, but it is entirely in keeping with what we know of that great man that he should send an express messenger to get the answer.

For more than twenty years York scholar and Frankish monarch were in regular contact, often by letter. More than 300 of Alcuin’s letters survive (more than for any other Englishman of the Middle Ages, even Boniface). Since Alcuin often travelled with the peripatetic court and even once followed the king on campaign, their relations were generally close and, for the times, informal. But on those rare occasions when Alcuin felt he must question royal policy, he was careful to use the greatest formalities of address: ‘To Charles, King of Germany, Gaul and Italy, the most excellent and devout lord’, runs the opening of a strong critique on the question of tithes. This ten per cent charge, levied on agricultural produce and income for the good of the church and clergy, was resented even in well-established Christian communities. When Charles imposed it on newly conquered territories and recent converts, Alcuin feared that resentment could threaten rebellion and apostasy. He urged the king to forego the levy: it was better to lose the tithe than endanger the Faith.

News of the sack of Lindisfarne in June 793 prompted a long letter from Alcuin to Æthelred of Northumbria. He bemoans the desecration of St Cuthbert’s church, the spattered blood of its priests and the plunder taken by the pagans. But he writes more in anger than in sorrow about what he calls the worst atrocity since the English arrived in Britain nearly three hundred and fifty years earlier (clearly he accepts Bede’s date for the
adventus saxonum
of
AD
449). In a Jeremiad that warns of worse to come if ways are not mended,
he inveighs against ‘fornication, adultery and incest . . . even among nuns’, against ‘greed, robbery and judicial violence’, against luxurious dress and against the fashion for pagan hair style and beard trims.

It appears that some clerics were so unprincipled as to hunt mammals with dogs! Soon after his elevation as archbishop of York, Eanbald, a pupil of Alcuin’s, received a letter of exhortation that would have earned the moral approval of today’s House of Commons. ‘Let not your companions’, he writes, ‘gallop hallooing across the fields after foxes’; while elsewhere he deplores the frivolous novices at Jarrow who, he hears, prefer to dig out foxes’ earths and go hare coursing rather than worship Christ.
²⁰
Alcuin, who like Boniface had heard reports of drunkenness among English monks, urges sobriety. Elsewhere a telling aside reveals that, while regulations as to the correct vestments for the religious offices might be disregarded, people scrupulously observed due order ‘of age and rank’ at the refectory dinner table. It is another reminder that the ranks of English monastic life were well staffed with members of the upper social classes.