A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (26 page)

Work by Professors McKitterick and Rollason in England and Joachim Ehlers in Germany, has revealed that Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History
was widely influential on the continent from the late 700s. Presenting the English church as an extension of the primitive church and of the universal mission enjoined by Christ on his disciples, Bede belongs in the tradition of ‘
l’histoire universelle
’, according to Georges Tugène. Continental copies, probably made at Aachen from manuscripts originating in Northumbria, such as the so-called ‘Leningrad’ Bede (completed about 746 and in St Petersburg since the early eighteenth century), arrived at monastic libraries from Würzburg to Tours and from St Hubert in the Ardennes to Trier. Recounting the conversion of a heathen people and the building of a Christian polity, Bede’s work appealed to a Frankish elite pushing Christianization as a tool of imperial expansionism first among the Frisians, then the Saxons under Charles the Great, and under his successors (less effectively) among the Danes. When Europe’s present
nomenclatura
wrote religion out of its failed ‘constitution’, it betrayed the convictions of Charlemagne himself, eponymous hero of its most vaunted prize.

At the time, the English example of diocesan organization was as important as Bede’s historical schema. In the 760s, Abbot Gregory of Utrecht, a young Frankish nobleman, disciple of Boniface, took on an English auxiliary named Aluberht, who was duly consecrated bishop of the ‘Old Saxons’ at York; here a brilliant young scholar was making a Europe-wide reputation. His name was Alcuin.

6

ALCUIN OF YORK AND THE CONTINUING ANGLO-SAXON PRESENCE ON THE CONTINENT

The French historian and minister of education (1832–7) Guizot may have dubbed Alcuin of York ‘Charlemagne’s minister of education’, but Alcuin himself looked upon his role, as did many aristocratic Anglo-Saxon churchmen, as that of a warrior in the service of Christ. Writing to Charles from his retirement at the abbey of Tours about 802, he begs not to be called once more to fight again and ‘sweat under the weight of armour’ having ‘laid aside the soldier’s belt’.
¹
He was well aware of the honoured place the war belt with its costly buckle enjoyed in the rating of a warrior’s equipment – the buckles at Sutton Hoo and Prittlewell tell the story.

Alcuin was born, it is now thought, about the year 740, into a well-connected kin group, perhaps of the minor nobility. He had also inherited ‘by legitimate succession’ the monastery of St Andrew built near the mouth of the Humber by Wilgils, father of St Willibrord, on little parcels of land given to him by kings and nobles. The career of Wilgils was not untypical of devout countrymen turning to the life of religion and attracting a small, sometimes ‘distinguished’ following so that their hermitage might evolve into a modest minster.

Alcuin’s kinsmen included Willibrord, whose biography he wrote, and also Willehad, a cousin who would become the first
bishop of Bremen. We have already noted that he almost certainly had relatives in Northumbrian court circles (see
chapter 3
). Another was Beornred, to whom he dedicated his two biographies of St Willibrord and whom he nicknamed Samuel. (The biblical Samuel, it will be remembered, had sponsored King David and ‘David’ was Charles the Great in Alcuin’s system.) Beornred, who was abbot of Echternach from 775 and ten years later archbishop of Sens, was an important figure among the Anglo-Saxons in the Frankish administration of state as well as church: in 785–6 he shared with the abbot of St Vaast a two-man commission from King Charles to report on the condition of the church in Italy, which would also include the state of the papacy.

The aristocratic world of the court and the warrior is never far from Alcuin’s correspondence. Writing to Archbishop Simeon of York in 801, who was at odds with King Eardwulf of Northumbria (the ‘tyrant’ as Alcuin dubs him), he urges him to resist and stand bravely like the standard-bearer in Christ’s battle line, for if the standard-bearer leave the field what is the army to do? Later in the same letter Christ himself is compared as a war leader ‘going before the ranks of his host . . . [who] first bore his cross to his Passion’.

Clerics shared the heroic and military culture of their class. Writing to another churchman, Alcuin seems to give us a glimpse round the screens of a cathedral monastic refectory where the readings, which should be from scripture or some improving book, may sometimes in fact have been from bardic lays or from
Beowulf
itself, with musical accompaniment. Specifically, Alcuin complains about the story of Ingeld or Hinield, a prince of the Heathobards, probably the one featured in the
Beowulf
epic, being declaimed to harp or lyre accompaniment. ‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ?’ he exclaims, ‘Your house cannot have room for both.’
²
Since at least one modern scholar has surmised that
Beowulf
itself may actually have been composed in a clerical community, Alcuin’s allusion becomes the more intriguing.
³

Alcuin entered the cathedral school at York under Archbishop Ecgberht (d. 766), brother to the king. He made precocious progress, showing mastery of the Psalms of David and fluency in the works of Virgil well before the age of ten. They were happy days. His teachers seem to have been more indulgent than Alcuin himself would be with advancing age. We are told that Sigulf, a favourite pupil who followed him to the Continent and became an assistant teacher at Tours, would read Virgil with his own pupils but in secret because Alcuin would not approve.

The school at York was a stronghold of learning and its library ‘a wondrous treasure’ of many books under a single roof. In his long verse history of the church and saints of York, considered the first historical epic to survive in the literature of the medieval Latin west,
⁴
Alcuin recalled works in Hebrew and Greek, as well as the major Latin grammarians and classics such as Cicero and Virgil, but the library also held in its catalogue books by English scholars such as Bede and Aldhelm. In fact the library, built up by archbishops Ecgberht and Ælbert (d. 780) in the tradition of Benedict Biscop at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, won repute throughout Europe for the range and depth of its learning. Alcuin, who in the 760s graduated to a teaching post in the school of York, was also becoming known on the Continent.

But he was deeply proud of the ‘famed’ city of his birth. His verse history tells of the high walls and towers of the Roman
castrum
Eboracum, which he believed had been built with the collaboration of the local tribes. The Britons of those days were not cowed and resentful, but worthy to stand as partners in an empire ‘whose sceptre ruled the world’. By contrast their descendants had been cowardly and incompetent before the onslaught of a warrior race from distant Germany called ‘Saxons’, so called because they are ‘hard as stone’. (No doubt Alcuin reckoned the derivation from the Latin word
saxum
, ‘stone’, more flattering than the one from the Germanic
seaxa
, the short stabbing knife, the Saxons’ traditional
weapon.) And there is a vivid landscape of the York, the emporium, he knew:

a merchant town of land and sea . . . where sailors haste to heave their hausers out and ride at rest . . . a town . . . whose river flows through flowery meads to haven for its ships . . .
⁵

The scholar never lost his loyalty to Northumbria, the country of his birth. Both as courtier and scholar he honoured the name of its warrior patron saint Oswald, describing him as a man powerful in virtue and the guardian of the fatherland (‘
vir virtute potens, patriae tutator, amator’).
⁶

At about the time his reputation was taking off outside England, Alcuin made his first visit to Rome on the school of York’s business travelling via the important abbey of Murbach in Alsace and the Lombard capital at Pavia. In 778–9 he was sent on a mission to the Frankish court and apparently made useful network connections with courtiers on his journey up the Rhine, though not meeting the king on this occasion. But the following year he was again in Rome to collect the pallium, or scarf of office, for York’s archbishop Eanbald from the pope On his way back he had a momentous interview in the north Italian city of Parma with Charles the Great, king of the Franks, in March 781. As a result he was to become the leading member of the palace school, though perhaps not ‘head’ in a formal sense.

Ten years before he encountered Alcuin, Charles the Great had become sole ruler of the Frankish lands following the death of his brother Carloman. Called by Alcuin the father of Europe (an early instance of the use of that word in common parlance), he was a man of towering stature and ambition, bent not only on conquest and power but also on a cultural programme to revive learning we know as the Carolingian Renaissance (from Carolus, Latin for Charles). It was the view of the late Professor Elton that ‘learned Englishmen like Alcuin . . . helped to civilize the court of Charlemagne.’
⁷
The
English were not alone, as Alcuin indicated in one of his letters, where he speaks of a new Athens in Francia (Athens having attracted men from all over ancient Greece) and perhaps rather flatteringly praises Charles as an example of Plato’s philosopher king. A man of great intellect and wide familiarity with the studies of the men he recruited, Charles was also a ruthless evangelist determined to make the heathen, and above all the Saxons, ‘submit to the mild and sweet yoke of Christ’, whatever the cost in blood. War rumbled on round the more conventional missionary efforts of the churchmen. Back in the 740s these had already established an institution that would be vital to his great cultural initiative and that Charles himself was to enrich with valuable endowments – the monastery of Fulda, inspired by Boniface.

Fulda, foundation for the future

The building of Fulda had been a classic case of the application of practicalities to the achievement of great ideas. Having decided on the site, Boniface had gone to the man in authority, Carloman, the current mayor of the palace. A religious man who would later retire into a monastery, he willingly granted the site whole and entire, together with all the land that he may be ‘supposed to possess’ within a radius of three miles. The area in question is termed ‘wilderness’ and property boundaries are vague. In these last years of the Merovingian dynasty titles of authority are vague too: one source calls Carloman ‘king of the Franks’, another ‘king of Austrasia’. Strictly speaking, he was not king at all.

A charter was drawn up and signed by the ‘king’ and an assembly of nobles of the region, who are told that the king ‘requires’ them to give any land they may hold in the area for the use of the monastery. Towards the end of March ‘in the year of the Incarnation [i.e.
AD
] 744’ (note the Bedan date)
⁸
, Boniface visited the site. He was accompanied by a body of labourers and their
supervisors who cleared the site of trees and undergrowth. A year later building work was well advanced and the archbishop came again, this time to give instruction in the Rule of St Benedict. It is apparent that the abbey already had a thriving water-powered craftwork production. Sturm had recruited workmen to divert a channel from the River Fulda under the abbey workshops, which ‘conferred great profit upon the brethren . . . as is still obvious to those who use it . . . to this day’.
⁹
This strongly suggests that the abbey had installed a horizontal wheel water mill, no doubt similar to the type of machine, dated to about
AD
700, of which traces were excavated at Ebbsfleet, Kent, in 2002 (as reported in
Current Archaeology
, no. 183).

While the king pursued his missionary work ‘partly by conquest . . . partly even by bribes’, Abbot Sturm focused on the cult centres, cutting down sacred groves and destroying temples. Not surprisingly the Saxons, clearly ‘a depraved and perverse race’, responded in kind. In 778 a particularly violent resurgence forced the community at Fulda to quit the monastery and carry the body of Boniface to temporary refuge at Hammelburg. Local forces in fact drove the Saxon threat back but Charles returned with a new army. Yet more campaigns against the Saxons under their famous ‘duke’ Widukind followed: in the mid-780s we find Abbot Beornred giving hospitality to his fellow Englishman Willehad, forced to abandon his missionary work because of the war. When Widukind finally submitted to the Frankish king and his religion of love in 785, Willehad ‘resumed his work among the Saxons with obvious success’. He was consecrated bishop of Bremen on Charlemagne’s orders.

The Sword in the Book – martyr and patron

The continuing influence of Alcuin’s scholarship and teaching ran deep. More dramatic are the memories of Willibrord of Utrecht and
Boniface, the patron saint of Germany, who ended his life in martyrdom. In his seventies he had decided to return to the mission field of Frisia. There on 5 June 754, as he and his party were reading in their tents, they were set upon by a robber band and the saint felled by a sword cut to the head – he died, we are told trying to fend off the blow with the Gospel book in his hand.

Today it is tourists as much as pilgrims whose money bulks the municipal income of Echternach on the celebration of Willibrord’s saint’s day (7 November), but for Roman Catholics in the Netherlands after its independence as the United Provinces, he and his great assistant Boniface meant much more than a holiday. In 1583 the archbishopric of Utrecht was dissolved by the Protestant States General and Roman Catholicism outlawed, following the tyranny of the former ruler, Philip II of Spain. The religion went underground. Its spiritual leader was a priest from Delft, Sasbout Vosmeer, with his seat at Utrecht. According to the German historian Michael Imhof (2004), the cults of Willibrord and Boniface enjoyed a resurgence and Vosmeer compared himself, surrounded by heretics, to St Boniface surrounded by heathen. So, at the very time when the English Protestant state, like the Dutch, was proscribing Roman Catholicism, two Englishmen were venerated as spiritual champions by an oppressed Catholic minority on the Continent.