A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (29 page)

As to the actual conduct of the service in the chapel, he has much to say on music. First and foremost it should be sung according to the Roman rite. He, like his English predecessors in Europe, insisted on it. After his death, a cleric at the church of Metz remembered how as a boy Alcuin, ‘the wisest teacher of our whole country’, had taught his class the Roman (presumably Gregorian) chant. The boys would also have been told to sing in a disciplined manner, neither florid nor overloud, since Alcuin, like many another churchman, reckoned singers were all too ready to show off.

Teacher and scholar

Alcuin was one of the regular intimates participating in word games and verse exchanges at court, drafting correspondence for the king-emperor and taking a leading part in a public theological debate
before Charles with a team of Spanish bishops. At this time, too, work began on assembling definitive written texts of the courses he had been teaching at the palace school for years, and much else beside.

He wrote guides to orthography, grammar and rhetoric as well as aspects of astronomy, was passionate about punctuation and prolific in writing analyses of biblical texts. He set new standards for accuracy in the copying of texts in the scriptorium It has even been suggested that his meticulous rules for the pronunciation of Latin (in his
Dialogus de Rhetorica
) may have influenced the direction of the emerging French language.
²¹
In the Romance-speaking areas of Europe, where Latin was evolving into the modern languages of French, Italian, Spanish and so forth, bad pronunciation, grammatical irregularities and slang idioms (‘vulgarisms’) were slipping into acceptability as ‘Latin’. Alcuin’s passion for rhetoric led him to one important and original development – the treatise addressed to the ruler linking rhetoric with the business of ruling. He was convinced that eloquence of speech was a tool by which the ruler could persuade men to do what was just and good. His treatise to Charles the Great on this theme was the first of many such works by scholars at courts of the Carolingian age.

Towards the end of his career Alcuin seems to have provoked jealousy among colleagues. In a letter to his community in York in 795 we find Alcuin protesting that he did not go to Francia ‘for love of gold’ but for the ‘strengthening of catholic doctrine’. He did pretty well nevertheless. The revenues of no fewer than three religious houses (Ferrières, Maastricht and Troyes) were awarded to him, while the appointment as abbot of the immensely rich monastery of St Martin’s at Tours meant a comfortable, if busy, life. In office there for just eight years and in the declining years of his life, he strengthened the place’s reputation as a seat of learning, stocking the library with copies of ‘rare learned books which I had in my own land’ (that is, Northumbria). He writes to the emperor that everything he needs
can be supplied from York and asks Charles to pay the expense of sending students north to ‘bring back the flowers of Britannia to Gaul . . . so that the garden of York may supply off-shoots of paradise-bearing fruit’, intended for what Alcuin called elsewhere the smoky roofs of Tours.

During the seemingly placid career of a scholar, Alcuin had risen to a position of eminence in the business of state and influence over many of his fellow human beings: the head of religious houses, adviser to a king-emperor, and director of programmes and cultural institutions such as the schools of those houses. Writing in his
The Carolingian Empire
(Oxford, 1957), the German scholar H. Fichtenau commented that ‘Alcuin had crossed the English Channel with a single companion. In the end he was lord of many thousand human beings.’

In April 799 the new pope, Leo III, who had created Charles ‘Patrician of the Romans’, had been forced by opponents who accused him of misdemeanours to flee the Holy City and seek Charles’s protection. In November 799 a commission appointed by Charles restored the pope at Rome. In April 800 the king visited Alcuin at Tours. We do not know what they discussed. Then in the autumn he went to Rome in person to ‘restore the state of the church’. It seems that at this time Charles may have been planning to assume the title of ‘emperor’ in the sense of ‘a streamlined king who ruled over several nations’.
²²
On Christmas Day of that year, 800, however, at mass in St Peter’s, as he rose from his knees, it was to find Leo placing a crown upon his head and the crowd hailing him as ‘Emperor of the Romans’. One assumes that Alcuin, a good churchman, approved the honour done to King ‘David’; the recipient may have been less pleased.

Viking raids were to destroy much of the complex at Tours, including Alcuin’s tomb and epitaph, yet the cathedral school was one of Europe’s leading educational centres before the advent of universities in the twelfth century. As Louise Cochrane observed in
her book
Adelard of Bath: The First English Scientist
, ‘The development of the cathedral schools in Europe, stem[med] from that founded for Charlemagne by Alcuin of York at Tours and a later one by Fulbert at Chartres.’
²³

As he got older, Alcuin was subject to recurrent fits of illness, malaria has been suggested, and he may also have been troubled by a cataract. But he kept hard at work. In 800 he writes that the king, soon to be emperor, has charged him with a revision of the Old and New Testaments – in other words he was working on the text of St Jerome’s Latin Bible known as the Vulgate, completed some 300 years earlier. Over the centuries the text had become corrupt thanks to copyists’ errors and confusion over other old Latin versions. A major casualty had been punctuation, ‘which greatly improves the style of a sentence’ and, in Alcuin’s opinion, was as much in need of restoration as was fine scholarship and fine learning.

The scriptorium at Tours was kept busy multiplying copies of the new Bible under Alcuin’s supervision (it seems to have reached England by the 820s). They surely followed the injunctions of the ‘General admonition’ (
Admonitio generalis
) issued by Charles in 789 for the better ordering of church and society within his dominions. The imprint of Alcuin’s concepts is to be found everywhere in the document, both in language and in content.
²⁴
Typical is the instruction that when a new Gospel or service book is to be copied, the work must be entrusted to a trained man not a boy. The copyists wrote in the elegant and highly legible ‘Carolingian miniscule’ lettering, which would provide the model for some of the finest early printing types centuries later. Alcuin was responsible for the beautiful book design and reader-friendly page layout and ensured the distribution of the copies to monasteries and cathedral churches throughout the Frankish empire.

Among Alcuin’s students were two young Germans, Einhard (770–840), the future biographer of Charles the Great, and Rabanus, a decade his junior. Aged nine, Einhard had entered the
school at Fulda, founded by Boniface; in 791 he graduated, so to speak, to the palace school where Alcuin, its most prominent teacher, numbered the king and his family as well as young courtiers among his pupils. In later life Einhard recalled the great teacher as ‘a man most learned in every field’.
²⁵
Thus one of the most celebrated figures of the Carolingian Renaissance followed his entire educational career in establishments either inspired by the ideals of an English founder or conducted under the aegis of an English teacher. It is generally supposed that when the Welsh bishop Asser came to write his biography of King Alfred of Wessex he may have taken the idea for writing a biography of his royal master from Einhard’s book on Charles the Great. This would hardly be surprising, since both were in that wide circle of cultural exchange initiated by the English missions to the Continent.

Yet more important was Alcuin’s influence on Rabanus (also Hrabanus, c. 780–856), born at Mainz when Boniface’s English successor, Lull, was still bishop. Nicknamed ‘Maurus’ by Alcuin, after a disciple of St Benedict, he was trained at Fulda before being sent by the abbot to spend a year or two at Tours under Alcuin. He was then appointed director of the monastic school at Fulda. Under him ‘the Tours of the North’ became the leading centre of learning in the German world. The English tradition is apparent. Like Alcuin’s beloved York, Fulda’s library amassed a treasury of books. Like Alcuin, Rabanus was a prolific if unoriginal author and his book on grammar draws heavily on Priscian, Alcuin and Bede. In another important way, the cultivation of the vernacular, Rabanus, remembered as
praeceptor Germaniae
(‘Teacher of Germany’), may also have been inspired by English precepts. By a decree of 748 Boniface had insisted that priests should ‘require from persons presenting themselves for baptism an affirmation of Faith and Renunciation of the Devil in their mother-tongue’.
²⁶
With the endorsement of Charles the Great, the German church made use of the vernacular in parts of the church liturgy.

The time that Rabanus was at Fulda (803–40) saw the creation of the long religious epic
Der Heliand
(‘The Saviour’), written in Old Saxon by a poet possibly trained at Fulda. Since it is a retelling of the Gospel story, it is not a Germanic epic as such but it depicts the history of Jesus Christ in terms that would have been familiar to its target audience, the Old Saxons, and indeed to any Anglo-Saxon expatriates still to be found in the German religious world. This Jesus is a warrior king, a ring-giver (
bôggeðo
), and his disciples or ‘
theganos
’ owe him the full allegiance until death due to a lord: in short, a Jesus from the world of Beowulf.

7

VIKING RAIDERS, DANELAW, ‘KINGS’ OF YORK

The sack of Lindisfarne in June 793, which caused Alcuin such anguish, had in modern terms been a catastrophe waiting to happen. The coastal site, so convenient for the raiders, had been chosen, like that of many another monastic community from Whitby in the east to Iona in the west, as a rugged retreat ideal for the contemplative life and remote from interruptions by the secular world. In the century that was to come the British Isles, like the rest of Europe, would become accustomed to incursions by alien and brutal raiders who targeted church properties as they would treasure hoards, and pillaged the countryside for supplies as well as for plunder. Richard Abels, a specialist in military history, estimates that a war band numbering in the upper hundreds would have consumed at least a ton of grain a day and its horses up to seven times as much in fodder.

These raiders terrorized the peasant population and displaced ruling dynasties; in the end they seemed likely to overturn the entire cultural project of Christian England. The tradition of fine script and manuscript production in Northumbria, such as the accomplished Roman display scripts (uncial and half uncial), for which Monkwearmouth-Jarrow was noted, appears to have been broken by the half-century of Viking disruption between 835 and 885.
¹
Writing a century after the event, and one suspects with the
wisdom of hindsight, the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
speaks of the year of Lindisfarne as one of dragons in the sky. The Vikings’ dragon-prowed ships on the seaways would cause much more havoc.

This chapter aims to trace the history of devastation, warfare and resistance that saw the evolution of these raiders into settlers, like the Anglo-Saxons before them. The great work in which military planning, social restructuring and governmental initiative made possible the restoration of that culture during the reign of Alfred the Great of Wessex will be the principal theme of
chapter 8
. Here the king features as war leader against the raiders.

Many monks were killed at Lindisfarne and many treasures lost, but the relics of St Cuthbert and the great Gospel book survived, though we no longer have the original binding and cover. A ‘book shrine’ worthy of the sacred words it enclosed, it was adorned with ornamentation in gold, precious stones and silver gilding, the work of Billfrith the Anchorite. This, too, seems to have escaped the raiders of 793, judging by a note in the book in a mid-tenth century hand. Evidently the monastery’s great treasure had been well guarded. Did it perhaps, have a full-time guardian? After all, the attack on that June day came, almost literally, out of a clear sky. If the great jewelled book had been seen by one of the plunderers, at the very least the encrusted cover would have been hacked off. Elsewhere, in later raids, the massive parchment volumes of religious and cultural manuscripts, with their gold leaf and gilded lettering, were incinerated so that the precious metal could be poured off and harvested from the ashes. This made good sense. Unable to read and in no sense multiculturally aware, the sea robber may have been fearful of magic spells in the strange black tracings on the page, but he certainly valued gold.

Archaeology indicates that life of a sort continued at Lindisfarne once the raiders had gone on their way. The surviving monks no doubt gave a decent burial to those of their brothers slaughtered by the barbarians, tidied up their ruined buildings and set about the
business of restoring lost treasures, supposing they had the inventive genius and the technical capacities needed. For their part, the cottagers in the lee of a ravaged minster would return to work their land and possibly replace torched wattle and daub homesteads. Given a good growing season and good crops the material impact of the disaster would fade soon enough. ‘For the ordinary person in Britain’, to follow Julian Richards, such raids ‘may have had little impact’. But ordinary people rarely leave much of interest. And whether or not such raids had much or little impact on them, the Viking age in general had a catastrophic impact on the general cultural life of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.