Alcuin: Achievement and Reputation (Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 16)

Alcuin: Achievement and Reputation: Being Part of the Ford Lectures Delivered in Oxford in Hilary Term 1980

Donald A. Bullough

Brill

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ALCUIN

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EDUCATION AND SOCIETY IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE Editors

Jürgen Miethke (Heidelberg) William J. Courtenay (Madison) Jeremy Catto (Oxford) Jacques Verger (Paris)

VOLUME 16

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ALCUIN Achievement and Reputation Being Part of the Ford Lectures Delivered in Oxford in Hilary Term 1980

BY

DONALD A. BULLOUGH

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2004

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This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bullough, Donald A. Alcuin : achievement and reputation : being part of the Ford lectures delivered in Oxford in Hilary Term 1980 / by Donald A. Bullough. p. cm. — (Education and society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ISSN 0926-6070 ; v. 16) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 90-04-12865-4 1. Alcuin, 735-804. 2. Poets, Latin (Medieval and modern)—Great Britain—Biography. 3. Catholic Church—England—Clergy—Biography. 4. Northumbria (Kingdom)—Intellectual life. 5. Educators—Great Britain—Biography. 6. Education. Medieval. I. Title. II. Series. PA8245.B85 2003 871'.03—dc21 [B] 2003050252

The Trustees of the estate of the late Professor D.A. Bullough assert the Author’s right to be identified as the Author of this work in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISSN 0926-6070 ISBN 90 04 12865 4 © Copyright 2004 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

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EDUCATION & SOCIETY IN THE MIDDLE AGES & RENAISSANCE ISSN 0926-6070

1. M.M. Hildebrandt. The External School in Carolingian Society. 1992. ISBN 90 04 09449 0 2. B. Lawn. The Rise and Decline of the Scholastic ‘Quæstio Disputata’. With Special Emphasis on its Use in the Teachings of Medicine and Science. 1993. ISBN 90 04 09740 6 3. A. Maierù. University Training in Medieval Europe. Translated and Edited by D.N. Pryds. 1994. ISBN 90 04 09823 2 4. T. Sullivan, o.s.b. Benedictine Monks at the University of Paris., A.D. 12291500. 1995. ISBN 90 04 10099 7 5. C. Fuchs. Dives, Pauper, Nobilis, Magister, Frater, Clericus. Sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchungen über Heidelberger Universitätsbesucher des Spätmittelalters (1386-1450). 1995. ISBN 90 04 10147 0 6. M.J.F.M. Hoenen, J.H.J. Schneider & G. Wieland (eds.). Philosophy and Learning. Universities in the Middle Ages. 1995. ISBN 90 04 10212 4 7. J. Verger. Les universités françaises au Moyen Age. 1995. ISBN 90 04 10312 0 8. J. Davies. Florence and its University during the Early Renaissance. 1998. ISBN 90 04 11003 8 9. C. O’Boyle. The Art of Medicine. Medical Teaching at the University of Paris, 1250-1400. 1998. ISBN 90 04 11124 7 10. W. J. Courtenay & J. Miethke (eds.). Universities and Schooling in Medieval Society. With the Assistance of D.B. Priest. 2000. ISBN 90 04 11351 7 11. B. Roest. A History of Franciscan Education (c. 1210-1517). 2000. ISBN 90 04 11739 3 12. N.G. Siraisi. Medicine and the Italian Universities, 1250-1600. 2001. ISBN 90 04 11942 6 13. D.A. Lines. Aristotle’s Ethics in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300-1650). The Universities and the Problem of Moral Education. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12085 8 14. W.J. Courtenay. Rotuli Parisienses. Supplications to the Pope from the University of Paris. Volume I: 1316-1349. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12563 9 15. W.J. Courtenay. Rotuli Parisienses. Supplications to the Pope from the University of Paris. Volume II: 1352-1378. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13189 2 16. D.A. Bullough. Alcuin. Achievement and Reputation. 2004. ISBN 90 04 12865 4 17. R. Gramsch. Erfurter Juristen im Spätmittelalter. Die Karrieremuster und Tätigkeitsfelder einer gelehrten Elite des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts. 2003. ISBN 90 04 13178 7 18. T. Sullivan. Parisian Licentiates in Theology, A.D. 1373–1500. A Biographical Register. Vol. I. The Religious Orders. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13586 3

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v

To Alice, without whom there would have been no completion.

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BULL/BRIL/11615/19-09-02

60

chapter two

Donald A. Bullough (1928–2002)

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CONTENTS

Publisher’s Note .......................................................................... xi Donald Bullough Memoir .......................................................... xiii by Giles Contable Preface ........................................................................................ xvii Chronology .................................................................................. xxiii List of Abbreviations .................................................................. xxv

PART ONE

In Defence of the Biographical Approach. The Sources ...... Theme and Variations .......................................................... The Modern Reputation and the Contemporary Period .... Posthumous Reputation ........................................................ Alcuin Revealed? .................................................................... The Evidence of the Letters ................................................ Transmission of the Letters: the Beginnings ........................ Salzburg Copies of the Letters ............................................ The ‘Basic Tours Collection’ of the Letters ........................ Omissions from the ‘Basic Tours Collection’ ...................... Manuscripts of the T Collection in England ...................... An Anomalous Collection ...................................................... A ‘Personal’ Collection of Letters? ...................................... The English Collections of the Letters ................................ The Development of the Letter-Collections: the Evidence summarised ........................................................................ Author, Notaries and Copyists .............................................. Amicitia, and Sexual Orientation .......................................... The Possibility and Limitations of ‘Biography’ .................... Additional Note I .................................................................. Additional Note II .................................................................. Additional Note III ................................................................

3 3 12 17 24 35 43 51 57 66 68 71 75 81 101 103 110 117 120 122 123

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Chapter One Northumbrian Alcuin: Patria, Pueritia and Adoliscentia ................................................................................ The Eight-Century Regnum northanhumbrorum ........................ Northumbrian Society ............................................................ Patres familias ............................................................................ York, a City Emerging .......................................................... York and a Wider North ...................................................... The York Infans ...................................................................... York Cathedral Community .................................................. The Liturgy as Schooling ...................................................... “De laude Dei” and the York Liturgy .................................... Hymns .................................................................................... Mass-books .............................................................................. New Liturgical Commemorations ........................................ Calendar and Computers ...................................................... Grammatica: The Practice of Writing and Reading .............. Biblical Study .......................................................................... Vita quidem qualis fuit magistri?: Bede and Egbert .................. Master and School ................................................................ A New Regime and a Wider World .................................. From York to Rome .............................................................. York Consecrations, 767 ........................................................

127 129 135 146 153 160 164 165 176 193 200 204 215 217 220 224 227 236 238 242 247

Chapter Two Northumbrian Alcuin: Discit ut doceat ............ York books? ............................................................................ Veterum vestigìa patrum .............................................................. From the Other Island? ........................................................ Christian and Pre-Christian Poets ........................................ Grammarians and pre-Christian Prose Writers .................. Mastering Computus .............................................................. The Beginnings of Letter-Writing ........................................ Alcuin and the Vernacular .................................................... Teacher and Perpetual Deacon ............................................ ‘Without the City Walls’ ........................................................ A ‘Public’ Figure? .................................................................. The Cathedral Community ..................................................

252 255 260 274 277 282 287 293 301 304 309 314 326

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Chapter Three Between Two Courts .................................... To Rome for the Pallium .................................................... The Move to Francia ............................................................ 786: the Synodal Decrees ...................................................... At the Frankish Court: Beginnings ...................................... Renovatio, Imitatio, Correctio ...................................................... ‘The English Connection’ ...................................................... Northumbria: Promise Unfulfilled ........................................ Royal Counsellor .................................................................... Return to Francia. The Sack of Lindisfarne ...................... The Adviser at Frankfurt. Defender of Orthodoxy ............

331 333 336 346 356 371 391 395 401 410 419

Chapter Four Unsettled at Aachen ........................................ A Court Remembered in Verse .......................................... England .................................................................................. Court and Popes .................................................................... At the Aachen Court. Last months ...................................... Bibliography ................................................................................

432 437 442 445 461 471

Indices Index of Manuscripts Cited .................................................. Index on Alcuin .................................................................... Index of Alcuin’s Writings .................................................... Index of Biblical Citations .................................................... General Index ........................................................................

495 501 508 517 519

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PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Donald Bullough had originally intended this work to comprise two volumes: he had to give up plans to publish the said volumes. Nor was he given the time to put the finishing touches to the manuscript of this book, to fill the smaller gaps, to check bibliographical references or to finalise matters still left open, all things which authors like to leave for the final phases of a book’s publication. Others could never completely take over role of the author in this final polishing. For this reason a complete check of all references in the notes had to be omitted as did a truly thorough final review. Daniel Baumann, Gerald Schwedler in Heidelberg and Irene van Rossum in Leiden have contributed some corroborations, the first two of the above-mentioned have produced a list of the literature cited by Bullough, the publisher has furthermore arranged for a careful final check. Only because of the time available was it impossible to do more. The book can however speak for itself in the shape in which its author intended it. Thanks to the efforts mentioned it can be presented in a form, that corresponds even if not completely then certainly almost completely to that which only the author could have given when he decided to give it his imprimatur. The reader should put matters that could not be completely resolved or are left unresolved down to the limitations of the expertise of others and pay due tribute to what Donald Bullough has left out. The publisher further wishes to thank the following for their kind help in readying this volume for publication: Professor Giles Constable for his long note on the author; Dr Alice Harting-Correa and Mrs Nora Bartlett for proofreading the text; Dr Alicia Correa who created and compiled the five indices, and who, in the last stages, received invaluable help from Professor David Ganz, Professor Simon Keynes and Dr Mary Garrison; Dr Julia Smith who helped in a critical period; Professor Jürgen Miethke, who arranged for the checking of the bibliography. And finally he would like to thank the University of St Andrews for its financial assistance in the preparation of this volume.

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DONALD BULLOUGH MEMOIR

Donald Bullough’s scholarly interests concentrated on the three areas of early medieval Italy, Anglo-Saxon England, and Carolingian France. His published work moved, with many overlaps, from one area to the next. Between 1955 and 1971 he wrote a series of articles on Italy; his work on Anglo-Saxon England dates from 1965 and continued through his life; and in the same year he published The Age of Charlemagne, which marked his move into Carolingian studies and showed his ability to combine specialized research with work addressed to a wider public. His seven more general articles on the terminology of kinship (1969), drama and ritual as propaganda (1974), early medieval towns (1974), imagines regum (1975), burial practices (1983), community relationships (entitled ‘Friends, Neighbours and Fellows Drinkers’, 1991), and the Kaiseridee (1999), show that he was fully at home in historical sociology and anthropology, archaeology, political theory, and iconography as well as the more familiar fields of political, economic, institutional, and intellectual history. Throughout his work, from at least 1965 on, Alcuin held the pride of place, combining as he did the threads of Carolingian, AngloSaxon, and (to a lesser extent) Italian interests. There are almost twice as many references to Alcuin as to any other subject, including Charlemagne, in the index to the volume of Bullough’s collected studies entitled Carolingian Renewal: Sources and Heritage, which appeared in 1991. He published eight articles, and several occasional pieces, on Alcuin, beginning in 1973 with ‘Alcuino e la tradizione culturale insulare’, which was presented as a lecture at the Settimana di studio in Spoleto devoted to the West in the eighth century. This was followed by articles on Alcuin’s ‘York Poem’ (1981), ‘Alcuin and the Kingdom of Heaven’ (1983), which was originally presented as the Andrew Mellon Lecture at the Catholic University of America, ‘Alcuin of York and the Shaping of the Carolingian Court’ (1984), an article on Alcuin’s letter 172 (1995), ‘Alcuin before Frankfort’ (1997) in the catalogue of the exhibition celebrating the 794 council of Frankfort, ‘Alcuin’s Cultural Influence’ (1998), which might have been better titled, Bullough said, ‘Alcuin in the Manuscripts’, and ‘Alcuin and Lay Virtue’ (2002). Along the way he wrote the entries on Alcuin

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in the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church and in the forthcoming New Dictionary of National Biography and brief articles on Alcuin’s letters 174, 178, and 179 in the catalogue of the exhibition of Carolingian art and culture at Paderborn (1999). Together these articles form the background of the present work. There are many references to Alcuin in Bullough’s letters to me (and doubtless to others) during this period. He wrote in 1973 that ‘with Bischoff ’s encouragement’ he was ‘working on “the writings of Alcuin: chronology and manuscripts” ’ and in 1977 that he hoped to complete in 1980 a Clavis Alcuinae on which he thought he had made ‘a good start in 1972–3’. In 1982 he wrote that ‘I am again falling behind in getting Alcuin and Alcuin MSS. into print. But I do now see the end,’ and in 1985 (after a period of bad health and six months as acting director of the British School in Rome) that ‘I got much less academic work done than I had hoped—the expectation had been that the Alcuin handlist would at least have been set up “in print” before I left.’ Before this, in 1979–80, he had delivered the Ford Lectures at Oxford on ‘Alcuin: Achievement and Reputation’, and in 1988 he wrote that the [Oxford University] Press does know that it is getting a volume considerably larger and much more substantially footnoted (texts and mss. essentially) than some other Ford Lectures . . . Whether they will be very happy with the highly technical discussion of the transmission of the letter-collection in Ch. 1 I am not so sure.

In 1991 he wrote that ‘the revised text of Alcuin still isn’t complete, although I persuade myself that there is less than six months work to do’. Three years later, in 1994, he wrote in a fellowship application that ‘Having completed the revision for publication of my Oxford Ford Lectures Alcuin: Achievement and Reputation, I am now returning to other aspects of the eighth and ninth centuries on which I did preliminary work in the 1970s.’ The following year, however, in his report on work done during the fellowship, he wrote: Two developments in the summer of 1994 forced a change of plan: firstly, I unexpectedly identified significant new material in German libraries which could hardly not be incorporated in a supposedly ‘definitive’ monograph; secondly, the work had expanded so much over the years that the Oxford University Press editor with whom I had been corresponding raised the possibility of a division into two volumes and the separate publication of some digressive sections.

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This information may appear in the author’s preface to the present volume (which I have not seen), but his letters shed light not only on the development and progress of Bullough’s work but also on his methods of research and writing. He paid a price, both personally and professionally, for his perfectionism, as did those who were deprived of his unpublished work. A case in point—one perhaps of many—is a review he wrote in 1969 for Speculum (of which I was at that time one of the book-review editors) of Tabacco’s I liberi del re. It is an excellent piece of work but could not, since it ran to over twenty-two pages, be published as a review, as Bullough was fully aware. Indeed, he wrote somewhat drily in an accompanying letter that he had looked in recent issues of Speculum ‘with a kind of hopeful despair’, but without success, for ‘any review even remotely approaching this length’. It could have been published as an independent article, with a new title and notes, which Bullough was ready to provide, but it sank from sight after 1969, though it still appears among work ‘in progress’ in a bibliography dated November 3, 1971, under the title ‘ “Status, wealth and royal power in Carolingian and post-Carolingian Italy” (to be published in Speculum)’. It may be among his papers, along with other work that did not come up to his own exacting scholarly standards. We can therefore rejoice that, after its long gestation, Alcuin: Achievement and Reputation is now coming out as the author intended it. Even though he did not live to see the finished book, he had the satisfaction of seeing the title-page and of knowing that after so much work and so many ups and downs it would finally appear. Like the Alcuin described in the poem by Siegfried Sassoon read at Bullough’s funeral, Bullough ‘from temporalities at rest, sought grace within him, given from afar’, and he found it in his scholarship as well as in his faith. This work is the fruit of a lifetime of dedication and the crowning achievement of one of the most learned and perceptive medievalists of his time. Giles Constable Institute for Advanced Study

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PREFACE

This is a work I never intended to write and, having begun, frequently doubted whether I would ever bring to a conclusion; and indeed this is only the first volume of two, although it constitutes rather more than half of the whole work. Having completed my semi-popular The Age of Charlemagne in 1965, it was my intention to return to the history of the pre-Gregorian church in the Italian peninsula, and more specifically its cathedral churches and their clergy. But finding myself teaching Carolingian history—for the first time!— as newly-appointed Professor of Medieval History in the University of Nottingham, I was repeatedly asked by an exceptionally bright and articulate group of students, untouched by the new ways of ‘writing history’, whether the contributions of particular individuals to the familiar achievements of Court and kingdom in the period 750–820 could not be more precisely defined and more exactly dated within those seven decades. Alcuin’s letters, edited by Ernst Dümmler for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in the last decade of the nineteenth century and of course regularly cited in every twentieth-century work on Charlemagne and his court but (I suspected) highly selectively, were the inevitable starting-point: because in scale alone they outweigh any other sources for the history of the Court and not merely for Alcuin’s own particular contribution. A first reading was not very encouraging; as all commentators have observed, only a small minority of them include unambiguous chronological indications, duly reflected in the editor’s very broad datings of many of them, or direct references to his other writings, which fill hundreds of columns in two volumes of Migne’s Patrologia Latina. At the same time I felt increasingly that they belonged to a considerably shorter period than those editorial dates allowed for—with consequences for their use by historians—and that a reexamination of their manuscript tradition, which was still pretty much where Dümmler had left it, might help to clarify this. A letter from Bernhard Bischoff supplementing his published account of Munich clm. 6407 and the publication of the facsimile of the manuscript Vienna Nationalbibliothek 795 (1969), to which Richard Hunt drew my attention on a visit to the Bodleian Library, prompted me to

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consider whether the surviving manuscripts of Alcuin’s works other than his letters might not also have much to tell us. An invitation to address the 1972 Spoleto Settimana di Studio on some aspects of Alcuin resulted in a first attempt (in fact, as I quickly recognised, premature) to establish the specifically Northumbrian elements in his documentable learning and spirituality when he moved to Francia. A subsequent invitation from Prof. Josef Fleckenstein to spend a forthcoming ‘Sabbatical’ at the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte, Göttingen and a generous grant from the British Academy under the rubric of ‘exchange visits with European institutions’ enabled me to start listing the Alcuin manuscripts in a number of German and Austrian libraries in the autumn/winter of 1972/3. The catalyst of the present work was, however, the totally-unexpected election as ‘Ford’s Lecturer in the University of Oxford’ for 1979/80, which requires the Lecturer to give six lectures on some topic of English history. Correspondence with my old mentor Michael Wallace-Hadrill (then Chichele Professor) confirmed that it was indeed expected that I would lecture on Alcuin, with the emphasis on his ‘English’ aspects rather than his years at the Frankish Court and at St. Martin’s, Tours. In accepting the challenge to do so, when almost all the direct evidence for his life and ideas belongs to the Continental years, I was very conscious of a degree of perversity and recklessness! But even more reckless, in the light of the (supposed) absence of personal details in the letters and the rejection of ‘biography’ as a legitimate form of inquiry by critics as diverse as R.G. Collingwood, J. Derrida and (later and in a rather different way) Caroline Heilbrunn, was to approach the corpus of Alcuin’s writings—and not merely one part of them—in the form of an ‘intellectual biography’: other approaches seemed destined to end up as one more general treatment of the achievement of the early Carolingian court and ‘the origins of Empire’ (a livelier issue in the 1960s and 70s than three decades later) or as an attempt to re-interpret those writings in terms of modern literary or sociological theory, for which I knew I had only a limited sympathy and no talent. The six lectures given in Hilary Term 1980 were deliberately a preliminary offering, with the required Anglocentrism. At that stage, I expected to complete a fuller and revised version, with due regard to Alcuin’s Continental years, in four or five years. Heavy teaching and, later, even heavier administrative loads plus what one critic of an interim publication called ‘a refusal to take anything for granted’

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and what others legitimately label ‘an obsessive perfectionism’, steadily pushed the likely completion-date further and further away. At times I wondered whether I would have done better to produce an historical and linguistic commentary on the individual letters; but to have done so would, among other objections, have committed me to retaining the sequence, or at least substantial parts of the sequence, in Dümmler’s edition which is probably its most debatable aspect. A complicating factor was an increasing uncertainty about aspects of Latinity, to which many students of Carolingian topics had, it seemed to me, adopted a simplistic approach, although there were clear signs of change in this regard in the late-1980s and early-1990s. My own contributions in this volume are little more than lexical; and a serious study is still a major desideratum. Finally, I felt growing unease about the near-universal assumption that the letters in which Alcuin conveys his view of himself in his later years and the claims he makes as an admonisher and adviser are equally valid evidence for the views and responses of his addressees—monarchs, bishops and others—and the overlapping circles of those on whom their exercise of public authority is ultimately dependent: a scepticism which I have expressed most categorically in the York ‘Quodlibet Lecture’ ( June 2001) titled ‘Why do we have Alcuin’s letters, anyway?’ The infrequency of references to secondary literature, particularly in areas of disagreement, is conscious and deliberate, and the absence of any reference to a particular article does not mean that I am unaware of it—although of course it may mean that! I have (I hope) duly acknowledged the work of others, particularly in the younger generation—until quite recently, an almost universal courtesy—who have persuaded me to adopt a particular interpretation or line of thought. The extensive references to and quotations from contemporary and Patristic texts are intended to show why I take the view that I do of what Alcuin says, and provide ample material for those who favour or have argued for alternative interpretations. To those colleagues and students who have openly regretted that I did not produce a more succinct, less documented, version of the original lectures I can at least now reply that the New DNB will include an account of Alcuin’s life and achievement in five thousand words (with no footnotes!). Obviously in this prolonged period of gestation I have incurred debts to several institutions and innumerable colleagues. In addition to my own University, St. Andrews, its research funds and library—

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whose staff remained courteous and helpful even when I most exasperated them with my demands—they are the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Munich) under its successive Presidents, Prof. Dr. H. Fuhrmann and R. Schieffer, which provides a congenial atmosphere for taking up the work again in 1989 (with financial support from the DAAD) and 1992–93; and the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, which on the recommendation of Giles Constable at a crucial stage accepted me as a Visitor for a full year, 1994–5. The list of manuscripts used in the preparation of this work is an indication of how much I owe to the help and courtesy of innumerable Librarians and Keepers of manuscript collections: at the risk of being invidious, I would like to express particular thanks to Janet Backhouse, †Leonard Boyle, Michelle Brown, Johannes Duft, †Richard Hunt, Eva Irblich and Martin Kauffmann, and to Gunther Glauche and his regrettablynameless colleagues in the Manuscripts section of the Munich Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. I have acknowledged elsewhere my indebtedness to Michael WallaceHadrill; and I would like to link with his name that of the late Sir Richard Southern who inspired and encouraged me over many years, both as Chichele Professor and as President of St. John’s College, Oxford. Likewise among those of an older generation who have not already been named, Paul Meyvaert and Ann Freeman have for decades been fruitful sources of ideas and knowledge, as well as generous with hospitality on visits to North America; and Francis Newton has been particularly helpful with cruces in Alcuin’s Latinity. Perhaps more than most, I have benefitted in countless ways from the advice, criticism and help of various sorts of scholars in a younger generation: notably, David Ganz, Patrick Wormald, Peter Godman, Gabriel Silagi, †Timothy Reuter, Michael Herren, Tom Noble, Julia Smith, Alicia Correa (Starkey), Katy Cubitt, Mary Garrison and Susan Rankin. Two other names must be singled out: one who figures in innumerable footnotes and one who is (I think) never mentioned at all. The latter is Arnaldo Momigliano: between the late 1950s and his death in 1987, we met frequently in all three of the countries in which he held academic positions, and I never failed to come away from conversations with him both challenged and better-informed. The former is, of course, the late Bernhard Bischoff. From the time of our first meeting, in Edinburgh in 1958 when he encouraged me to send any queries I might have about the dating and localization of Carolingian-period manuscripts, to a few weeks before his fatal

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accident, latterly in the fabled study at ‘Ruffini-Allee, 27’, he was unfailingly generous in the sharing of his unique knowledge of scriptregions, scriptoria and scribal hands and their dating within the ninth century; without that guidance, much of what I say about the early copying and dissemination of Alcuin’s writings, or indeed apparent ignorance of them, would be shakily based indeed. I only wish that I could have repaid my debts to them earlier. My greatest personal debt is reflected in the Dedication.

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CHRONOLOGY

Northumbria/York Born ca. 740. Infans at York cathedral ca. 745. ?Lector mid-750s. Visit to Italy (Rome; Pavia) and Francia (Murbach) early 760s. Deacon ?mid-760s. Assistant to Ælberht magister early 760s; magister ?767–early 780s. ?Putting together a collection of computistic material. Calculatio Albini magistri with concluding hexameter verses 776. Compiling of the material for De laude Dei ?a. 786. First visit to Charlemagne’s court late 770s (?779). Letter-poem Cartula, perge 779–80. Associated with Eanbald in the building of the church of Alma (al. agia) Sophia, consecrated 30 October 780. Journey to Rome to obtain the pallium for (arch)bishop Eanbald 780–81. Encounter with Charlemagne at Parma ?March 781. Earliest extant letters ?783–4. Participation in the Papal legatine councils at ?Corbridge, Northumbria and in the kingdom of Mercia 786. Departure from England for the Frankish Court summer/autumn 786.

Francia At the itinerant Court 786–early 790. First royal grants of ‘monasteries’. Making available (?re-organizing) a computistic-astronomical collection. ?First version of Quaestiones in Genesim ?Ep. no. 131 on confession, to St. Martin’s, Tours. Major contributor to capitulary of March 789; ‘composer’ of royal letter De litteris colendis.

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 Northumbria/York

Return to Northumbria (York). Beginning of ‘registration’ of outgoing correspondence. (Ineffective) involvement in Northumbrian ‘politics’. Advice solicited by King Offa and King Charles. ?Collecting testimonia relevant to ‘Adoptionism’. ?First version of De orthographia

Francia Return to Francia early summer 793. Carm. ix and letters on sack of Lindisfarne post-21 793/94. Rejoins Frankish Court (when?). At Frankfurt summer 794. Responsible for letters in names of Frankish bishops and of king. At Aachen palatium ?autumn 794 to summer 796. Teacher both orally and through the written versions of his ‘pedagogy’; wrote occasional letters in king’s name; earliest letters on conversion of Avars. Departed for St. Martin’s, Tours (apparently reluctantly) summer 796. Abbot of St. Martin’s 796–804.

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xxv

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AA.SS ACO ACOE AfD AfLw AFU AnBoll ARF ASC ASE BAR BCS BHL BM2 BS BÉHÉHisp. Bibliothekskataloge CCCM CCSL CLA Coll. Bibl. Lat. CPL CPPM CSEL DA DMLBS DOP ed. EEMF EHD EHR EME EphemLit Epist. select. FmSt Frankfurter Konzil Germ.Pont.

Acta Sanctorum Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum: Concilium Universale Ephesenum Archiv für Diplomatik Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft Archiv für Urkundenforschung Analecta Bollandiana Annales regni Francorum inde ab a. 741. usque ad a. 829., qui dicuntur Annales Laurissenses maiores et Einhardi, ed. F. Kurze (MGH SSRG in us. schol. 6, 1895, repr. 1950) An Anglo-Saxon chronicle from British Museum, ed. E. Classen and F.E. Harmer (Manchester, 1926) Anglo-Saxon England British Archaeological Reports W.G. Burch Chartularium Saxonicum Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina J.F. Böhmer and E. Mühlbucher. Regesta Imperii 1 Die Regesten des Kaiserreichs unter den Karolingen 751–918 2nd ed. (Insbruck, 1899) British Series Bibliotheque de l’École des Hautes Études Hispaniques Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Deutschlands und der Schweiz, vol. 1ss. (München 1918ss.) Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaevalis Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina Codices Latini Antiquiores, ed. E.A. Lowe (Oxford 1934, 2nd ed. 1972) Collectanea biblica latina et studio monachorum S. Benedicti Clavis Patrum Latinorum, ed. E. Dekkers (3rd ed., Turnhoult 1995) Clavis patristica pseudepigraphorum medii aevi Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Deutsches Archiv Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (Oxford, 1975ff.) Dumbarton Oaks Papers edited, editor Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile English Historical Documents, c. 500–1042, ed. D. Whitelock (London, 1955) English Historical Review Early Medieval Europe Ephemerides Liturgicae see MGH abbreviations below Frühmittelalterliche Studien Das Frankfurter Konzil von 794. Kristallisationspunkt Karolingischer Kultur, 2 vols., ed. R. Berndt (Mainz, 1997) Germania Pontificia

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xxvi GCS

  

Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte (Berlin and Leipzig 1897ff.) GL Grammatici Latini HE Bede, Historia ecclesiastica HBS Henry Bradshaw Society HR Historia Regum, in: Symeonis Monachi opera omnia 2, ed. Th. Arnold (Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevis scriptores or chronicles and memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the middle ages 75/2, London, 1885) HZ Historische Zeitschrift Jaffé-Wattenbach Regesta Pontificum Romanorum ad a. p. Chr. N. MCXCVIII, 2nd ed. in 2 vols., ed. W. Wattenbach, worked out by S. Loewenfeld, F. Kaltenbrunner, P. Ewald (Leipzig, 1881–1888) JE Jaffé/Ewald, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum JL Jaffé/Löwenfeld, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum JW Jaffé/Wattenbach, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum JournEcclHist Journal of Ecclesiastical History JournMedLat Journal of Medieval Latin JTS Journal of Theological Studies Karlswerk Karl der Große—Lebenswerk und Nachleben, 4 vols., ed. W. Braunfels (Düsseldorf, 1956) LexMA Lexikon des Mittelalters, 11 vols. (Munich, 1980–1998) LThK Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche 11 vols. (Freiburg i. Breisgau, 1993–2001) MAPS Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society MaSt Mittelalterliche Studien 1, 2, 3, B. Bischoff (Vol. 1–2 Stuttgart, 1967, vol. 3 Stuttgart, 1981) MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica MGH AA Monumenta Germaniae Historica Auctores Antiquissimi MGH Capit. Monumenta Germaniae Historica Capitularia MGH Conc. (II) Monumenta Germaniae Historica Concilia aevi Karolini (II: ed. A. Werminghoff (Hannover, 1820–1871) MGH DD Monumenta Germaniae Historica Diplomata MGH, DK MGH, Diplomata Karolinorum MGH, Epist. select. MGH, Epistulae selectae MGH Epp. Monumenta Germaniae Historica Epistulae MGH Epp. KA Monumenta Germaniae Historica Epistulae Karolini Aevi MGH LL Monumenta Germaniae Historica Leges MGH Poet. Monumenta Germaniae Historica Poetae MGH SS Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores MGH SSRL Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores Rerum Langobardicarum MGH SSRG Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores Rerum Germanicorum MGH SSRG in us. schol Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum MGH SSRM Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum MIÖG Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung (Innsbruck, 1948ff.) MLGB Medieval Libraries of Great Britain MLWB Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch

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   MS NDB NF NS PG PL QFIAB

xxvii

Manuscript(s) Neue Deutsche Biographie Neue Folge New Series Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne Quellen und Forschungen aus Italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken RAC Rivista di Archeologia Cristiana RevBén Revue Bénédictine RevEtAug Revue des Études Augustiniennes RHEF Revue d’Histoire de l’Eglise de France RHT Revue d’Histoire des Textes RS Rerum Britannicarum Scriptores (Rolls Series) S-K Initia carminum latinovum. S. xi antiquirum ed. Schallerand Könsgen. Göttingen 1977 Sawyer Sawyer, P.H. (1968) Anglo-Saxon Charters (London: Royal Historical Society Handbooks) SC Sources Chrétiennes SCH Studies in Church History SLH Scriptores Latini Hiberniae SMBGO Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktiner Ordens und seiner Zweige StudMed Studi Medievali StT Studi e Testi transl. translated, translator, translation Verfasserlexikon Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters—Verfasserlexikon, 2nd ed. by K. Ruh et al., vol. 1ss. (Berlin and New York, 1978ss.) Villa Claudia Villa, “Die Horazüberlieferung und die ‘Bibliothek Karls des Großen’: Zum werhverzeichnis der Handschrift Berlin, Diez B66.” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 51:1 (1995) 29–52. YAJ Yorkshire Archaeological Journal ZfKg Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte

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1

PART ONE

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IN DEFENCE OF THE BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH. THE SOURCES

Theme and Variations Writing in the summer of 800 to three fellow-toilers in the cause of religious orthodoxy, Alcuin affirmed that it was (he believed) by Divine dispensation that he had been called to service in the Frankish kingdom: and he added—a little defensively—that this was ‘as in my own country a certain very holy man endowed with the spirit of prophecy foretold was to be the will of God’.1 Anyone who asserted that his election as Ford’s Lecturer was similarly the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy would rightly be regarded as suffering from a faulty memory or from an arrogance unusual even in the young. The invitation (a quarter-of-century ago!) was the more unexpected to someone whose historical interests, although undoubtedly orthodox, had only intermittently embraced ‘his own country’. Moreover, to have found one’s theme in the English contribution to Carolingian Europe was to follow awesome precedents: Wilhelm Levison’s lectures in 1943, the publication of which in the immediately post-war period had been for some of us a revelation on the Damascus road, and the no less notable series in 1970 by the late Chichele Professor, Michael Wallace-Hadrill.2 Much of the content of the lectures as originally delivered was little more than a gloss on parts of theirs, although like some other ‘continuous glosses’ it has subsequently expanded far beyond the basic text. If I differ from those earlier Ford Lecture-series in any significant measure, it is in focussing on a single figure—for the first time among medievalists, I think, since Sir Maurice Powicke’s Stephen Langton: an equally awesome precedent3—in an effort to define more precisely Alcuin’s 1

Ep. no. 200 (MGH Epp. IV, p. 332). W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946); J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the Continent (Oxford, 1971). 3 F.M. Powicke, Stephen Langton (being the Ford Lectures delivered in the University of Oxford . . . in Hilary Term 1927) (Oxford, 1928). Sir Richard Southern has drawn attention to the significance of these lectures for the subsequent development of medieval studies in Oxford: see The Bible in the Medieval World: Essays in memory of Beryl Smalley, ed. K. Walsh and D. Wood (Eccl. Hist. Soc.; Oxford, 1985), 3 ff. 2

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     .  

personal contribution to the Carolingian achievement and its heritage, and the experiences and education that formed it. This was no new subject even in 1980, as could properly be claimed for the lectures and subsequent publications of each of those three precursors. Already in the 1820s a German Protestant scholar, Friedrich Lorentz, made excellent use of Frobenius Forster’s then recently-published opera omnia of Alcuin to write a full-length textbased ‘Life’, of which an English translation was published in 1837: I have never seen it cited in any modern work; but in both comprehensiveness and critical judgement it is often superior to most of the ‘biographies’ produced during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century—more numerous, indeed, than of any other Carolingianperiod individual except of Charlemagne himself ! Only C.J.B. Gaskoin’s work of 1904, little known outside the British Isles and before its reprinting not widely available in it, clearly improves on Lorentz.4 The most important English-language contributions since then have focussed on particular aspects of Alcuin’s achievements: among them, Father Gerald Ellard’s Master Alcuin, Liturgist of 1956, which is now mainly valuable as a summary of half-a-century’s liturgical scholarship that has been largely overtaken or disproved; and Luitpold Wallach’s Alcuin and Charlemagne of 1959. The latter work set the standard for subsequent philological and textual analysis of Alcuin’s writings, even when it provoked disagreement with both arguments and conclusions. A year after the delivery of the lectures, a fine book by Dr. John Marenbon put the ‘philosophical’ aspects of Alcuin’s reading, excerpting and teaching on an entirely new basis, although his inferences from some of the key texts seem to me challengeable; and 1982 saw the publication of a much-needed new edition of Alcuin’s ‘York poem’, with an extensive introduction, by Dr. (now Professor) Peter Godman.5 4 Friedrich Lorentz, The Life of Alcuin, transl. Jane Mary Slee (London, 1837), the St. Andrews University Library copy of which was formerly Mark Pattison’s, who had acquired it in 1840; C.J.B. Gaskoin, Alcuin, His Life and his Work (London, 1904). One Continental scholar who read Gaskoin was the late Eduard Fraenkel—in his Oxford years, mentor and critic of medievalists as well as of classicists—who did so on Paul Lehmann’s behalf in the middle of the First World War! see Philologus 74 (1917), 362 n. 42 = P. Lehmann, Erforschung des Mittelalters 2 (Stuttgart, 1959), p. 90 n. 200. Among the other biographies, Miss Eleanor Duckett’s charmingly-titled Alcuin, Friend of Charlemagne: his world and his work (New York, 1951), is underpinned by lightly-displayed scholarship in many sections but is totally unreliable on chronology. 5 G. Ellard, Master Alcuin, Liturgist: a Partner of our Piety (Loyola U.P., Chicago, 1956), provocatively and learnedly reviewed by C. Hohler in JEcclHist 8 (1957),

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     .  

5

A new look at Alcuin, whether in 1980 or in 2002, cannot seek justification in a substantial body of unpublished material or of published but misattributed or ignored writings. Early post-medieval manuscript collectors and librarians, especially in France—Nicholas Le Fèvre and Bouhier among them—made hopeful or simply reckless attributions of anonymous exegetical works to Alcuin, which most later editors rightly ignored. Even in 1913, a Jesuit and a Benedictine (rare allies!) claimed for Alcuin the Commentarius in LXXV Psalmos, printed by Migne among the works of Rufinus: but almost immediately Dom André Wilmart showed that the the true author was the twelfth-century Letbert of Lille, abbot of St.-Ruf.6 Kleinclausz made a futile attempt to vindicate Alcuin’s purported authorship of the treatise De processione Sancti Spiritus in an early-ninth-century St.Amand book subsequently at Laon: it is, in fact, a primary text for the Filioque debates and their conciliar resolution in 809, latterly attributed to Archbishop Arn of Salzburg. A text entitled Igitur converso primum omnium dicere debemus, quando devota mente convertitur was published as a work of Alcuin’s, because in the tenth-century Milan manuscript in which it occurs it follows the De fide sanctae Trinitatis, the Interrogationes et responsa de Trinitate and the De ratione animae, of which only the first has Alcuin’s name in the title(!), and because of some not very distinctive parallels with passages in the letters: the 222–6; L. Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne: Studies in Carolingian History and Literature, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, 32 (Ithaca, 1959); J. Marenbon, From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 3rd ser., 15 (Cambridge, 1981), chs. 1, 2 and App. 1; Alcuin, The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York ed. P. Godman, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1982). For Michael S. Driscoll, Alcuin et la Pénitence à l’Époque Carolingienne, Liturgiewissenschaftliche Quellen u. Forschungen 81 (Münster, 1999), see below, n. 160. 6 Le Fèvre’s table of contents in Paris B.N. lat.2384 (pt. i) (St.-Denis, s. ix1), fol. v 1 , credits Albinus with the authorship of the opening ‘commentary on Matthew’; and in the mid-nineteenth century Francis Monnier, ‘précepteur du Prince Impérial’, published extracts from it as a work of Alcuin’s: Alcuin et Charlemagne (Paris, 1863), pp. 361–9. It is now recognised as an anonymous Irish work, complete only in Orléans Bib. mun. 65: B. Bischoff, ‘Wendepunkte in der Geschichte der lateinischen Exegese im Frühmittelalter’, MaSt, 1, 244–5 (no. 16 I), J. Vezin in Rev. Bén. 94 (1984), 315–9, 325; further literature and discussion in SASLC: Trial version, pp. 102–3 (where the Ps.-Alcuin designation is unfortunately retained). Bouhier suggested that the expositio orationis Dominicae on fols 1–8v of his manuscript C.53, now Montpellier Fac. de Méd. 141 (Flavigny or vicinity, s. ix1; for the slightly earlier palimpsested leaves with the same origin, see CLA VI, 794 and Bischoff, MaSt 3, 19, n. 66), was the work of Alcuin. Pseudo-Rufinus: PL 21, cols 641–958; Heinrich Brewer, S.J., ‘Der Pseudo-Rufinische Commentarius in LXXXV-Psalmos, ein Werk Alkuins,’ in Zeitschr. f. Kath. Theol., 37 (1913), 668–675; Germain Morin, O.S.B., in Rev. Bén., 30 (1913), 458–9; A. Wilmart in Rev. Bén., 31 (1914–19), 258–76.

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     .  

fact that it is composed for converts to Benedictine monasticism and that neither the style nor the forms of Scriptural citation are characteristic of Alcuin are sufficient grounds for rejecting his authorship. Wilmart himself, having identified the earliest known copy of the ‘exposition of the Mass’ inc. Primum in ordine in the English (Mercian?) manuscript Bodleian Hatton 93 raised the possibility that Alcuin was the author, only to reject it! and a more recent attempt to establish his authorship produces no relevant evidence.7 Dr. John Marenbon argued for Alcuin’s authorship, during his first period of residence in Francia, of the much quoted and widely circulated short text De imagine Dei, of which he provided the first critical edition from early manuscripts. This would indeed have important implications both for Alcuin’s intellectual biography and for the early development of learning at Charlemagne’s Court. The alternative view, for which I argued in 1983 and which Dr. Marenbon now partly shares, is that the work (but less certainly, the expanded De dignitate conditionis humanae of which it constitutes the initial and final sections) is a late-Patristic one, which re-surfaced at the Court and was subsequently exploited by Alcuin and his pupils.8 A French cleric with 7 De processione: in the thirteen-leaf (!) Laon Bibl. mun.,122 bis, fols 2–23v (on the origin of which the late Prof. Bernhard Bischoff changed his views more than once, but finally decided for St.-Amand, and perhaps precisely datable to 809); ed. H. Willjung, Das Konzil von Aachen 809, MGH Conc. II, suppl. ii (Hannover, 1998), pp. 253–83, cf. ibid. pp. 35–47, 62–87; A. Kleinclausz, Alcuin, Annales de l’Université de Lyons, III.15 (Paris, 1948), pp. 204–5 and n. 17. Igitur converso etc. inc. Frater dic mihi que est voluntas: ed. from Milan, Bibl. Ambrosiana S.17 sup., fols 57v–61v (?N.Ital., s. x) by C. Ottaviano, Testi Medioevali Inediti, Fontes Ambrosiani, 3 (Florence, 1933), pp. 3–18; the unknown (ninth-century?) author’s ‘Alcuinian’ language was probably derived directly from the letters of Jerome etc. which had inspired Alcuin. Primum in ordine: Oxford, Bodleian Libr., Hatton 93, fols 2–41 (constituting the entire ms. apart from added fly-leaves, unlike later copies of the work); CLA II, 241, but now dated by Jennifer Morrish (Tunberg), ‘Dated and datable mss.’, Traditio, 50 (1988), 513–4, 538, to s. ix1; Wilmart in EphemLit, 50 (1936), 133–9; F. Unterkircher, ‘Interpretatio canonis missae in codice Vindobonenesi 958’, Beiträge zur Buchkunde u. Kulturgesch.: Festgabe f. Franz Unterkircher ed. O. Mazal (Graz, 1984), pp. 317–31, esp. pp. 321–2 (to which Dr. Morrish kindly drew my attention). Note that in a Salzburg manuscript of the ?840s, Budapest c.l.m.ae. 316 fol. 29v, another Carolingian exposition of the mass, inc. Dominus vobiscum, has the heading EXPOSITIO . . . VEL TRACTATUS ALBINI MAGISTRI; but this attribution seems equally excluded on stylistic grounds. 8 Marenbon, From the Circle of Alcuin, esp. pp. 30–43, 144–51, the edition ibid., pp. 158–61; Bullough, ‘Alcuin and the Kingdom of Heaven’, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 175–81; Marenbon, ‘Alcuin, the Council of Frankfort of 794 and the Beginnings of Medieval Philosophy’, Das Frankfurter Konzil von 794 ed. R. Berndt (Mainz, 1997), 2, 603–15 and esp. 613–5; below, pt. II ch. 3, p. 376. For the version of the (post-

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     .  

7

a novel view of the ‘British understanding of “personality”’, Vincent Serralda, sweeping aside or ignoring seventy years’ cumulative scholarship, has recently and implausibly maintained (admittedly, in company with Mabillon) that a substantial Confessio fidei is a genuine work of Alcuin’s: the discussion of Eucharistic doctrine in the last of its four books, if nothing else, refutes this claim; and Alcuin is merely one of several Carolingian and post-Carolingian writers used by its early-eleventh-century author (almost certainly John of Fécamp).9 Although the text first printed in 1571 as Alcuinus de Psalmorum usu, from an incomplete manuscript copy, and the falsely-titled Officia per ferias in its several manuscript versions are unquestionably of ninthcentury origin, Alcuin can properly be credited with neither. Only the letter inc. Beatus igitur David printed as the preface to the secondnamed work, in that or another version, and the more elaborate prophetiae spiritus which originated and circulated independently but was early adopted as the first-named work’s preface, are acceptably his. They are linked in more than one way with ‘books of prayers’ (extra-liturgical) in ninth-century and later manuscripts, which include orationes and other texts of which Alcuin is the probable composer and in the first compilation of which his, or disciples’, active involvement is highly likely.10 For three-quarters of a Isidoran but pre-Carolingian?) De benedictionibus patriarcharum which is appended to (or concludes) Alcuin’s ‘Questions and Answers on Genesis’ in many of the manuscript-copies and in Migne, see below, ch. 4. 9 Text in PL 101, cols 1027–98, from Chifflet’s edition; V. Serralda, ‘Étude comparée de la “Confessio Fidei” attribuée à Alcuin et de la “Confessio Theologica” de Jean de Fécamp’, Mittellat. Jahrb. 23 (1988), 17–27. But see J. Geiselmann, Studien zu frühmittelalterlichen Abendmahlschriften (Paderborn, 1926), pp. 51–96; Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels, pp. 126–37, 574 (n. 1); idem, ‘Deux Préfaces spirituelles de Jean de Fécamp’, Rev. d’Ascétique et de Mystique 18 (1937), 44; Jean Leclercq and J.P. Bonnes, Un maître de la vie spirituelle au XI e siècle: Jean de Fécamp (Paris, 1946), esp. pp. 32–44; G. Mathon, ‘Jean de Fécamp, theologien monastique?’, La Normandie Bénédictine au temps de Guillaume le Conquérant (XI e siècle) (Lille, 1967), pp. 485–500. Serralda’s idea of the British concept of ‘personality’ in relation to Alcuin(!) is expounded in the final Appendix of his La Philosophie de la Personne chez Alcuin (Paris, 1978), pp. 510–12. 10 De Psalmorum usu: PL 101, cols 465–508; Officia per ferias: idem, cols 509–612. In a penetrating series of studies between the two World Wars, of which little account was taken elsewhere until the 1960s, Dom André Wilmart had broadly established both the true character and origins of these two works and the several elements and principles of composition and development of the early Continental prayer-books: see especially his Auteurs Spirituels et Textes Dévots du Moyen Age Latin (Ét. Augustiniennes, Paris, 1932; repr. 1971), ‘Prayers of the Bury Psalter’, Downside Review 48 (1930), 198–216, and ‘Le manuel de prières de Saint Jean Gualbert’, RevBén 48 (1936), 259–99; and his edition of four prayer-books, unfortunately without commentary, as Precum Libelli Quattuor Aevi Karolini (Rome, 1940). Some of the variant forms in which the

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     .  

century, liturgiologists generally followed Edmund Bishop’s lead in seeing Alcuin as the compiler of the indisputably early-Carolingian Supplement (additional mass-sets, ‘proper’ prefaces and benedictions) to the so-called ‘Gregorian Sacramentary’, until his arguments and conclusions were convincingly challenged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with Benedict of Aniane as the proposed author. Conversely, Alcuin’s ‘authorship’ of some or all of the prayers in a series of votive and other masses, long familiar to worshippers as well as to liturgists, was put almost beyond doubt. The precise character of Alcuin’s contribution to the epistle-lectionary or Comes that passed under his name in the ninth century remains, however, uncertain.11 The young André Wilmart (again!) expressed doubts about Alcuin’s authorship of the Expositio in Canticum(al.-ica) Canticorum and its verse preface inc. Hunc cecinit Salomon mira dulcedine mirum, which circulated in two somewhat different versions from the ?second quarter of the ninth century; these doubts have periodically resurfaced, but scholars who have studied the text most closely are generally agreed that the longer version is Alcuin’s re-fashioning of part of Bede’s Expositio allegorica of the ‘Song of Songs’.12 A distinctive didactic text, the earliest known version of a metrical martyrology, datable to the 760s/770s may owe something to Alcuin. Manuscript support can be found for ascribing to him new recensions, also in his York days, of one or more of the argumenta which were variously combined in pre-Carolingian and Carolingian handbooks of calendar calculation, computi; and a partial reconstruction of the

two works occur in manuscripts from the ninth to the eleventh century (even more complex than Wilmart had supposed!) are analysed by J.B. Molin, ‘Les manuscrits de la “Deprecatio Gelasii”: usage privé des Psaumes et dévotion aux Litanies’, EphemLit, 90 (1976), 113–48. For Alcuin’s authorship of Prophetiae spiritus, PL 101, cols 465B– 468A, see Wilmart in Rev. Bén. 48, 263–4 and nn., 268–9 (although reservations are possible: Molin, p. 117, says ‘très vraisemblablement alcuinien’). For the manuscript traditions of that text and of Beatus igitur David, see below. 11 Supplement: E. Bishop, Liturgica Historica (Oxford, 1918), pp. 54–7, 344–8 and passim (cf. index s. v. ‘Alcuin’); Ellard, Master Alcuin, chs. 6, 7; J. Deshusses, ‘Le “supplément” au sacramentaire Grégorien: Alcuin ou Saint Benoìt d’Aniane?’, AfLw., 9 (1965), 48–71; Deshusses, Sacr. Grég., 1, pp. 63–70, 3, pp. 70–75, with references to other literature (mostly his own). Alcuin’s mass-sets: H. Barré and J. Deshusses, ‘A la recherche du Missel d’Alcuin’, EphemLit, 82 (1968), 3–44; Deshusses, ‘Les Messes d’Alcuin’, AfLw., 14 (1972), 7–41; For the Comes, see below, p. 19 and n. 42. 12 Expositio: PL 100, cols 641–64; for authorship and the relationship of the two versions, compare Wilmart in Bulletin de Littérature Ecclesiastique 8/9 (1906) p. 235 n.[p. 234 n. 1 cont.].

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personal handbook in which they were included seems possible.13 Although decisive proof is still lacking, the uncertainly-attributed Propositiones ad acuendos iuvenes is judged by its most recent editor to be not-impossibly Alcuin’s, and certainly from his circle. More recently, a musicologist has rehearsed the arguments for a possible identification between the short text inc. Octo tonos in musica consistere, which was incorporated in a more extensive music-theory treatise before the middle of the ninth century, and the De musica credited to Alcuin in the pre-829 Vita Alcuini and elsewhere.14 A small number of manuscripts report ‘sayings’ of Alcuin (Alcuinus ait . . .), the schoolmasterish or donnish sententiousness of which supports their substantial authenticity; while a (?)late-ninth century Bobbio glossary-collection and a Verona-area computus and astronomical collection of s. ix/x include an account of the varieties of ‘cubit’ quoted from an Alcuin quiz (Ex questionario Alcuini magistri, Bobbio; Ex libro questionum Alcuini, Verona), which could well be a genuine reflection of his teaching.15 13 Martyrology: below, Pt. II ch. 1 (pp. 206–217); computistic texts: below, Pt. II chs. 2, 3. Aldhelm and Bede’s use of argumentum specifically in the context of calendar studies is better represented by MLWB. argumentum: 4’ (cols 941–2) than by the entry argumentum in DMLBS, 1, 124. If Alcuin ever used the word in that connection, I have failed to notice it: he seems to have preferred the alternative calculatio, cf. the text discussed below, pp. 287–293 and cartulas . . . calculationis. 14 Propositiones: ed. M. Folkerts, Denkschriften Wien (1978), with an excellent introduction and commentary; also, with a new introduction and a German translation by H. Gericke, in Science in Western and Eastern Civilization in Carolingian Times, ed. P.L. Butzer and D. Lohrmann (Basel-Boston-Berlin, 1993), pp. 273–81, 283–362. The editors’ arguments for Alcuin’s authorship are not very strong, and ‘style’ is not obviously helpful; but for additional lexical arguments see below, Pt. II ch. 1. De musica: H. Möller, ‘Zur Frage der musikgeschichtlichen Bedeutung der “academia” am Hofe Karls des Grossen: Die Musica Albini ’, in: Akademie und Musik. . . . Festschr. für Werner Braun zum 65. Geburtstag (Saarbrücker Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, n.F. Bd.7; Saarbrücken, 1993), pp. 269–88, text at p. 276. 15 Sayings: Munich clm.14614 (‘Isanberht group’: W. Fr.? or Salzburg area?, c. 820/35) fol. 256; Paris BNF lat. 10861 fol. 123v (Continental addition of ?s. ix2—although Michelle P. Brown supposes later—to a probably Canterbury book of s. ix1–2/4), etc. But not the text headed ALBINUS AD REGEM, inc. Fuganda sunt omnimodis in Cologne, Erzbischöfl. Diözesan- u. Dombibl. cod. 106 fol. 26v, which is ‘lifted’ from (probably) Jerome. Nor, as Manitius supposed (Geschichte 1, 149), the Item Flaccus dicit: vidimus ex Hebraeis virum elegantem et admirati eum sumus et amplexi in the Ars Bernensis in Bern, Bürgerbibl. 123 (central(?) France, s. ix med.: Bischoff ), fols 78v–117, ed. H. Hagen, Anecdota Helvetica = Keil, GL Supplementum (1870), pp. 62–142, at p. 134; for this is a verbatim quotation from Virgilius Maro Grammaticus. Quiz: Milan Ambr. C 243 inf. fol. 88 (referred to by P. Collura, Studi Paleografici. La precarolina e la carolina a Bobbio (Milan, 1943), p. 161); Padua, Bibl. Antoniana, 27, fol. 96v. Compare Alcuin’s own description of a letter from the king with questions about the Heavens as Quaestionaria carta, ep. no. 155 (p. 250) of 798.

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     .  

There are at the most two substantial works of Alcuin which have yet to be edited in their entirety. One is a collection of extracts De laude Dei et de confessione orationibusque sanctorum assembled by him from the Bible, the Fathers, Christian poets and liturgical texts which (as we shall see) throws invaluable light on the ill-documented preFrankish Court years. The other is a ‘question-and-answer’ commentary on the Apocalypse, which occurs in association with other Alcuin and Alcuin-circle texts uniquely in a ?south-east German manuscript: if it is Alcuin’s, he is unlikely to be the author of another one published under his name by Angelo Mai and reprinted by Migne.16 With these exceptions, and the poems included in modern editions that are probably or certainly not composed by him, the corpus of Alcuin’s writings, more substantial than any other eighth/ ninth-century scholar-cleric’s, except Hincmar of Rheims,17 is welldefined and has attracted the attention of printers and editors since the earliest age of the printed book. The substantial De fide sanctae Trinitatis appeared in print under Alcuin’s name already in 1493, although this fact has largely escaped the attention of cataloguers of incunabula; and even that had been preceded by the De dialectica, printed in 1480 as a work of Augustine. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries added steadily to this first tally, with England (and Scotland) making only a modest contribution—the more modest, indeed, because John Leland’s pioneering partial transcripts of letters in an English collection were not published until the early

16

De laude Dei: details in Pt. II ch. 1, pp. 193–200 Unpublished Apocalypse commentary, inc. praef. Devotissima ac inextricabilis et vitia dixerim: Munich clm. 13581, fols 3–31 (a manuscript of the ‘Isanberht group’, as defined by Bischoff, Südostdeutsched Schreibschulen, 1, 229–34; cf. ibid., 230 and E.A. Matter, ‘The pseudo-Alcuinian «de septem sigillis»: an early Latin Apocalypse exegesis’, Traditio 36 (1980), p. 137 n. 79. ?Pseudo-Alcuin on the Apocalypse, inc. praef. Beatus Beda in septem periochis dicit Apocalypsin consistere: PL 100, cols 1087–1156, following Mai’s editio princeps from BAV Vat. Lat. 651 (?Italy, s. x), fols 1–31. The work discussed and re-edited by Matter in Traditio 36, 111–137, is that in PL 101, cols 1169A–1170B, which Frobenius Forster (as n. 20) had published among the Alcuin dubia from BAV Vat. lat. 5096 [s. xi, ?Italy]; an earlier manuscript-source of the same version is the Verona-written, Tours-linked Munich clm. 6407, while an older version is in two ninth-century Reichenau manuscripts. Dr. Matter favours sixth/seventh century Spanish origin for the commentary; but for some doubts, arising from its links with demonstrably Hiberno-Latin texts, see SASLC: Trial version, pp. 111–2. 17 PL 125, cols 9–1320, idem, 126, cols 9–648; J. Devisse, Hincmar, Archevêque de Reims 845–882, 3 vols (Geneva, 1976), pp. 1158–61 and passim, for works not included in PL.

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eighteenth century.18 The Frenchman André Duchesne essayed in 1617 the first comprehensive edition of Alcuin’s writings, including letters and poems: using for the latter a manuscript subsequently lost, he saved a number of genuinely-Alcuin verses from oblivion but saddled him with many that were not.19 It was, however, the south German Catholic Enlightenment, in the person of Frobenius Forster of St. Emmeram (Regensburg), that produced in 1777 the still-standard edition of Alcuin’s opera omnia.20 The carmina appeared in a new (but not entirely satisfactory) critical edition by Ernst Dümmler in 1881, in the first volume of the recently-established Poetae series of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica; and the same editor was responsible Bullough, ‘Alcuin from Manuscript to Printed Book: the first phase’ (forthcoming), where early-sixteenth-century editiones principes (all S.German/Swiss) of exegetical works and of the de Rhetorica are described. Leland’s excerpts were printed by Thomas Hearne in his six-volume Lelandi de Rebus Brittannicis Collectanea of 1714/15 (1715 on the title-page of vol. 1; but see P.L. Heyworth, Letters of Humfrey Wanley (Oxford, 1989), p. 303 n. 4), at vol. 2, pp. 392–404 of the more widely-available 1774 re-issue; for their (debatable) manuscript source, see below, pp. 79–80. Somewhat later the French scholar Pierre Pithou may have started to copy the manuscript that became Troyes bibl. mun. 1165 pt. i (below, pp. 57–61). The first printed text of a letter-collection (St. Gallen Stiftsbibl. 271: below, pp. 61–2) is, however, that of H. Canisius, Antiquae lectionis tomus I (1601), 1–123. Idem, tomus V (Ingolstadt, 1604), 988–1050 is the editio princeps of the De grammatica. In 1638 the Royal Librarian and St. Andrews graduate Patrick Young published the Expositio in canticum canticorum from BL Royal 5.E. xix (Salisbury, s. xi/xii: a note in Young’s hand on fol. 37) as the second item in a volume whose title-page suggests that it contains only Gilbert Foliot’s expositio (from the ?unique BL Royal 2.E.vii Rochester, s. xiii in) and is commonly so catalogued. 19 B.Flacci Albini sive Alchvvini . . . Opera . . . studio et diligentia Andreae Quercetani Turonensis, 3 pts in 1 vol. (Paris, 1617): for the full title, see ‘Editions of Texts’; for Duchesne’s texts of the poems as a principal source of later editions, see below, n. 54. Duchesne was certainly assiduous rather than scholarly, more a transcriber than an historian: see R. Poupardin’s introduction to Bibliothèque Nationale: Catalogue des Manuscrits des collections Duchesne et Bréquigny (Paris, 1905), pp. i–xix. But the brief account by Roman d’Amat in Dict. de Biographie Française, 11 (Paris, 1967) is unduly dismissive—and omits the Albini . . . Opera from his bibliography. 20 B.Flacci Albini seu Alcuini . . . Opera omnia . . . cura ac studio Frobenii, S.R.I. principis et abbatis ad Sanctum Emmeramum Ratisbonae, 4 pts in 2 vols (Regensburg, 1777). This had been preceded by Forster’s thirty-page quarto Conspectus omnium, quae hucusque inveniri potuerunt, operum beati Flacci Alcuini quorum novum editio paratur (Regensburg, 1760). The printing of the Opera omnia extended over several years, newly-discovered material being incorporated in the process. For Forster’s life and scholarship see J.A. Endres, Frobenius Forster, Fürstabt v. St. Emmeram in Regensburg (Strassburger theologische Studien, 4: Freiburg i. Breisgau, 1900); Neue Deutsche Biographie 5 (Berlin, 1961), 302–3 [L. Hammermeyer]; B. Bischoff, Salzburger Formelbücher u. Briefe aus Tassilonischer u. Karolingischer Zeit (SB. Bayerische Akad. der Wissenschaften, Ph.-Hist. Kl., Jahrg. 1973 Heft 4; Munich, 1973), esp. pp. 3–8. 18

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     .  

for the magisterial edition of the epistolae fourteen years later.21 For most of Alcuin’s other writings Forster’s texts, through the Migne reprints, have provided the only solid basis for modern evaluations of the man and his achievement: for many, including the exegetical works and the De fide sanctae Trinitatis, they still do, although in the past fifteen years a younger generation of scholars—predominantly in North America—has begun the preparation of new critical editions of several of them.22

The Modern Reputation and the Contemporary Record At the end of the nineteenth century the great Ludwig Traube, who understood Latin philology as embracing all aspects of the transmission of texts from one generation to another, more than once declared that Alcuin ‘became and long remained the intellectual leader of Europe’; and many later scholars have echoed his words. English-language and French-language writers in the present century, following or adapting Guizot, have regularly characterised Alcuin as ‘Charles’s Minister of Education’ or ‘Minister of Religious Affairs’.23 It is as the reverse of this image that the late Professor Barraclough in one of his moods blamed an educational tradition stemming from Alcuin for the post-1945 West’s failure to find a technological answer to the upsurge of Asia and the resurgence of Islam! Distinguished scholars with less expansive historiographic horizons have been generous almost to the point of recklessness in what they credit to Alcuin. For much of the twentieth century, liturgiologists (as already remarked) credited Alcuin with the Supplement to the ‘Gregorian Sacramentary’ which, fused with that earlier section, became the basis of the Roman Missal in use until the 1950s; and many scholars have inferred that

21 Dümmler, Poetae latini aevi Carolini I, MGH Poetae latini medii aevi 1 (1881, repr. 1997). 22 For the exceptions see ‘Editions of Texts’. 23 Sir Frank Stenton characterised Alcuin even more comprehensively as ‘the head of the palace school . . ., the chief adviser of Charlemagne on doctrinal issues, and his agent in all his relations with England’(!): Anglo-Saxon England 3 (Oxford, 1971), p. 189. It was Traube’s early death that prompted St. Andrews’ Professor of Humanity, W.M. Lindsay, to move the centre of his own interests to the external features of early Latin manuscripts, with consequences that were delicately recognised in the ‘dedication’ of the original volume II of Lowe’s Codices Latini Antiquiores: see The Classical Review 21 (1907), 188 f. (obituary notice of Traube), CLA, 2 (1935), p. xvii.

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the Frankish king had reform of the mass-liturgy in mind when he invited Alcuin to join his court. Palaeographers, despite Traube’s cogent objections, have been reluctant to abandon Mabillon’s epochmaking claim for Alcuin as the creator of ‘Caroline minuscule’ script, whether at the Frankish Court or at the abbey of St. Martin’s, Tours; and they have even identified codicological features of Court (ex‘Ada group’) manuscripts which may be attributable to him.24 Professor F.-L. Ganshof, whose formidable scholarship was always informed by personal experience of political structures and social tensions which had their remoter origins in the breakdown of Carolingian Imperial unity, came to regard Alcuin as the decisive influence in Charlemagne’s accession to Emperordom in 800. Extensive discussion since his seminal Glasgow lecture of 1949 has focussed particularly on other, contemporary, notions of ‘Empire’ and Imperial authority, and on the roots of Alcuin’s own concepts.25 Professor Wallach, having convincingly identified Alcuin as the dictator or author of a number of texts prepared at and sent from the Court in the middle years of the reign, endeavoured over many years—ultimately unsuccessfully— to establish his ‘authorship’ also of the massive Libri Carolini (Opus Caroli Regis) Against Images.26 The uniquely-influential position thus attributed to Alcuin in the circle of those around King Charles contrasts with the relative silence of genuine royal and Imperial diplomas, in which he figures only twice, 24 Compare Traube, Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen, 2 (Munich, 1911), ed. P. Lehmann, p. 25; 3 (Munich, 1920), ed. S. Brandt, pp. 243–4 and n., with E.A. Lowe, CLA VI (Oxford, 1953), p. xxvii. Stenton, loc. cit. last note, more cautiously says that ‘At Tours . . . the influence of his scholarship contributed to the development of the most beautiful of all forms of script associated with the Carolingian Renaissance’. 25 F.-L. Ganshof, The Imperial Coronation of Charlemagne: theories and facts (David Murray Lecture, 16; Glasgow, 1949) = Ganshof, The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy (London, 1971), pp. 41–54. Compare, among an extensive literature, H. Fichtenau, ‘Karl der Grosse und das Kaisertum’, MIÖG 61 (1953), 257–334; P. Munz, The Origin of the Carolingian Empire (Dunedin, N.Z., 1960); R. Folz, Le Couronnement Impérial de Charlemagne (Paris, 1964) (the English-language version of 1974 is seriously flawed); P. Classen, Karl der Grosse, das Papsttum und Byzanz. Die Begründung des karolingischen Kaisertums, 3rd ed. (by H. Fuhrmann and C. Märtl) (Sigmaringen, 1985). Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship ch. 6 discusses Alcuin’s conceptions of kingship but not of Empire and emperordom. 26 Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, pp. 147–65, 198–226. Overlapping arguments were put forward independently by F.-C. Scheibe, ‘Alcuin u. die Admonitio generalis’, DA 14 (1958), 221–9; idem, ‘Alcuin u. die Briefe Karls des Grossen’, DA 15 (1959), 181–93. For Theodulf, not Alcuin, as the author of the Opus Caroli, see Ann Freeman, with Paul Meyvaert, Opus Caroli Regis contra Synodum (Libri Carolini), MGH Conc. II, Suppl. 1 (Hannover, 1998), Einleitung, 2, and esp. (for Wallach’s views), pp. 15–16.

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     .  

as abbot of St. Martin’s and probably in the same year (800);27 and there is an even more striking contrast with the total silence of annalistic texts linked in some way with the Court. The criteria by which the author-compiler of the ‘Frankish Royal Annals’ includes or excludes particular events are, as in most examples of the genre, neither consistent nor clear except that he is usually silent on military defeats and conspiracies which an evidently well-informed ‘Reviser’, of debatable date and unknown location, included in his version. In the last decade of the century, for a part of which at least the ‘Royal Annals’ are acceptably a contemporary record, they report two legations to Rome by the Frankish Angilbert (792, 796) and a third (in 799) by an abbot and an Italian duke; legations from Rome, from the Imperial Court in Constantinople and its representatives in Sicily, from the tudun of the Avars, from both Muslim and Christian Spain (a named envoy of the king of Galicia and Asturias presented ‘a most beautiful tent’ on the earlier of two visits in 798 and 799) and from Jerusalem; and the plundering of the Balearic Islands ‘by Moors and Saracens’.28 The unrevised annal for 790 is the briefest for twenty years; the revised version is notably fuller, as is that in the almost-certainly contemporary Annales Laureshamenses. The absence from all of them of a reference to Alcuin’s return to England or to any other embassy sent to make peace with king Offa suggests at the very least that the Mercian and Northumbrian kingdoms did not then loom as large in Frankish political consciousness as much modern scholarship supposes.29 27 DK 1, nos 192 (in favour of St. Martin’s dependent house at Corméry), 195: for the date of the second of these see Mühlbacher’s comments ad loc. For Alcuin’s claim that he intervened on behalf of an Italian monastery in ?795, see below, Pt. II ch. 4. He is, however, named in no less than six forged diplomas of medieval date: three times as a participant or petitioner, respectively in idem, nos 259 (of s. xi ex, using no. 192), 240a (of 1155–57), 240b (of s. xiv/xv?); once as a ‘witness’, idem, no. 303 (of s. x/xi); and twice as the member of the writing-office responsible for their preparation. idem, nos 254 (Alcuinus levita et cancellarius sacri nostri palatii ), 266 (advicem Alguini archicapellani ), both of s. xi in. 28 ARF, ed. Kurze, 90, 92–4, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104, 110; the ‘Revised’ annals, misleadingly designated Ann. q.d. Einhardi, are on the facing odd-numbered pages. Angilbert is recorded in the ‘Royal Annals’ for 792 as the person who conducted the ‘heretic’ Felix from Regensburg to Rome; but his name is omitted in the otherwise much fuller account of the episode in the ‘Revised’ version. The controversial origins and development of the latter are radically re-examined, without being resolved, by Roger Collins, ‘The “Reviser” Revisited: Another Look at the Alternative Version of the Annales Regni Francorum’, in A.C. Murray (ed.), After Rome’s Fall. Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History. Essays Presented to Walter Goffart (Toronto, 1998), pp. 191–213. 29 Notably Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England , pp. 215, 219–21; Wallace-Hadrill,

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     .  

15

The ‘Royal’ annalist’s and his ‘reviser’s’ conspicuous silence is matched by that of the Carolingian dynasty-centred Annales Mettenses priores: largely copying the ‘Royal Annals’ for the years 791–802 but evidencing a marked stylistic break at that point, its composition has sometimes been associated with Alcuin or with the royal nunnery of Chelles with which he had close personal links.30 Equally silent is a sparser sequence of annals extant in a number of versions, which have in common a seventh-century Northumbrian starting-point and a record of the Frankish Easter Courts from 782 to 787 (or 792): copies were made and new material introduced in the late eighth and early ninth centuries at several centres, including St.-Amand, where Alcuin was already a familiar name and presence.31 Their ‘Charlemagne and England’ [1965], Early Medieval History, pp. 155–80, esp. pp. 156–63 (684–90); idem, Early Germanic Kingship, pp. 115–17. For the circumstances of this dispute, which is otherwise known only from the Gesta sanctorum Patrum Fontanellensis coenobii (written after 814), and Alcuin’s involvement—or non-involvement!—in its resolution see below, Pt. II ch. 3; the 790 annal is ARF, ed. Kurze, p. 86. For the Annals’ silence about the sack of Lindisfarne in 793, cf. pp. 410–18. 30 Annales Mettenses priores, ed. B. v. Simson (Hannover-Leipzig, 1905), on which see H. Hoffmann, Untersuchungen zur karolingischen Annalistik (Bonner Hist. Forsch., 10; 1958), esp. pp. 9–12, 38–41, and my comments in EHR, 85 (1970), 64–5; also I. Haselbach, Aufstieg u. Herrschaft der Karolinger in der Darstellung der sogenannten Annales Mettenses priores (Historische Studien 412; Lübeck-Hamburg, 1970), esp. pp. 25–40. Roger Collins has recently suggested, without attempting to argue the case in detail (‘The “Reviser” Revisited’, pp. 196–7, 213), that the Ann. Mett. in its transmitted form ‘is intrinsically a compilation of the early 830s’. 31 Ed. from the supposedly Auxerre manuscript of ca. 830 (so Carey, followed by Jones [CCSL 123B, p. 251]), Paris BNF lat. 13013 pt. ii (fols 48–161), as Ann. Lindisfarnenses Cantuarienses. Ann. ut videtur Alcuini, MGH SS IV, p. 2 (Pertz); from the probably Fleury (rather than Auxerre: see M. Mostert, The Library of Fleury. A provisional list of manuscripts, Medieval Studies and Sources 3 (Hilversum, 1989), BF 1258) manuscript Paris BNF lat. n.a. 1615 by Delisle, Fonds Libri et Barrois (1888), 72 (n. to p. 71); selectively from Würzburg Univ.-Bibl., M.p.th.f.46 in MGH SS in fol. I, pp. 87–8, incompletely amplified and corrected idem, 3, 122, the ‘Salzburg’ entries (as Ann. Iuvavenses maiores) in idem, 30/2, 729 ff. (Bresslau). But according to Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 2, 133–4, Würzburg M.p.th.f.46 fols 1–97v, the opening section of which includes the older annalistic entries, were written by St.Amand scribes at the beginning of the ninth century (the hand of fols 84–97v being similar to that responsible for Alcuin’s De orthographia in Vienna Nat. bibl. cod. 795, fols 5–19v, and were not at Salzburg until the 820s. Pertz, as his title indicates, credited Alcuin with the recording of the Easter courts simply because it began with the year 782 (in Carisiago): but he did not claim (as others subsequently have implied) that Alcuin brought with him the Insular archetype of the entire complex. Since the Northumbrian entries end in 664 and are followed (except in the St.Amand version!) by Canterbury ones, this is not on the face of it very likely; but compare below, Pt. II, ch. 2, and esp. pp. 288 n. 109 and 289 n. 113, with particular reference to the computus manuscripts Vatican Pal. lat. 1449 and Berlin Staatsbibl. Phillips 1831 (128).

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     .  

collective outlook contrasts sharply with that of a Northern/Central Irish contemporary incorporated in the later ‘Annals of Ulster’; and with that of the likewise contemporary author or compiler of Northumbrian (not implausibly, York) annals, transmitted only in an amplified version by Byrhtferth of Ramsey and chronicles dependent on it or in much abbreviated versions. The former, although silent on the sacking of Lindisfarne in 793, records raids on the island of Britain in 794 and the death of Offa rex bonus Anglorum in 796.32 The latter in its fuller version(s) adds to an account of local events in 794–5 the death of Pope Hadrian in Rome and the preparation of a marble epitaph by order of the Frankish king (recte 795–6), and devotes the annal for 795(–6) to a surprisingly detailed account of the booty that the Franks had taken from the Avars—information possibly but not certainly supplied by Alcuin.33 The earlier of at most 32 The Annals of Ulster (to A.D. 1131), ed. S. MacAirt, G. MacNiocaill, 1 (Dublin, 1983), p. 250. (D. Dumville’s severe criticisms of this publication, intended to replace the first part of the edition by W.M. Hennessy and B. MacCarthy, 1887 seq., in Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 10 [1985], 67 ff. do not affect the interpretation of these passages.) The omnes insolae Britanniç of Ann. Ulst. are usually understood as the Western Isles of Scotland, in which Irish annalists would have a particular interest. Was the epithet given to Offa a reference not so much to his moral qualities as to his political superiority or overlordship? compare Ann. Ulst. an. 846 (recte 847), ed. item, p. 306: Feidhlimidh rex Muman optimus Scotorum, and the comment of Hughes, op. cit., p. 136. For direct contact between the Mercian Court and Irish Courts or religious houses in Offa’s last months, see Alcuin’s letter ep. 101, discussed in Pt. II ch. 4. 33 The ‘Northumbrian Annals’, Byrhtferth version, are in the fourth section of the Historia Regum attributed to Symeon of Durham (ob. c. 1130), as transmitted by Cambridge, CCC 139 (c. 1164), ed. T. Arnold, Symeonis Opera, 2, RS. (1885), 30–68: see P. Hunter Blair, ‘Some observations on the Historia Regum attributed to Symeon of Durham’, Celt and Saxon: Studies in the Early British Border, ed. N.K. Chadwick (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 63–118; M. Lapidge, ‘Byrhtferth of Ramsey and the early sections of the Historia Regum attributed to Symeon of Durham’, ASE 10 (1981), 97–112, esp. 115–7, repr. 1993, pp. 317–42, 488. For the annals for 794–6 see Arnold’s edition, HR 2, 56–7. Other annalistic and chronicle texts which depend substantially on the hypothesised ‘Northumbrian (?York) Annals’ for the years 732–802 or on their expanded, Byrhtferth, version are: i. the so-called ‘Ramsey Annals’ in Oxford, St. John’s Coll., 17, fols 139–43v, ed. C. Hart, EHR 85 (1970), 39–44; ii. the Northumbrian (Durham?) nucleus of the ‘Chronicle of Melrose’ (BL Cott. Faustina B. ix), facsimile with introduction by A.O. and M.O. Anderson (London, 1936), [1]–[6]; iii. the incompletely-published Historia post Bedam in BL Royal 13, A.VI (s. xii med.) fols 2–107v and Oxford, St. John’s Coll., 97 (s. xiii in., Durham), fols 1–80v; iv. the Annales Lindisfarnenses et Dunelmenses in Glasgow Univ. Libr., Hunterian Coll. T.4.2 (85) (s. xii2–3, Durham), fols 18–26v, ed. W. Levison, DA, 17 (1961), 478–9. Earlier than any of these, however, was the lost text of the Northumbrian Annals (to 806) used by the compiler of the version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which was the common source of the ‘D’ and ‘E’ texts and which, because of the presence of additional Whithorn material (details in Pt. II ch. 1), must have been a variant version of the ‘York’ text used by Byrhtferth.

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     .  

17

two contemporary or near-contemporary annalistic references to Alcuin in his lifetime is to be found in the Byrhtferth version of the ‘Northumbrian Annals’. Here we read, as the first part of the record for ‘anno dccxcii’, that Charles, king of the Franks, sent to Britain a synodal book, directed to him from Constantinople, in which book—grievous to say—were found many things improper and contrary to the true faith, especially that it had been asserted with the unanimous consent of nearly all the scholars of the East, no fewer (rather more in fact) than 300 bishops, that images ought to be adored, which the Church of God utterly abhors. Against this Albinus wrote a letter, wonderfully supported by the authority of the Holy Scriptures, and presented it with the same book and in the name of our bishops and nobles ( principum nostrorum) to the king of the Franks.

This remarkable statement, which is repeated verbatim in the twelfthcentury northern English Historia post Bedam and with varying degrees of distortion in other English chronicles, requires exposition and interpretation; but it is impermissible simply to dismiss it, as has sometimes been done, as a supposedly late concoction.34 The second annalistic record, in the problematic Annales Maximiniani and of much more uncertain status, is one which names ‘master Alcuin’ after the Papal legates, the patriarch Paulinus (of Aquileia) and Bishop Peter of Milan as defenders of orthodoxy at the Frankfurt council in 794.35

Posthumous Reputation The indifference of contemporary ‘official’ records from the Court which Alcuin served, even when qualified by the occasional mention in the writings of his contemporaries, fits ill with the evidence 34 HR ed. Arnold, 2, 53–4, and similarly in both manuscripts of the Historia post Bedam; for the origin and interpretation of the passage, see below, Pt. II ch. 3. Compare L. Wallach, Diplomatic Studies in Latin and Greek Documents from the Carolingian Age (Cornell U.P.; Ithaca-London, 1977), p. 13 n. 21. 35 MGH SS XIII, p. 22. After nearly two centuries of debate, students of the Frankish Annals do not agree on much: but it is generally accepted that for the period to 796, and in part even beyond that date, the Annales Maximiani are only one of several derivatives from a lost compilation, which Levison thought was Bavarian but Löwe believed was Frankish, and seems also to have borrowed from the ‘Royal Annals’ as defined above (Wattenbach-Levison, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter, 2 (Weimar, 1953), pp. 188, 191 [Levison], 257–8 [Löwe], cf. Hoffmann, Untersuchungen, pp. 13–19). For the significance of the passage and its relationship to a similar one in the ‘Royal Annals’ (in which Alcuin is not named), see below, Pt. II ch. 3.

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     .  

for his posthumous reputation. Most familiar here are the laudatory references to him in the writings of men who were his pupils and then the pupils of his pupils (who do not, until Notker’s pupil Salomon, seem to have been bored by the donnish reminiscences of their teachers), pursuing their distinguished, controversial or modest careers in widely-separated parts of a once-united Empire. Yet this may not be quite so straightforward as it at first seems. Alcuin’s death in 804 is ignored by the ‘Royal Annals’. Several ‘minor’ or ‘local’ annals of the early ninth century record it, sometimes with a precise day: none of them can confidently be regarded as a contemporary entry.36 His epitaph, incised on a bronze plaque and placed above his tomb within St. Martin’s at the insistence of the bishop of Tours was, except for the concluding (prose) section, his own composition, with a characteristic opening verse Hic rogo pauxillum veniens subsiste, viator. It disappeared at an early date; the text is, however, preserved in several ninth-century and later manuscripts, in very varied contexts although never, despite assertions based on André Duchesne’s edition, in association with a text of the Vita Alcuini. Perhaps copies were circulated by the St. Martin’s community, soon after Alcuin’s death or a few years later.37 There is an unusual and indirect tribute to him in Benedict of Aniane’s Munimenta fidei, compiled c. 804/14 for his ‘favourite son’ Guarnerius who, he says, ‘has diligently learnt by heart master Alcuin’s books on the Trinity’—which, however, ‘he didn’t hold of much account’!38 Conversely, a sermon preached by 36 Thus, the Fulda recension (815/17)—in Vienna Nat. bibl. 430*—of the Chronicon Laurissense breve includes in its item ‘XXXVI’ (for an. 804?) Alcuinus XIII. kal. Mai [sic, for Iun(ii)] obiit, et Ricboto eodem anno moritur, the month error suggesting copying from a calendar; the corresponding entry in the supposed ‘original Lorsch version’ compiled in ?806/7 and certainly before 814 (but transmitted only in BAV Pal. lat. 243, fols 49–66, written almost a century later: B. Bischoff, Die Abtei Lorsch im Spiegel ihrer Handschriften, ed. 2 (Lorsch, 1989), pp. 122–3) simply records the death of Rihcbodo archiepiscopus. See H. Schnorr von Carolsfeld, ‘Das Chronicon Laurissense breve’, NA. 36 (1911), 15–39, at 37 and 34. For a further posthumous reference to Alcuin in both versions, see p. 19 at n. 40. 37 Vita Alcuini c. 28 ad fin. (p. 197); MGH Poet. I, pp. 350–51 (no. cxxiii), S.-K. no. 6688; Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, pp. 255–65. . . . Subsiste, viator, used by Alcuin in other verses, has a centuries-long epigraphic history. For the manuscript evidence, see Additional Note II. 38 J. Leclercq, ‘Les “Munimenta Fidei” de Saint Benoît d’Aniane’, Analecta Monastica, ser. 1 = Studia Anselmiana, 20 (Rome, 1948), 27–66 (from the unique, formerly Moissac, manuscript, Paris B.N. lat. 2390, here pp. 47, 49, cf. idem p. 68). The terminus ante quem non, however, is provided not by ep. no. 205 (only in this manuscript, at fols 84–85v, and presumably from the ‘recipients’ copy’) but by the De fide sanctae Trinitatis which was not completed and sent to the Emperor until the autumn of 802. Chronicon: Hrabanus: MGH Poet. II, pp. 159 ff.

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     .  

19

a disciple of Alcuin’s a year or two after his death seems to include an oblique but quite pointed criticism of the master.39 At some point in the last years of Charles’s reign, the ‘author’ of the so-called Chronicon Laurissense breve included in the entry corresponding to the year 795 the statement that Alcuinus cognomento Albinus diaconus et abba monasterii sancti Martini sanctitate et doctrina clarus habetur; and not long afterwards Alcuin’s Fulda disciple Hrabanus ingeniously paid tribute to his late teacher in a poetic Intercessio Albini pro Mauro (inc. Sancte Dei presul, meritis in saecula vivens) composed to accompany a presentation-copy of the first part of his work In honorem Sanctae Crucis.40 A new phase in the development of Alcuin’s posthumous fame seemingly begins in the early 820s. Ardo of Aniane, recording the life of his mentor Abbot Benedict very soon after his death in 821, names Alcoinus among the contemporaries with whom the abbot had close links, characterizing him as ‘a deacon celebrated for his learning’ who was held in the very highest regard at ‘the emperor Charles’s court’.41 Shortly afterwards an anonymous writer, almost certainly Louis the Pious’s ousted ‘chancellor’ Helisachar, composed a preface for the supplement added to the Comes (epistle-lectionary) copied from an exemplar incorporating corrections and revisions made, he said, by ‘the most learned man Alcuin, at the command of the most wise emperor Charles’.42 Amalarius—controversialist and gyrovagus,

39

I.e. Candidus at Maastricht. Chronicon: ed. Schnorr von Carolsfeld, p. 34; the Fulda version (item ‘XXXVI’) changes the opening words to His temporibus Alcuinus rethor Britanicus diaconus etc., idem, p. 37. Intercessio: S.-K. no. 14623, new edition by M. Perrin, Rabani Mauri in honorem Sanctae Crucis, CCCM 100 (Turnhout, 1997), p. 5; the approximate dating is provided by vv. 13–14, cf. Perrin’s Introduction, p. xxi. Perrin’s edition of the verses omits the title, and his apparatus (p. 4) notes it as unique to Wimpfeling’s 1503 edition (from a lost manuscript). But this is surely mistaken: Intercessio Albini pro Mauro is already in BAV Reg. lat. 124, fol. 3, in surely contemporary rustic capitals. Perrin has reviewed and in part radically revised the composition and chronology of the work hitherto usually cited as the De laudibus Sanctae Crucis. 41 Ardonis Vita: c. 24, ed. Waitz, MGH SS XV/i, 210. 42 Comes: A. Wilmart, ‘Le Lectionnaire d’Alcuin’, EphemLit 51 (1937), 136–97, the text of the Preface from the St.-Amand manuscript of s. ix1/3 (only later at Chartres cathedral) Paris B.N. lat. 9452, at pp. 164–5; a variant text in the Freising manuscript Munich clm. 6424 (of the 820s, not s. x: Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 2, 215), ed. G. Morin, ‘Une rédaction inédite de la préface au Supplément du Comes d’Alcuin’, Rev. Bén., 29 (1912), 342–3, arguing (ibid., 343–7) for Helisachar’s authorship of both versions a few years apart. The dating of the earlier version depends very largely on how one regards its relationship with Helisachar’s letter to Nebridius (MGH Epist. V, pp. 307–9) and with the Hucusque preface to the Gregorian Sacramentary Supplement, of which Benedict of Aniane’s authorship is now, following 40

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     .  

although not always by choice—does not name Alcuin in his first and longest work of liturgical commentary, the Liber Officialis of 823: the references to the older man’s ability and authority as a liturgist come after 831, although some years previously he cited Alcuin’s letter to the king on the subject of Septuagesima, etc.43 The Bamberg copy of the ‘Alcuin Bible’, which commemorates his editorial involvement with a crude portrait-medallion set in the midst of his own introductory verses, inc. In hoc quinque libri, belongs not to the earliest phase of Tours production, as Rand thought, but to the years 834/43, and to Marmoutier rather than St. Martin’s. It is, therefore, close in date to, although probably a few years earlier than, the representation of Alcuin in the dedication pictures included in the revised edition of Hrabanus’s In honorem Sanctae Crucis, in the Fulda book BAV Reg. lat. 124.44 Paschasius Radbertus in his ‘life’ of Adalhard of Corbie, written very shortly after the latter’s death in 826, cites the letters of ‘master Alcuin’ as evidence for his hero’s Deshusses, generally accepted. A date ca. 825 has been proposed by J. Décréaux in the Introduction to his edition of Le Sacramentaire de Marmoutier (Autun 19 bis) dans l’histoire des Sacramentaires Carolingiens du ix e siècle (Rome, Pont. Inst. Arch. Crist., Studi di Antichità Cristiana, 38; 1985), 223–4, where, however, this is linked with his theory (ibid., 196–234), that the Supplement and its Hucusque preface are the work not of Benedict but of Helisachar! For the Comes proper (Alcuin’s?), compare A. Chavasse, ‘Les plus anciens types du lectionnaire et de l’antiphonaire romains de la messe. Rapport et date’, RevBén 62 (1952), 1–91, esp. 5–6, 67–70. 43 Opera liturgica, ed. Hanssens, 3, pp. 94, 99, cf. idem, 2 (pp. 13–543); idem, 1, pp. 343–4, a letter to Hilduin of 822/30 (?824). Although Alcuin’s letter ep. no. 143 of 798 (which is cited here) is included in the T collection, discussed later in this chapter, Amalarius had probably read it in a more isolated and specialized context: indeed, his legi in litteris . . . missis ad Karolum IMPERATOREM suggests a link with the erroneous head-note in Valenciennes bibl. mun. 247 (237) (s. ix1/4; prov. St.-Amand but of W.Fr. origin), fol. 125v, epistola . . . ad Carolum imperatorem, the next text (fols 131–5) being ep. no. 126 De saltu lunari. 44 Bamberg Bible: Bamberg SB. Msc. Bibl. 1; Bischoff, Katalog, no. 190 (p. 44), with references to the essential literature. As a product of the late 830s (or later), it is notably both conservative and imitative in script, orthography and some aspects of punctuation (for the orthography, cf. below, pp. 107–109; for the implications for the history of the ‘Tours-text’, see Bonifatius Fischer, ‘Alkuin-Bibeln’ [1971], Lateinische Bibelhandschriften im Frühen Mittelalter, ‘Vetus Latina’. Aus der Geschichte der Lateinischen Bibel, 2 (Freiburg, 1985), pp. 265, 285–7, cf. [1965], ibid., pp. 127–9 and passim. Medallion and verses (Alcuin’s carm. lviii, MGH Poet. I, p. 287) are at fol. 5v, illustr. W. Koehler, Die karolingischen Miniaturen, I/2 (Berlin, 1930), pl. 57b—a poor reproduction, however, and better in, e.g., Die Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu 972 April 14, Rom: Ausstellung . . . Wolfenbüttel (Göttingen, 1972), p. 86. Dedication-picture: BAV Reg. lat. 124 fol. 2v; a reduced facsimile in H.-G. Müller, Hrabanus Maurus ‘De laudibus sancta<sic> crucis’, Beih. zum “Mittellateinischen Jahrb.”, 11 (Düsseldorf, 1973), Anhang.

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     .  

21

nickname Antonius. Einhard’s Vita Karoli, in which he praises Alcuin as the teacher responsible for the more advanced elements in Charlemagne’s Latin learning—the initial, grammatical, stages having been provided, he records, by Peter of Pisa whom, unlike Alcuin, he had never known personally—was probably (but not certainly) written in the late 820s.45 On the evidence of surviving manuscripts, the late 820s and 830s saw the multiplication of copies of the Alcuin lettercollections at or for places with which he had not been closely connected in his lifetime; and in the late 840s the west-Frankish Benedictus Levita, seeking to claim older authority for all the texts included in his Capitulary collection, asserted that Book III was taken ex canonibus that had been collected on Charles’s orders by Paulinus of Aquileia and Alcuin.46 A revived regard for Alcuin (if that is indeed what the evidence indicates) in circles generally unsympathetic to recent trends at the Imperial Court may provide the context which has hitherto been lacking for the anomalous Vita Alcuini. Written after 821 and not later than 829 by a member of one of the religious communities ruled successively by its subject and by a disciple of his—almost certainly Ferrières—it is not a work for which either medieval or modern readers have shown much enthusiasm. It has survived in only two medieval copies: the first is item XIII (the numbering is contemporary) in a Marian and hagiographic miscellany which is one of the earliest books commissioned by Hincmar after he had moved from St.-Denis to the see of Rheims (845); the second is in a thirteenth/fourteenth-century quire of a composite volume now at Troyes and possibly (but not certainly) originating in that region.47 45 Vita Adalhardi, cap. 21: PL 120, col. 1519. Vita Karoli, cap. 25, ed. O. HolderEgger MGH SSRG VI (Hannover, 1911), p. 30. For a date of composition possibly even as late as 829, see the articles of Hauck, Fleckenstein and Löwe cited in Bullough, ‘Aula Renovata’, Carolingian Renewal, p. 147 n. 2. M. Innes and R. McKitterick have recently re-argued the case for a dating 817/8 (‘The Writing of History’, Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation (Cambridge, 1994), at pp. 203–9. 46 For the manuscripts of the letters, see below, pages 35–43. Benedictus: MGH Leges (in-fol.), II Praef., p. 40, a statement never satisfactorily explained; for a recent summary account of the author and his work, see Handwörterbuch zur Deutschen Rechtsgeschichte 1 (1971), 362–3 (Eckhardt). 47 Ed. princ.: Duchesne, Opera omnia, gathering è (signature è1ro–è6 vo), from the Rheims manuscript; modern edition by W. Arndt in MGH SS XV, pp. 184–97, from Mabillon’s revision of Duchesne’s text and the Troyes manuscript; Arndt’s discussion of date and place of writing, idem, 182–3. Manuscripts: Rheims, bibl. munic., 1395 fols 89–113v INCIPIT PROLOGUS VITAE BEATI ALCUINI. Superna Christi

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     .  

The anonymous ?Ferrières author concludes his Preface on an uneasily-defensive note, which reverberates through several subsequent chapters. His hero’s way of life was not easy to commend in an age which judged monastic life by the stricter and more austere standards introduced by Benedict of Aniane, whose friendship with Alcuin is none the less emphasised.48 At the same time, it had displayed other virtues which, like those of the Frankish king and Emperor commemorated by a disillusioned Einhard, seemed the more worthy of commemoration as the age and values that they had exemplified receded into an irrecoverable past: notably, the enthusiasm for learning and teaching and the unremitting struggle for Trinitarian orthodoxy.49 Later writers who had occasion to include a lexiconstyle ‘biography’ in their own writings, from Sigebert of Gembloux in the years either side of 1100 to William Thorne of Canterbury at the end of the fourteenth century, were free to concentrate on Alcuin the teacher and confidant of Charlemagne, the titles or substance of his opera or opuscula and his liturgical compositions.50 A second measure of Alcuin’s reputation may be found in the copying and availability of his writings over many centuries, on a scale that makes for surprising comparisons with others whose intellectual achievement in their own time would generally be regarded

rorante. . . . (expl.) Lammina scriptus in çrea parietique insertus <sic>: for a description of this strangely mis-represented manuscript, see ‘Additional Note I’ at the end of this chapter; Troyes, bibl. munic., 1712 fols 146–77v (mutil.), INCIPIT PROLOGUS. . . . COGNOMENTO ALBINI. Superna etc.: incompletely described in Cat. Gén. des Manuscrits des Bibl. Publ. des Dépts., 2 (1855), pp. 723–4 [Harmand], this part apparently of s. xiii ex or s. xiii/xiv; nothing is known of its history before it was acquired by Pierre Pithou (1539–96) whose library mark IO 8 is on fol. 212v. 48 Vita, c. 13: ed. Arndt, MGH SS in-fol. XV, p. 192. Compare Ardo’s Vita Benedicti, ibid., p. 210: (Alcuin) inviolabili se illi caritate coniuncxit. 49 Compare, most tellingly, Lupus to Einhard in 829–30, shortly after his arrival at Fulda from Ferrières: Correspondance, ed. L. Levillain, 1 (Paris, 1927), p. 4; and Hincmar himself in the Prologue to his Miracula S. Dionysii (this part, however, not included in Rheims 1395 item IIII. EX LIBELLO MIRACULORUM etc.), ed. Mabillon, AA.SS saec. III pt. 2 = vol. 4 (1672), 343: Quippe sapientiae studium multos apud nos neglectum est annos liberalesque artes diu sunt intermissae; signa autem quae a temporibus Karoli famosissimi imperatoris, qui disciplinas adeo excoluit etc. 50 Sigebert of Gembloux, Chronographia, an. 790: ed. Bethmann, MGH SS VI, p. 335; idem, Catalogus virum illustrium c. 83: ed. R. Witte (Lateinische Sprache u. Literatur des M.A., ed. A. Önnerfors; Bonn-Frankfurt, 1974), pp. 76–7; the chronicle in Cambridge University Library Add. 3578, probably by Thorne but ed. by T. Hearne as T. Sprott, Chronica. . . . (Oxford, 1719), pp. 57 ff. (the genuine Sprott being a work of s. xiii2, in the Canterbury, St. Augustine’s manuscripts London, BL Cotton Tiberius A ix, fols 107–80 and Lambeth Palace 419, fols 111–60).

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     .  

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as the more impressive or who were far better known through the multiplication and public reading of their Vitae. Consider, for example, the more than 140 manuscripts of the De virtutibus et vitiis, the later ones often cheaply produced for a partly lay market and creased or cover-worn although not necessarily read, since mere possession was a convenient surrogate for the avoidance of sin; the one hundred or so more-or-less-complete manuscripts of the De fide sanctae Trinitatis, to which can be added uncounted short extracts in devotional or other compendia, homiliaries and Office Breviaries; the forty-five of the De rhetorica, one of the last being a copy that comes from the circle of Leipzig University humanists active in the 1460s and 1470s; and the forty of the De dialectica, a work that modern scholars until very recently have dismissed as ‘puerile’.51 Compare that with the manuscript evidence for the best-recorded of Abelard’s writings: the twelve copies, plus one set of excerpts, of the Theologia ‘scholarium’ (in four versions!), the eleven copies of the Sic et Non, the five of the Ethica—the rare copies of which might keep company for a time with more extensive south-German library holdings of Alcuiniana, still accepted there as moderni.52 Contrast the survival 51

For a broader view than that offered here see Bullough, ‘Alcuin’s Cultural Influence: the evidence of the manuscripts’, in: Alcuin of York ed. L.A.J.R. Houwen and A.A. MacDonald (Groningen, 1998), pp. 1–26. The figures in the text are based on my List, supplemented in the case of the De virtutibus et vitiis by the list compiled independently by Professor Paul Szarmach (see Manuscripta 25 (1981), 131–40, corrected and amplified for the ninth/tenth centuries in Mediaevalia 12 (1989, for 1986), 14–16). De fide extracts (in fact, overwhelmingly the final, credal, section = PL 101, cols 56D–58C, and/or the immediately preceding ‘hymn’ or invocatio): in compendia, already in Karlsruhe Landesbibl. Aug. XVIII (Reichenau, s. ix in [copying a Tours book?]) fol. 64 FIDES ALCHUINI LEVITIS AD KAROLUM IMPERATOREM DATA. Credimus Sanctam Trinitatem . . . confitenti in omnia sçcula sçculorum. amen; a characteristic twelfth-century homiliary (-lectionary) example, Vat. lat. 6451 (prov. Italy [?Tuscany]) fols 247–248 inc. CREDIMUS SANCTAM TRINITAtem (om. gratia . . . confitenti ), where it is immediately followed by SERMO HYSIDORI çPI DE TRINITATE inc. MULTIS ETIAM MODIS Christus (compare the near-contemporary ‘Rochester Homiliary’ Vat. Lat. 4951, in which the Sermo de Sancta Trinitate is the Symbol of the Eleventh Council of Toledo); a typical late-mediaeval breviary, Solothurn Zentralbibl. cod. S 208, probably written for an Augustinian canon of Basel a.1462, the Alcuin excerpt at fol. ?120 as lections for the Trinity Sunday office: see A. Schönherr, Die Mittelalterlichen Handschriften der Zentralbibl. Solothurn (Solothurn, 1964), 9–11. The Leipzig De rhetorica is in Stuttgart Württembergische Landesbibl. HB VIII 13, a manuscript of 1470 connected with Rudolf Brun v. Gottmadingen, et al. 52 J. Barrow, C. Burnett, D. Luscombe, ‘A checklist of the manuscripts containing the writings of Peter Abelard and Heloïse and other works closely associated with Abelard and his school’, RHT., 14–15 (1984–85), 183–302, esp. 255, 253–4,

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     .  

of the sixth/seventh-century Columbanus’s major writings in no more than two or three manuscripts, with the 150 extant copies of Jonas’s Life of the Saint, produced between the third quarter of the ninth century (at Rheims, close in date to the earlier manuscript of the Vita Alcuini ) and the early sixteenth century (in the Low Countries and the British Isles).53 Almost the only part of Alcuin’s writings not to circulate widely in the Middle Ages was his poetry, which in the past century has acquired a familiarity probably second only to his letters: nearly half the verses in Dümmler’s edition—many of them, in fact, other men’s compositions—are known from a single, lost, St.-Bertin manuscript; and the tradition of others is almost equally limited, in spite of early transmission via, for example, Salzburg and ?Orléans.54

Alcuin Revealed? A necessary first question is, therefore: what were the basis and substance, and not merely the outward form, of Alcuin’s High-Mediaeval and twentieth-century reputation? Any worthwhile answer will implicitly be raising further questions: in what ways were the writings he bequeathed to future generations a direct response to or a reflection of the environments in which spent his most productive years? is it possible to identify what he owed to his earlier years at York when he became one of the circle of scholars at the Frankish Court? and can we identify the extent and limits of his personal influence on 247. The 1165 catalogue of Prüfening Abbey declares (Bibliothekskataloge, 4.i, ed. Ineichen-Eder, p. 422): Patres alii antiqui, alii moderni. Antiqui sunt Gregorius, Paterius . . . Effrem, Autpertus et multi alii. Moderni sunt Beda, Albinus . . . Petrus Baiolardus, Petrus Longobardus et multi alii. 53 G.S.M. Walker, Sancti Columbani Opera (SLH. 2; Dublin, 1957), pp. xxxv ff., M. Lapidge (ed.), Columbanus: Studies on the Latin Writings (Woodbridge, 1997), and especially the contributions of Neil Wright, Clare Stancliffe and T.M. CharlesEdwards; B. Krusch, Ionae Vitae Columbani abbatis discipulorumque eius (MGH SSRG, 1905), pp. ix–xi; but the earliest (Rheims) manuscript, unknown to Krusch, is Metz Grand Séminaire, 1: for knowledge of the Vita already in eighth-century England, however, see below. 54 See the apparatus to carmina ix–cxvii in MGH Poet. I, where A. Duchesne’s texts (1617) from the St.-Bertin manuscript figure as Q [uercetanus]. The most extensive critique of Dümmler’s edition, with an emphasis on the problems of ‘authenticity’, is H.-D. Burghardt’s Heidelberg doctoral dissertation of 1960, ‘Philologische Untersuchungen zu den Gedichten Alkuins’, unpublished but available in typescript; see also the several contributions of Schaller and Godman (below, p. 118 and n. 295, and Pt. II ch. 4), and the forthcoming Cambridge University Ph.D. of Mary Garrison.

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     .  

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the king and Emperor? To pose such questions or to ask them in this particular way is, of course, to assert the claims and assume the obligations of the biographer—a figure who (it has been said) is both digger and dreamer. The validity of the attempt and the results are equally open to challenge. R.G. Collingwood maintained that biography is not merely non-historical but anti-historical and comparable rather to the novel. Taken out of its particular philosophical context the consequences of Collingwood’s view are ultimately to reduce history to the operation of impersonal forces, with no place for human dignity, sanctity (in the widest sense) or the elusive inner journey that nourishes both. A more serious objection is that the Middle Ages are a ‘portrait-less millenium’ (this particular phrase is taken from Professor Tellenbach but the notion is widely familiar)55 and that purported biographies of most pre-1400 figures simply confirm this. Any claim that we can approach Alcuin more nearly than any of his contemporaries or than any one in the next three centuries (and perhaps longer) must be justified by more than assertion. The late Sir Richard Southern’s consistent reading of Eadmer’s Vita Anselmi was as ‘a personal and intimate view, which only those who lived in the friendship of Anselm could experience’ and whose reporting of his spoken words ‘in a vivid and natural way’ conveys something of the individual personality behind them. It allowed him to claim that the author is the first medieval writer whose awareness of his subject’s inner motivations makes his account a genuine ‘biography’.56 There is no sense in which the early-ninth-century ?Ferrières author of the Vita Alcuini anticipates his twelfth-century Canterbury successor. He is no more attempting ‘portraiture’ than he has achieved a distinguished example of the genre ‘hagiography’. But it may be that it is because the few readers of the Vita Alcuini have approached the text with too limited a notion of the genre and with the wrong expectations that they have failed to consider what it does record and why. Several decades ago it was suggested that a new and distinctive strand began in early-eighth-century Northumbria with Stephen of 55 For some of the implications for post-1945 ‘Personenforschung’ see e.g. Karl Schmid, Gebetsgedenken u. adliges Selbstverständnis im Mittelalter: Ausgewählte Beiträge (Sigmaringen, 1983), esp. pt. III and the extensive literature cited there. 56 R.W. Southern, St. Anselm and his Biographer (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 314–16, 331–3; Southern, St. Anselm: a Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 384–5, 422–6 and passim.

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     .  

Ripon’s Life of Wilfrid and the anonymous Life of Abbot Ceolfrith; taken to the Continent by English missionaries, it coloured to a greater or lesser degree the Vitae written to commemorate them and their followers in the evangelisation of the still-pagan regions of western Europe. Their authors are unusually concerned with the external, worldly, activity of their subjects, to which they give a recognisable chronological framework, and with the particular contexts in which those men and women functioned as channels of Divine grace; unlike the hagiographers of late-Roman and Frankish Gaul they have little to say about the miracle-working powers of their heroes in their lifetime, or immediately after their death.57 The ?Ferrières Vita of the English-born Alcuin can be viewed as a not-entirely typical example of that strand in early-medieval hagiographic composition.58 It would now be agreed that the supposed distinction seriously over-simplifies the diverse forms that the vitae of the period might take and of the (in our terms) ‘historical’ and biographical information which they include or exclude.59 Merovingian Lives are indeed generally indifferent to chronology, and sparing in their references to independently-documented events; but they are often ‘rich in per57

Th. Schieffer, Winfrid-Bonifatius u. die christliche Grundlegung Europas (Freiburg, 1954; repr. 1980), pp. 104 ff., 147 ff., 273 f.; F. Lotter, Die «Vita Brunonis» des Ruotger (Bonner Hist. Forsch., 9; 1958), pp. 9–12; also (with a different emphasis) Bullough, ‘Hagiography as patriotism’, Etudes Augustiniennes (Paris, 1981), pp. 340–45. 58 I originally suggested this approach to the Vita Alcuini in my 1972 Spoleto lecture, ‘Alcuino e la tradizione culturale insulare’, I Problemi dell’Occidente nel secolo VIII, XXa Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano sull’Alto Medioevo (Spoleto, 1973), here pp. 577–80. In what follows, it will be clear that although still holding to it in part I have subsequently changed my views at several points. A very different interpretation was proposed by Lutz E. von Padberg, Heilige und Familie. Studien zur Bedeutung familiengebundener Aspekte in den Viten des Verwandten- u. Schülerkreises um Willibord, Bonifatius u. Liudger (Diss. phil. Münster, 1980), pp. 27–9, without reference to my own treatment of the subject; for the most part it fails to convince me, except in its stress on the ‘exemplary’ character of the text; and the inferences from, e.g., the supposed ending of the Vita with the full text of Alcuin’s epitaph are necessarily false. 59 A.T. Thacker, The Social and Continental Background to early Anglo-Saxon Hagiography (Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1976) already argued that the Continental background to the first English Vitae has been seriously underplayed; and he makes a strong case for Northumbrian familiarity with Jonas’s Vita Columbani. There is now an enormous and growing literature on the interpretation of early- and high-medieval vitae: representative examples are F. Lotter, ‘Methodisches zur Gewinnung historischer Erkenntnisse aus hagiographischen Quellen’, HZ. 229 (1979), 298–356; D. von der Nahmer, Die lateinische Heiligenvita. Eine Einführung in die lateinische Hagiographie (Darmstadt, 1994), esp. pp. 11 ff.; the references conveniently assembled in M. Stumpf, ‘Zum Quellenwert von Thangmars Vita Bernwardi ’, DA 53 (1997), at 479–81 nn. 79–82.

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     .  

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sonal and political detail’; and collectively and individually evidence for a landed aristocracy which linked its social dominance with leadership in the Church. The missionary Lives are predominantly of men and women who never forgot their monastic training and vocation and whose attitude (or whose biographers’ attitude) to the established authorities is often either ambivalent or concealed.60 What they, and Carolingian and post-Carolingian Lives, have in common is that they document and illustrate the elements in their heroes’ earthly careers that are seen as ‘exemplary’. The Vita Alcuini is distinctive both in the aspects that are singled out and emphasised by its ?Ferrières author, and in the sources of his knowledge of them. No fewer than five of the sixteen pages in the modern folio edition are concerned with Alcuin the pupil and teacher in the school of York. A mere two pages are devoted to his teaching and writing at the Frankish Court and St. Martin’s, Tours; nearly a page of text is concerned with his manner of observance of particular liturgical occasions. In the early sections there are unusually frequent references, by name, to individuals who were evidently felt to have played a significant part in Alcuin’s life before he left York for Francia; and in the later chapters similarly, to disciples, some of whom are otherwise unknown.61 The one paragraph in the Vita that details Alcuin’s virtues in standard hagiographic terms begins with a reference to his moderate drinking-habits—conveniently adopting Paul’s advice to Timothy—and concludes with his pupils’ concern not to do anything that he would find deplorable when they participated in services at other places. The only miracles reported are two during his time at Tours, which should properly be credited to St. Martin, and two very minor ones immediately after his death: an Alcuin cultus never got off the ground and was not encouraged by the Viking sack of the city and abbey in 853.62 At the same time, 60

Wallace-Hadrill, Frankish Church, pp. 89–93, 158–61. Cc. 4, 6, 8, 9: ed. Arndt, pp. 186–7, 188, 189–90. See below, Pt. II, chs. 1 and 2. 62 Cc. 19, 20, 28: ed. Arndt, pp. 194, 197; for the life-time miracles see Pt. II ch. 7. According to Kleinclausz, Alcuin, p. 281: ‘A Tours, au xe siècle, il existait dans le cloître de l’abbaye de St.-Martin une chapelle consacré à saint Alcuin’ where Odo of Cluny ended his days, on the evidence of Vita Odonis (ed. Mabillon, AA.SS, 7) VII 41, where the ecclesia or oratorium is twice mentioned; and he has been followed by others. But this is a total mis-representation of the supposed ‘source’. ‘VII 41’ (AA.SS 7, p. 142) refers to Mabillon’s introductory Elogus, where he is quoting from a late-fifteenth-century (!) necrology of St.-Julien at Tours, which asserts that 61

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     .  

the Vita includes a conspicuous element of ‘fulfilled prophecy’; and it has a correspondingly digressive approach to the chronology of its subject’s career in Francia. To the reporting of protective and healing miracles must be added that of dreams and visions, including a nightmare shared by the boy Alcuin and ‘a simple tonsured rustic’, the adolescent Alcuin’s vision of the ‘whole world encompassed’, and two associated with Alcuin’s death and entry into Heaven, revealed respectively to the bishop of Tours and to a solitary in Italy; and the related evidence of Alcuin’s prophetic gifts, a premonitory knowledge and the reading of other men’s thoughts, displayed during his time as abbot. These episodes are not to be dismissed lightly, as ‘hagiographic commonplaces’, if only because of their specificity.63 They have their counterparts in Alcuin’s own writings in the 780s and 790s: the extended accounts of two Northumbrian visions in the ‘York poem’ (more than a tenth of the entire text), and a rather different shorter one, that of the

the dying Odo—contrary to the evidence of the Vitae of both John of Salerno and Nalgodus (12th cent.)—in ecclesiam sancti Albini, quae proxima erat, se deferri iussit; and it is again Mabillon who records that Superest ad hoc usque tempus <sc. 1685> istud sancti Albini oratorium intra claustra praedicti coenobii [sc. S. Juliani]. A chapel at Tours dedicated to sanctus Albinus, whether in the tenth or the seventeenth century, would in any case almost certainly commemorate the sixth-century bishop of Angers of that name (St.-Aubin). The principal, and indeed the only, evidence for an incipient Alcuin cultus is the presence of his Vita in Rheims, Bib. mun., 1395 between the Passio sanctae Marinae virginis and the Passio sancti Eleutherii episcopi et Anthiae matris eius. For the sack of Tours and its consequences see P. Gasnault, ‘Le tombeau de Saint Martin et les invasions Normandes dans l’histoire et dans la légende’, RHEF. 47 (1961), 51–66. 63 Dreams or visions in the Vita: cc. 2, 7, 22 (a bad dream as an adult), 26, 27: ed. Arndt, pp. 185–6, 188–9, 196; premonitions, etc.: cc. 14–18, cf. 12: ed. Arndt, pp. 192–4, 191–2. There is now an extensive literature on dreams and visions in medieval texts, much of it listed in P.E. Dutton’s outstanding The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (1994), pp. 277–8 and passim: to which add especially P. Sims-Williams’s ‘The unseen world: the monk of Wenlock’s vision’, Religion and Literature, pp. 243–72 and, for comparative material, Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations, ed. B. Tedlock (Cambridge, 1987). But only Dutton (Politics of Dreaming, p. 44) makes any reference to the Vita; and since his primary concern is with ‘political’ dreams, the instances there are not separately discussed. In his Opus Caroli regis, III 26, ed. Freeman, MGH Conc II, Supplementum I, pp. 459–66, Theodulf ‘of Orleans’ argued for a distinction between ‘dreams’, which are not merely associated with sleep but are commonly demonic, and ‘visions’, which are normally revelations of Divine origin. He was clearly aware, however, that the supposed contrast is justified neither by the language of NT (esp. Mt 1 and 2) nor by the most authoritative Patristic texts: and among his contemporaries and nearcontemporaries, Alcuin for one did not consistently recognise it (see next note).

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hermit Balthere; the prayer in verse that ‘those terrors which a dark power looses in our sleep,/ I ask the merciful right hand of God to restrain’; and the radically simplified version of Augustine’s influential ‘three kinds of visions’ in one of his didactic letters from Tours.64 Not surprisingly, Alcuin’s own dreams and visions are among the unusually numerous passages where the Vita-author uses oratio recta: for this there is ample hagiographic precedent. Even in more earthly contexts, however, such as that where brethren of St. Martin’s, ‘finding another Anglo-Saxon at the door during Alcuin’s abbacy, expostulate “O God, deliver us from these Britons: for they all descend on us like bees returning to their queen”’, these speech-passages cannot safely be regarded as reliable Eadmer-style, let alone Boswellstyle, reportage. Certainly, they are not (or not normally) rhetorical set-pieces designed to illustrate the possession of a particular virtue or simply to display the writer’s virtuosity, as in other narrative texts; but anecdotes of this kind have their own literary function, as later in Notker’s Gesta Karoli.65 The reminiscences and reports of intensely personal experiences in Alcuin’s early life must none the less have come ultimately from his own lips via, as the Vita itself bears witness, ‘his most faithful disciple Siguulf ’ who had followed him (probably) from York to Tours and long outlived his master at Ferrières.66

64 ‘York Poem’ ed. Godman, lines 876–1007 for Dryhthelm’s vision of the Other World as reported by Bede, lines 1602–48 for the visions of a boyhood friend of Alcuin’s; also lines 1337–62 for the hermit Balthere’s prayerful response to the demonic pursuit of a deacon’s soul until PROPRIIS animam ferri vidisset OCELLIS/ altius angelicas caeli super astra per ulnas. Carm. xcvi/1 (MGH Poet. I, p. 321), which the early Salzburg text in Vienna Nat. bibl. cod. 808 (below, pp. 71–74) indicates was to be displayed in dormiturio: Et quos inmittit somno vis nigra timores/ Conpescat clemens domini, rogo, dextra potentis.: ep. no. 135. Willibrord’s mother’s prophetic vision, reported by Alcuin in his Vita c. 2 (ed. Levison MGH SSRM VII, p. 117), for which his capitulum is De somno (!) et eius interpretatione, quod mater sancti Willibrordi se vidisse narrabat (ibid., p. 115), may fairly be regarded as a hagiographic commonplace. 65 See Vita c. 18, ed. Arndt, pp. 193–4, for the reaction to the arrival of the ‘Engelsaxo’ Aigulfus (= Ecgwulf ) presbiter and Alcuin’s handling of it: with which compare (e.g.) Adomnán’s Vita Columbae I, 2, 3, 4 (Adomnán’s Life of Columba, revised ed. by M.O. Anderson [Oxford, 1991], pp. 18–28) and many subsequent chapters; Notker, Gesta Karoli I 9 (an exchange between Alcuin and the Emperor that one would like to believe is authentic!), II 7. But the Vita’s reported exchange between Alcuin and the king in ?789/90 (c. 9: ed. Arndt, p. 190) is clearly designed to show his respect for canonical authority and disregard of riches, two points on which Alcuin was rightly sensitive. 66 Vita cc. 15, 16, 19 etc., ed. Arndt, pp. 192–3, 194.

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     .  

This does not, of course, resolve the problem for the modern biographer. Those who believe that they have fulfilled or are fulfilling a destiny to which they have been called ab origine in utero have, at all times in recorded history, not been averse to re-arranging their own and others’ past lives to make the pattern clearer or more artistic.67 The Vita’s account of Archbishop Ælberht of York’s death-bed injunction to Alcuin to go to Rome and visit Francia on his return, where his presence will be needed to combat those who reject the true doctrine of the Trinity and make Christ the adopted Son of God, is clearly just such a re-arrangement and improvement of Alcuin’s own statements in his later years. The passage in the letter of 800 referring to the holy man endowed with the spirit of prophecy which introduced this chapter is immediately followed by the assertion that ‘in addition (etiam et) my master [sc. Ælberht] commanded me that if at any time I heard of new sects arising contrary to apostolic doctrine I should straightaway give myself entirely to the defence of the Catholic faith’.68 Suspicion even attaches to the supposed day of Alcuin’s ordination as deacon, recorded as the festival of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, i.e. February 2nd, which Arndt in his edition reasonably supposed was taken from some written record at ?Ferrières. It is, however, by no means certain that when Alcuin was a boy at York the celebration on February 2nd was of the Purification of the B.V.M., rather than, as earlier, a festival of Our Lord, viz. His Meeting with (or Presentation to) Simeon in the Temple. True, its title in the ‘Vatican Gelasian’ sacramentary is purificatio sanctae Mariae; and Bede was already aware of Rome’s celebration of Mary on that day, complete with processions and candles. But his own homily on Lc 2.22–32 is ‘dedicated especially to the humility of Our Lord, together with that of his inviolate mother’; the entry for February 2nd in Willibrord’s Calendar is sancti Symeonis patriarchae; the ‘York metrical martyrology’s’ verse for that day characterizes it as the one on which Christus tem-

67

For a striking twentieth-century example see my ‘Alcuin and the Kingdom of Heaven’, Carolingian Renewal, p. 161. The limitations and distortions of ‘autobiographical memory’ as an historical source have recently attracted pointed comments from J. Fried, The Veil of Memory. Anthropological Problems When Considering the Past, German Historical Institute 1997 Annual Lecture (London, 1998), esp. pp. 5–16; for the views of non-historians see, e.g., Autobiographical Memory ed. D.C. Rubin (Cambridge, 1986). 68 Ep. no. 200 (p. 332).

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     .  

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plo offerebatur; and the earliest versions of the Gregorian Sacramentary and the ‘Frankish Gelasian’ sacramentaries name it Ypopanti, or in the latter alternatively Sancti Sym<e>onis, in their rubrics.69 Perhaps more importantly, the Vita goes on to say that on that same day in a previous year Alcuin ‘had let go the hair of his head (comam capitis amiserat)’. The verbal parallel with ad deponendam comam capitis in the Gregorian (Hadrianum) and ‘eighth-century Gelasian’ prayer ad clericum faciendum shows clearly that Alcuin’s ‘biographer’ understood the earlier ceremony as the tonsuring which made him a clericus and not to some other ceremonial hair-cutting.70 For this, the date is perfectly acceptable: no particular season or occasion has ever been prescribed for (first) tonsuring; but there is a little evidence from the late-eighth and ninth centuries suggesting that feastdays may have been preferred.71 The date February 2nd for a deacon’s 69 Vita: c. 8, ed. Arndt, p. 189; cf. p. 182. Vatican (‘Old’) Gelasian: ed. Wilson, II. viii (p. 165), ed. Mohlberg, no. 829; but note that the collect, inc. Deus qui in hodierna die Unigenitus tuus in nostra carne, quam assumpsit pro nobis, in templo est praesentatus, is in clear conflict with the title. Bede: De temporum ratione, ed. Jones (1943), pp. 207–8, 1977 ed., p. 323; Homeliae, I.18, ed. Hurst, pp. 128–33. Calendar and sacramentaries: Calendar of Willibrord, ed. Wilson, p. 4; Sacr. Grég., 1, ed. Deshusses, p. 123 (27), with no other titles in his apparatus; Sacr. Gell., ed. Dumas, p. 24; Sacr. Eng., ed. Saint-Roch (1987), p. 28; Metrical Martyrology, as in Pt. II ch. 1, pp. 215–217. Alcuin’s familiarity in his Tours years with the feast’s new title is shown by Liber contra Haeresim Felicis, ed. Blumenshine, p. 81 (c. xlvi). The editor does not identify the supposed omelia of Augustine for that day, but it is presumably one of the ps.-Augustinian sermons included by Alan of Farfa and Paul the Deacon in their respective homiliaries: for the latter and for other aspects of the pre-history and early history of the feast, see the wide-ranging study by I. Deug-Su, ‘La festa della purificazione in Occidente (secoli IV–VIII)’, Studi Medievali, ser. 3, 15 (1974), 143–216. 70 Sacr. Grég. ed. Deshusses, 1, no. 992 = 1246 (pp. 340, 417); Sacr. Gell. ed. Dumas, no. 2495 (p. 379), etc.; Giles Constable, intro. to Burchardi . . . Apologia de Barbis, ed. R.G.C. Huygens (CCCM 62, [1985]), pp. 103 ff. For capillatura see Sacr. Grég. cit., no. 991 (p. 339), cf. Sacr. Gellon., cit., nos 2492–94 (p. 379), and Constable, cit., 56 ff., 89 ff. Note that tonsura in ep. no. 16 (p. 43)—apparently the only instance in Alcuin’s letters—is a reference to (secular) hair-styles generally and not to clerical ‘tonsure’. Dümmler suggested a link with the 786 synodal decrees c. 19: but cf. below, Pt. II ch. 3. 71 Heiric of Auxerre was tonsured (attonsus est) on Christmas Day 850, according to his own annalistic notes in Melk, Stiftsbibl. 412, p. 39, ed. G. Waitz in MGH SS XIII, p. 80, ed. B. de Gaiffier in AB 77 (1959), 394. Hrabanus Maurus may have been tonsured on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (Sept. 14th) 791, the day before he witnessed a gift of property to Fulda by his relative Lantfrid, Urkundenbuch des Klosters Fulda, ed. E.E. Stengel, I/2 (Marburg, 1956), no. 190: so F. Staab, ‘Wann wurde Hrabanus Maurus Mönch in Fulda?’, Hrabanus Maurus, Lehrer, Abt und Bischof, ed. R. Kottje and H. Zimmermann (Akad. Mainz, Abh. Geistes-. u. Sozialwiss. Kl., Einzelveröff. 4; Wiesbaden, 1982), p. 95. The supposedly

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     .  

(or priest’s) ordination, on the other hand, would be wholly exceptional in the early-medieval West. It is certainly un-Roman and not to be expected in a region which claimed to be following Roman ways. The evidence—for England, admittedly, entirely inferential— shows an exclusive use of Ember Saturdays (sabbata in XII lectiones al. quattuor tempora); and the earliest possible date, even with the characteristically Roman usage of ingresso quadragesimali, is February 14th (in the years of Alcuin’s adolescence in fact February 17th).72 A masssupporting premise that September 14th was an Ember Day is both unnecessary and erroneous. In years with Dominical Letter B (. . . 774, 785, 791 . . .) Ember Wednesday was September 21st (similarly, with Dominical Letter G, September 19th): cf. the statement in the York Dialogus ecclesiasticae institutionis, interrogatio xvi ‘De tercio ieiunio’ (Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 412), that Hoc Anglorum aecclesia IN PLENA EPDOMADA ANTE EQUINOCTIUM neglecta terciae epdomadae computatione solet caelebrare; and the literature on Ember Days cited next note. (Equally erroneous is Staab’s assertion, p. 95 n. 97, that Heiric’s tonsuring was extra tempore because the day was ‘ein Quatember-, sondern ein Festtag’.) However, E. Freise, ‘Zum Geburtsjahr des Hrabanus Maurus’, Hrabanus Maurus ed. Kottje and Zimmermann, pp. 50 ff., maintains—more plausibly—that Hrabanus’s presence as a witness in September 791 excludes his being a Fulda oblate at that date and that the stages in his clerical career before he was ordained deacon in 801 are not precisely datable. Hrabanus and Heiric were both tonsured as monastic oblates; for Alcuin as a cathedral cleric, and for the cursus of other such clerics, see below, Pt. II ch. 1. 72 The fullest English-language account of the complex early history of Ember Days is G.G. Willis, ‘Ember Days’, Essays in Early Roman Liturgy (Alcuin Club; London, 1964), 49–98; but compare, for the English (and some other) evidence, Bullough, ‘Roman books’, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 5–6, 24–5 (n. 19)—where, however (as Catherine Cubitt pointed out) I wrongly denied a visit to Rome by the young Egberht, for which Bede’s letter to him is clear testimony. More recent summaries are A.G. Martimort (ed.), The Church at Prayer 4 (Collegeville, Minn. and London, 1986), pp. 28–9, C. Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: an introduction to the sources, Engl. ed. by W.G. Storey and N.K. Rasmussen (Washington, D.C., 1986), pp. 178, 312–13, with additional bibliography on pp. 220 (n. 164), 389 (n. 112). Eighth- and earlyninth-century evidence for the imperative character of the link between the quattuor tempora fasts and the ordination of priests and deacons in the Roman rite (cf. Martimort (ed.), The Church at Prayer, 3 [Collegeville and London, 1987], pp. 152–3) is: Sacr. Gelas. ed. Wilson, p. 22, ed. Mohlberg, nos 140–42; OR XXXIV c. 28 (Andrieu, 3, 610–11; with the editor’s introduction, idem, pp. 554–7); and Amalarius, Liber Officialis, II 1, 6–14 (ed. Hanssens, 2, pp. 198–201). In ‘Albuinus deliciosus regis’, p. 80 n. 23, I spoke of the ‘indirect reasons’ for supposing that Ember Saturday ordinations were also normal English practice. But these are really no more than the insistence on the correct (Roman) observance of ‘Ember Days’ in both the southern and northern Provinces in the central decades of the century: so Council of Clovesho, 747, c. 18, (Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 368), which has no counterpart in Frankish synodal decrees; Dialogus eccl. inst. int. xvi: ibid., pp. 410–13; the Gelasian sacramentary’s Ordo qualiter in Romana sedis apostolicae ecclesia presbyteri, diaconi eligendi sunt, inc. Mensis primi, ed. Wilson, p. 22, ed. Mohlberg, nos 140–42; and Amalarius, who regarded Alcuin as his master in liturgical matters and quotes in support of the link between Ember Days and ordinations the not

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     .  

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set the collect of which emphasises that it was unigenitus tuus [sc. Dei ] in nostra carne quam assumpsit pro nobis (Vatican Gelasian sacramentary) or unigenitus filius tuus cum nostrae carnis substantia (‘Frankish Gelasian’ and Gregorian sacramentaries) who was presented hodierna die in the Temple seems, in the light of Alcuin’s position and language in confronting Adoptionism, to be just a little too convenient.73 We should not be too ready to take literally some of the apparent documentation of Alcuin’s earliest years. Yet at the very least the Vita-author can be credited with conveying something of what Alcuin himself and subsequently his discipuli wished to be remembered, and in what form, of both the Northumbrian and the Frankish phases of his life. Although letters written in the 790s include a number of revealing biographical reminiscences going back almost four decades,74 Alcuin in general does little enough to provide the details which seem so important to the modern biographer and the Vita-author ignores. The pedagogical, exegetic and theological works which fill nearly two-thirds of Frobenius Forster’s and Migne’s pages, and are the material basis of any ‘intellectual biography’, characteristically contain almost no personal details and few direct references to the external world—although perhaps not quite so few as is commonly asserted. Only a minority of them include internal evidence that allows them to be dated to a particular year or to one of two years; and none of these is earlier than ca. 789. Both Alcuin’s older relative Willibrord and more than one of his near-contemporaries and pupils made a ‘kalendarial’ record of the principal dates in their clerical careers: if Alcuin did the same, as is not implausible, the only apparent trace of it is the previously-discussed (false?) day of his ordination. Alcuin’s verse-epitaph, although—or perhaps because—he

obviously-relevant responsio of Pope Gregory to (in his words) interrogationem [VI] Agustini Anglorum episcopi. Even accepting that the basic Northumbrian sacramentary was a variety of the Gelasian (below, pp. 205–06), there is obviously a certain circularity in the argument, which may make it unwise to dismiss out of hand the one specific reference to an eighth-century English ordination day. 73 Vatican Gelasian, as n. 70; Sacr. Gell., ed. Dumas, no. 196 (p. 24); Sacr. Eng., ed. Saint-Roch (1987), no. 203 (p. 28); Sacr. Grég. ed. Deshusses, 1, no. 124 (p. 124). Note that the Gregorian and Frankish Gelasian sacramentaries, but not the Vatican Gelasian sacramentary, have a post-communion prayer (Gell. no. 199, Eng. no. 207, Grég. no. 126) in which the words intercedente beata semper virgine Maria have been added to an older prayer-text. 74 For the character of these reminiscences, see my remarks in JournMedLat, 5 (1995), 174, 187–92; and add the references in n. 67 above.

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     .  

had composed it himself, includes none of the elements of a curriculum vitae that feature in the epitaphs of several of his disciples and admirers: it is very largely a weaving together of well-established epigraphic formulae and more recent poetic commonplaces; and even the one line that may seem to strike a personal note, ‘My name was Alchuine and wisdom was always dear to me (. . . sophiam mihi semper amanti )’ is firmly in this tradition.75 The one work of Alcuin’s other than his letters which includes significant biographical information, and that mostly indirectly, is his poem on ‘the Saints of York’. For more than a century it has been generally accepted that this is the one substantial work written before Alcuin left his homeland for Francia (traditionally dated 781/2), a view that has, however, been challenged by its most recent editor. Professor Godman used the poem to throw doubt also on the (equally traditional) dating of Alcuin’s birth and put it rather later, i.e. on his calculation 737/8–745/6, with obvious implications for our conception of the York years, and potentially of importance for any consideration of his relations with the Frankish king and others in the Court circle. Unfortunately, his assertion is based on an arithmetical error where the ‘correct’ calculation would produce a dating 745/7–752/54, which is not easy to reconcile with the evidence provided elsewhere by Alcuin himself or with the reminiscences of others: a date of birth a year or two either side of 740 remains the most probable.76 75 Above, p. 18 and n. 37. Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, p. 259, correctly identified the concluding prayer (which is not due to Alcuin) Requiem aeternam donet ei Dominus, and its extension et lux perpetua luciat ei in some manuscript-copies, as of liturgical origin; but he was probably wrong to derive it, at this date, specifically from the introit for a Missa de defunctis. Non-Psalmic—it is from the apocryphal IV Esr 2.34–5—the epitaph’s precise wording was widely used in the ‘Visigothic’ liturgy: see Le Liber Ordinum, ed. M. Férotin, Monumenta Ecclesiae Liturgica, ed. Cabrol and Leclercq, vol. 5 (Paris, 1904; repr. Farnborough, 1969), cc. 111, 112, 124, 133, 148 etc. Slightly variant forms are found in several pre-800 texts of Roman origin, a further variant being quoted at the English Council of Clovesho in 747: Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 373 (c. 27). It was, however, the Visigothic form that was adopted for the ninth-century Romano-Frankish liturgy in several different, although always funerary, contexts: details in D. Sicard, Liturgie de la mort, pp. 72–4, 76–80. 76 ‘York Poem’ ed. Godman, p. 133 (comm. to lines 1635–6). Lines 1600–32 are an account of two visions experienced by a iuvenis in the York community (almost certainly to be identified with the puer Seneca [sic!] of ep. no. 42 (p. 86), who had— Alcuin says—greatly influenced him for good in his own boyhood, while lines 1635–48 record his death later that same year, populantis peste doloris. Prof. Godman reasonably links this with the evidence of the annalistic continuation of one group of Historia Ecclesiastica manuscripts, which under the year 759 (ed. Colgrave and

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     .  

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The Evidence of the Letters If we are to approach the individual behind the self-created image and the subsequent reputation, or come nearer to the man behind the writings that were produced at least in part for posterity and not merely for his own age, it must inevitably be through the letters. The total number of these still extant is impressive, compared with collections of previous and immediately succeeding centuries. The standard modern edition contains at least two hundred and eighty-one letters written by Alcuin, even after the exclusion of eight or nine letter-prefaces to longer works, the elimination of those written by him in the king’s name as well as of ones addressed to Alcuin,77 and the rejection of a few letters wrongly attributed to him. The most important of the latter is the so-called Capitula quç tali convenit in tempore memorari that accompanies authentic letters and other Alcuinconnected texts in two lower-Loire manuscripts, which may indeed be of the eleventh century rather than (as has generally been supposed) of the late-ninth. On the grounds of language and style as well as of manuscript-context, Alcuin is clearly not the author of an anonymous (ille) letter addressed to Pope Leo III (ep. no. 180), from Mynors, pp. 574–6) records the succession of King Æthelwald, ‘in whose second year magna tribulatio mortalitatis venit and lasted almost two years’. (For the date, and the translation of this passage, see below, Pt. II, ch. 1, pp. 239–90 and n. 330) But having deducted fourteen, as the last year of pueritia, from the annalistic date to arrive at one limit-date for Alcuin’s birth, he deducts from this a further seven to arrive at the other! when it should, of course, have been deducted from the same adjusted annalistic date(s). 77 I count as letter-prefaces (or dedication-letters) epp. nos 80, 120, 200, 203, 213, 257, 306 and 309, but not—probably inconsistently!—epp. nos 201 (cf. Heil, Alkuinstudien, 1, 49–50, 71) and 202: ep. no. 201 almost certainly originally accompanied the antiAdoptionist text to which it refers as opusculo huic nostro; and the manuscript-tradition of all eleven items is quite distinct from that of most of the rest of Alcuin’s letters. Letters in the king’s name probably composed by Alcuin are epp. nos 85, 87, 92, 93 (the reservations expressed by H. Löwe in HZ 188 (1959), 439 take no account of the manuscript context), 100; letters written by others are epp. nos 46, 66 (Arn, apparently imitating a letter of Alcuin’s), 147, 151, 152—these five not addressed to Alcuin—144, 182, 183, 196, 199 and 247. Dümmler followed Jaffé in making three letters (epp. nos 179, 184, 208) out of one in the manuscripts: like Heil, Alkuinstudien, pp. 40–45, 71, I think they were wrong to do so, although I regard the first two as probably constituting a single letter. A border-line case is ep. no. 197. Dümmler assumed that this was a ‘letter of consolation’ to the king on the death of Liutgarda; but the heading in two of the three manuscript testimonies is Epitaphium Liodgardae feminae nobili in contrast with the following item’s [Epistola] alia consolatoria, and the opening and concluding sections are addressed to Domine [Deus] Iesu.

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     .  

which inferences have sometimes been drawn about his relations with the pope at the end of 799; it could, however, very well have been written (in an unknown year after 795) by (Arch)bishop Arn of Salzburg or by another bishop in his province.78 The text inc. Beatus igitur David rex in the form in which it was printed by Dümmler as ep. no. 304 is almost certainly not genuinely Alcuin’s, but a more authentic form may exist. Two previously unknown letters, respectively to King Offa of Mercia (in a tenth-century manuscript of unknown origin, now at The Hague) and to the Spanish abbot Beatus of Liébana (in a now-defective ‘Visigothic’ manuscript), came to light between the Wars. A third supposed addition, from a late-eleventhcentury south-Italian book, can be discounted.79

78 The capitula was edited by Dümmler (ep. no. 132) from the (?twin) manuscripts Paris B.N. lat. 5577 and Vatican Reg. lat. 69; frequently referred to in recent decades, particularly for its citing of the proverbial Vox populi, vox Dei, apparently for the first time, it has in my view nothing to do with Alcuin, although a case can be made for its connection with Fridugis, or his circle at Tours, a generation later. The manuscripts in question, hitherto dated to the late-ninth or ninth/tenth centuries, have latterly been re-dated by J. Vezin and the late Bernhard Bischoff to the eleventh century: see Bullough, ‘Reminiscence and Reality: Text, Translation and Testimony of an Alcuin Letter’, JournMedLat 5 (1995), 174–201, at 176–7, and Mordek, Bibliotheca capitularium, pp. 557–9, 805–7; and among the additional arguments for the later dating is the contemporary correction of spiritalis to spiritualis in BNF lat. 5577 fol. 118 (ep. no. 178). For the probably Salzburg-area manuscripts in which ep. no. 180 is transmitted, see below; Arn’s authorship was already suggested by Zeumer, MGH Formulae, p. 452. For the commendatory letter ep. no. 299 also as non-Alcuinian, see Additional Note III ad fin. 79 The two authentic letters are: to Offa, in The Hague, Kon. Bibl. 70. H.7 fols 58–59, ed. P. Lehmann, Sitz. Ber. Akad. München, 1920, no. 13 (1921), 29–34 (= Levison, England and the Continent, pp. 245–6); to Beatus in Madrid, Arch. Hist. Nacional B. 1007 fols [101–1v], 102–2v (fol. 101 being part of a detached quire which was in private hands before 1930 and apparently disappeared during the Civil War), ed. A. Millares Carlo, Contribución al Corpus de códices visigóticos (Publ. de la Fac. de Filosofía y Letras, Univ. de Madrid, 1, 1931), 213–22, ed. Levison, England and the Continent, pp. 318–23. L. Mattei-Cerasoli (Benedictina, 2 [1948], 227–30) proposed to add an Alcuini collectum ex sacra scriptura, qualiter septies in die et semel in nocte domino laudes omnibus christianis oporteat referre in Cava, Biblioteca della Badia, cod. 3 pt. iii (Cava, s. xi2), fols 318–319v. Although Alcuinian phraseology occurs intermittently in the ‘letter’ (and the next text in the manuscript, fols 320 et seq., is Charles’s letter to Alcuin, ep. no. 144 from a common source with the manuscript Madrid, Bibl. nac. 19 [A. 16]), its style and language overall are very different from Alcuin’s. Moreover, the concluding section on the seven-fold and nightly praise of God is closely related to the earlier re-fashioning of a seemingly genuine Alcuintext (i.e. one of the manuscript-versions of Dümmler’s ep. no. 304: above) to form the pseudo-Alcuin ep. no. 304a. The narrow and distinctive manuscript base of the latter, viz. Rome, Bibl. Casanatense 641 pt. ii (Beneventan, s. x in) fol. 167 and the

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     .  

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Even the reduced total of two hundred and eighty-three (284? 285?) is more than the surviving correspondence of Augustine and considerably more than that of Jerome. The best-documented eighthcentury figure before Alcuin is Boniface, from whom we have less than fifty extant letters, although more than thirty addressed to him are included in the collected correspondence. Bede apparently felt that only five of his pre-731 letters were worth preserving; and even with the addition of the epistola ad Egbertum and the dedicatory letters, mostly to Bishop Acca of Hexham, accompanying works of exegesis, the grand total does not exceed sixteen. For none of Alcuin’s contemporaries other than popes does the surviving correspondence reach double figures.80 The extant corespondence of the highlyregarded Lupus of Ferrières—highly regarded by modern scholars, that is—runs to one hundred and thirty-three letters: for all but five of them we are dependent on a single (late-ninth-century) manuscript. Evidence exists for some 450 letters written in the name of Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (thanks to their ‘registration’ by the chronicler Flodoard) but less than one hundred are preserved complete or almost complete. The correspondence of Ratherius of Lobbes and Verona in the later tenth century, laboriously assembled by modern editors, runs to a mere thirty-three (now thirty-four) items.81 Not until Anselm of Bec and Canterbury has one man’s correspondence Collectio canonum in V libris III ccliii (ed. M. Fornaseri, CCCM 6 (1970), pp. 438–9, with an erroneous identification and several errors of transcription), the primary manuscript of which is the probably Farfa book of s. xi1, Vat. lat. 1339, here fol. 143v, points strongly to a south-central Italian origin for both texts. 80 Boniface: Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus = MGH Epist. Select. 1, ed. M. Tangl (Berlin, 1916); and note that, in Tangl’s analysis, Boniface’s correspondence was assembled and copied only when collections of Alcuin’s letters had been circulating in Francia for some time. The ‘collection of 150 letters’ surviving from his correspondence claimed by Wallace-Hadrill (Frankish Church, p. 150) is actually the total number of items in Tangl’s edition! Bede: the list of his writings at the end of HE (V 24: ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 568) includes librum epistularum ad diversos, of which five are then specified. Two of them still lack a modern edition; for the primary manuscript, Paris BNF lat. 2840 (Ferrières), see below, Pt. II ch. 2 at n. 20. Contemporaries: MGH Epp. IV and V, passim. 81 Lupus: L. Levillain, ed. and transl., Loup de Ferrières. Correspondance (Les Classiques de l’histoire de France au M.A., vols. 10, 16; Paris, 1927, 1935), also P.K. Marshall, Servatus Lupus Epistolae (Teubner; Leipzig, 1984). Hincmar: MGH Epp. VIII, ed. E. Perels, R. Schieffer (in progress); and Schieffer’s observations in Mittelalterliche Textüberlieferungen und ihre kritische Aufarbeitung (Munich, 1976), p. 62. Ratherius: F. Weigle, ed., Die Briefe des Bischofs Rather von Verona, MGH Die Briefe der Deutschen Kaiserzeit 1 (Weimar, 1949), with the addition of the very fragmentary autograph Briefkonzept published by Bischoff, Anecdota Novissima, pp. 17–19.

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     .  

been preserved that exceeds Alcuin’s in scale. Excluding those addressed to Anselm, the standard modern edition gives the texts of nearly four hundred authentic letters; the main early collection in the Canterbury manuscript London Lambeth 59, which may reflect his own view of what ought to be preserved, has three hundred and eighty-nine letter-items (including ones to him).82 The limitations even of such a comparatively large collection as a source of ‘biography’ are none the less obvious. Letters of the early and central Middle Ages are (it is generally agreed) literary artifices or ‘public’ statements of attitude or policy, lacking any authentic personal element—the revealing of feelings, emotions, uncertainties or affection which we expect to find in the correspondence of more recent centuries. Only a restricted period of Alcuin’s later life is represented. No letter is to be dated before the early 780s, only fifteen of the two hundred and eighty-three/five are certainly or almost certainly, and a further seven possibly, earlier than the last months of 793;83 and a very few years at the turn of the century—say 798–801— are disproportionately well-represented. Even for the best-documented years we clearly have only a small part of what once existed. Ardo, the author of the first and only ‘historical’ Life of Benedict of Aniane, asserts that during Alcuin’s time at Tours he was frequently writing letters to Benedict (who admired him in spite of their different approaches to the religious life) which were then made up into a volume. No trace of this libellus is apparent in the extant collections, where only two letters addressed to Benedict individually are to be found, although both confirm Ardo’s claim of regular exchanges of correspondence.84 Paschasius Radbertus had seen letters to Abbot 82

S. Anselmi Opera Omnia, ed. F.S. Schmitt, vols. 3–5 (Edinburgh, 1946–51; repr. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1968). For the manuscript-collections and the controversy over their formation, see Southern, St. Anselm (1990 edition), pp. 458–81. 83 For the letters written while Alcuin was in England 790–93, see below, Pt. II ch. 3, pp. 391–400. ‘Not before the early 780s’, if I am right in dating epp. nos 1 and 2 (in Jaffé’s and Dümmler’s editions ‘773–86’, the years of Leutfred of Mayo’s pontificate), specifically to 784: below, p. 340. My suggestion in EHR 77 (1962), 635 n. 6 that ep. no. 11, addressed to Angilbert when he was primicerius of Pippin rex Italiae, might be ante-dated to the early/mid 780s was clearly mistaken: it must in fact be of the late 790s. 84 Ardo, Vita Benedicti, c. 24: ed. Waitz, MGH SS XV, p. 210; epp. nos 56, 57— both only in the H collection of letters, and the former clearly linked with the letter which precedes it in that manuscript-collection (ep. no. 55). Dümmler dated all three ‘782–96’: a dating 793/4–796 is not unlikely for nos 55 and 56, but the language of no. 57 makes it almost certain that this was written after Alcuin had left the Court for Tours; and compare Vita Alcuini c. 14, ed. Arndt, MGH SS XV, p. 192.

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     .  

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Adalhard of Corbie which are not necessarily identical with the six preserved in one particular collection that almost certainly had originated elsewhere. It is likely that Alcuin wrote far more letters to Pyreneean and Spanish clergy than might be concluded from the very few of which copies have survived; and the isolated survival of requests or thanks for prayers addressed to otherwise unknown correspondents, such as the one to an Elegius episcopus and his congregation(s) added in the late-ninth century to a collection of Fortunatus’s verse and other texts, suggests that these, too, had figured regularly in his correspondence, perhaps already before the ‘registration’ or collection of his letters had begun.85 Only a tiny number of Alcuin’s ‘business’ or administrative letters—announcements of impending arrival and other instructions to stewards of estates, open letters of commendation for messengers and other travellers—have been preserved: communications in the first category were obviously often transmitted orally, but there is unequivocal evidence for the use of writing also. None the less, the letters that are now extant average out at two a month for the period between July 793 and the end of 803 (and slightly more for the years at Tours only), which would be a respectable rate of survival for many public figures of more recent centuries. Alcuin contrasts epistolae proper, also referred to by the plural nouns apices and litterae, with epistiunculae.86 Apart from some invaluable remarks by Wallach, usually to prove a particular thesis, and Edelstein’s Eruditio und Sapientia, whose preconceptions I only partly share, there has been little serious study of the form and lexica of letters in either group. After ‘living with’ the letters for a quarter of a century, I am still uncertain whether the abrupt transitions and repetitiveness of

85

Paschasius, Vita Adalhardi cap. 21, PL 120, col. 1519; epp. nos 175, 176, 181, 220, 222, 237, all only in the H collection. Elegius: ep. no. 269 (Olim vestra beatissima caritas . . . perdonavit nobis assidua sanctarum apud se orationum suffragia, so vobis has dirigere litterulas curavi ad renovandam pristinae promissionis fraternitatem), in Brussels Bib. roy. 5354–61 (1352) fol. 7v (previously blank). The manuscript as a whole is, according to Bischoff, ‘östliches Frankreich’(?), IX. Jh., 3 Drittel’: Katalog 1, no. 713, p. 154. 86 Apices = epistola is Late Latin usage, first recorded in the fourth century but seemingly avoided by both Symmachus and Jerome (and very rare in Augustine). It was, however, adopted early by the Papal and other writing-offices; Aldhelm uses it, Boniface apparently only in his first surviving letter, when he was still much influenced by Aldhelm’s style and vocabulary (MGH, Epist. Select. 1, ed. Tangl, no. 9, p. 4: humillimis mediocritatis meae apicibus), and a Kentish king when writing to Boniface (ibid., no. 105, p. 230). Per hos rusticitatis meae apices is Alcuin’s characterisation of one of his earliest extant letters, ep. no. 7 of 790 in.

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     .  

some of the longer epistolae are evidence of the pre-existence of formulaic drafts that have been combined with the minimum of editing; or whether, in the process of oral composition, a new sentence or clausal opening (Cogita(te) . . ., Vos vero qui . . ., Esto(te) . . . etc.) commonly ‘triggered’ a succession of epithets or noun-clauses some of which had previously figured in a different sequence. Several are indeed impressively long, not least in comparison with those of the best-documented letter-writers of Antiquity: a letter to the archbishop of Canterbury in 793 extends to nearly fourteen hundred words, without the address-clause and the appended twenty-four lines of verse; the longest of a group to the Frankish king in 798 exceeds seventeen hundred words.87 Epistiunculae in contrast are notes, even ones to the king, usually dashed off spontaneously because time is short, and are not intended to say anything in particular, or else are written to accompany some gift or a batch of previously-composed letters; like the business-letters, they have a poor chance of survival.88 The form and address-clauses of a few of the epistolae indicate that their carrier was expected to take them to several destinations successively. Educated or otherwise reliable letter-carriers were commonly expected to give the addressee(s) additional information orally; news and views of a particularly delicate kind, which could have uncomfortable repercussions if they became known to the wrong person, were normally conveyed in this way.89 Conversely, Alcuin in one of 87

For repetitions in a single letter, see e.g., epp. nos 18 and 33. The long letters are epp. nos 17 and 136. According to A. Wikenhauser, New Testament Introduction, transl. J. Cunningham, (New York, 1958), pp. 346–7, the letters of St. Paul have an average length of 1300 words, ranging between 335 and 7101 words, while those of Cicero average 295 words with a maximum of 2530 and those of Seneca average 995 words with a maximum of 4134. 88 For epistiunculae to recipients unnamed and named, see especially ep. no. 57 to Benedict of Aniane: characteristically, this is a letter of a mere one-hundred-andseventy words, with no Biblical quotation or allusion, although it is not lacking in formal structure; and it deploys one metaphor of friendship which does not seem to recur in the correspondence. 89 ‘Circular’ letters: ep. no. 104 (to Brittanniae pontifices), epp. nos 137 and 138 (to monastic and clerical communities and to laity in parts of southern Francia). Oral messages: ep. no. 101 (Alcuin to Offa of Mercia), Hos disciplinae nostrae et eruditionis discipulos . . . ut . . . suscipiatis obsecro; pacificam vero legationem ferunt IN ORE et in manibus; et per eos mihi demandare potestis quod vultis; ep. no. 2 of ?784 (for the date and a possible explanation, see below, Pt. II ch. 3). For that age-old practice, to which the modern counterpart is the ‘confidential telephone-call’, compare G. Constable, The Letters of Peter the Venerable (Cambridge, Mass, 1967), 2, pp. 25–8. Note that in the letters of Alcuin and some of his contemporaries (e.g. ep. no. 46, Chase, Two LetterBooks, I/8 (p. 31)) legatio(nes) usually has the force of ‘commission(s)’.

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     .  

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his Dialogues, imitating the late-Antique Altercatio Hadriani Augusti et Epictiti philosophi, calls a letter ‘the silent messenger’, tacitus nuntius; and so sensitive were the contents of a letter written to him by Archbishop Arn that it was ‘consigned to the fire’ after he and a discipulus had read it, to ensure that it did not cause scandal because of the carelessness of ‘the person who looks after my correspondence’!90 Sustaining a correspondence, as Alcuin remarks on more than one occasion, depends on the comings and goings of anonymous messengers ( portitores, missi, exceptionally cursores) from near and distant places, sometimes even on the willingness of a hurried visitor or messenger to extend his stay. The fortuitous arrival of another person’s letter-carrier might lead to the renewing of a link that had been broken for many years or start a new chain of correspondence.91 St. Martin’s at Tours during Alcuin’s abbacy, on the other hand, was evidently maintaining a frequent messenger-service to a select few destinations. For many months in 798 and 799 Alcuin was writing to (Arch)bishop Arn at quite short intervals, sometimes measured in days rather than weeks, and Arn was replying somewhat less frequently. The losses among Alcuin’s letters are apparently almost as numerous as the survivals; not one of the letters addressed to him by Arn has been preserved—which is also the case with other regular correspondents over many years, such as Paulinus, patriarch of Aquileia.92 90 Editions of the Disputatio Pippini cum Albino and of the Altercatio by W. Suchier in L.W. Daly and W. Suchier, Altercatio Hadriani Augusti et Epicteti Philosophi, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 24 (Urbana, 1939), at pp. 143 and 104; ep. no. 184: propter neglegentiam meas cartulas servantis (-es, mss.; cf. ‘York Poem’ ed. Godman, line 1283, germanae pacis servantes iura vicissim), apparently the only such reference in the letters. 91 Epp. nos 57 (secundum oportunitatem portitoris), 104 (quia oportuna mihi evenit occasio), 189 (to the bishop of Winchester, with whom apparently Alcuin had not been in touch since the 786 synod), 190, 201 (si forte oportunus occurret vobis portitor—to Spain!), 207, 212 etc. Whatever was the case in Antiquity and in the later Middle Ages, in Alcuin’s time the several terms for ‘letter-carrier’ were clearly interchangeable. Baiulus, in mid-eighth century letters from the Kentish king and from the archbishop of Canterbury, Epist. Select. 1, ed. Tangl, nos 105 (p. 230) and 117 (p. 252), is not used by Alcuin. 92 A detailed account of the Alcuin-Arn exchanges in 798/9 is in Pt II, where also the evidence for a sharp reduction in correspondence in the years 801–2 is presented. Paulinus’s seven (or less) surviving letters, none of them to Alcuin, are MGH Epp. IV, pp. 516–27: and note that the letter of 791 to the Frankish king (idem. pp. 517–20), is in BAV Vat. lat. 3827 (N.Fr., end s. ix) at fols 39v–41v, where it immediately precedes the record of the 796/7 Friuli council and Pope Hadrian’s Capitulare adversus synodum, JE.2843. For lost letters of Alcuin to Paulinus of Aquileia in 796, see Pt. II, ch. 4.

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     .  

Unsurprisingly there is no surviving original. The material form and appearance of Alcuin’s letters must necessarily be deduced from their letter-collection copies and from the tiny number of original letters of Carolingian date. It is not excluded that ‘notes’ were sometimes written and sent on waxed tablets, as in earlier centuries.93 Most, however, were surely penned on a single parchment sheet, although some letters would necessarily have required a bifolium or, exceptionally, several foldings (to make a libellus or quire): Alcuin ends a letter to Arn with the assertion that he was running out of space—although not of love.94 They were generally tied (with a parchment strip?) to which a seal was sometimes applied; and the name of the addressee, occasionally with an additional form of identification or even greeting, was written on the outside.95 The overwhelming 93 Scripsi nomen Paulini mei non in cera, quae deleri potest, sed in anima says Alcuin in his earliest extant letter to Paulinus, ep. no. 28. Scripsi <non> in cera can surely be understood literally as well as figuratively, like the royal apices dilectionis atramento formati of ep. no. 126; but if so, the wax tablet is likely to have been used in the drafting of the letter rather than for the final version. 94 Ep. no. 124 (to the bishop of ?Leicester) fills roughly five sides in the earliest copies, ep. no. 136 (to Charles) requires at least ten sides! Original single-sheet letters are: Chartae Latinae Antiquiores 16 (1986), no. 629 (pp. 59–65) of 787/8, from Maginarius of St.-Denis to the king; and the several described by P. Chaplais, ‘The letter from Bishop Wealdhere of London to Archbishop Brihtwold of Canterbury: the earliest original “letter close” extant in the West’, Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries, ed. M.B. Parkes and A.G. Watson (1978), pp. 3–21. Ecce deficiente cartula—non caritate—pennam deponimus: ep. no. 107 (which none the less requires 21/2–3 leaves in its copies). 95 Tieing and addressing: Antonio . . . has litteras alias . . . CLAUSA CARTULA sicut est deprecor ut dirigas; quia si discincta veniat in praesentiam illius vilescit apud eum, ep. no. 221 (to Angilbert); cf. the distich Discingat chartam mitis, rogo, dextera David etc., clearly intended for the outside of the letter ep. no. 240 to Charles (pre-800 rather than later), the verses inc. Nulla manus [cartam] discingat ni tua, praesul, MGH Poet. I, p. 248 (no. xxix.2), which must belong to another letter, now lost (or unidentifiable), and the verses Curre velox carta, plures fer cincta salutes/ Dic: tua me queso discinge dextera illi, accompanying (and likewise originally on the outside of ) a letter from Alcuin’s disciple Candidus, MGH Epp. IV, p. 561. For other possible external ‘addresses’ preserved in later copies see below; for earlier English examples, including the one ‘original’, see Chaplais, ‘The letter from Bishop Wealdhere’, pp. 7–10. Alcuin’s seal: Hec ut nostra credatis, nostro sigillo subter sigillavimus, ep. no. 104, refers to an evidently circular (and therefore ‘patent’) letter to pontifices Britanniae; compare, however, his gloss on the etymology of epistola in ep. no. 88 (of c. 800?), Quasi supercinctorium esset epistolae sigillum, quo a foris vestiatur cartula, the metaphoric usage paginulam . . . sancta fide sigillatam in ep. no. 294 (on masturbation!) and solutis sigillis of a letter sent to Alcuin by Paulinus of Aquileia, ep. no. 86; but in ep. no. 57, asking Benedict to pass on to their intended recipients a batch of notes sent at the same time, Alcuin indicates that he is free to read them first if he wishes. Compare Chaplais’s caution (p. 10) about the ‘evidence . . . that Anglo-Saxon letters missive were actually sealed’: he does not use Alcuin’s letters.

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     .  

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majority of the extant letters were almost certainly fair-copied for dispatch by an amanuensis or other clerical scribe: whether the farewell clauses, which are only inconsistently preserved in the copies, and even the occasional postscript to a letter, were ‘autograph’ in the originals is not certainly determinable, although I favour the view that in many instances they were.96 Unexpectedly, perhaps, transcriptions of nearly eighty different letters (more than a quarter of the total extant) are to be found in three manuscripts written during Alcuin’s lifetime. Moreover, the palaeography and codicology of the two larger collections establish their places and dates of origin with unusual precision, and allow us to offer plausible hypotheses about the circumstances and manner of their compilation.97

Transmission of the Letters: the Beginnings The earlier of only two manuscripts of Alcuin’s ‘Seven Books against the Heresy of Felix’ composed in 799, Paris, BNF. lat. 2386, seems to be a contemporary copy, probably produced at Tours but by several 96 I.e. the concluding phrases Pax tibi et salus habitantibus in te (ep. no. 8; similarly no. 10), Vigeas valeas et floreas, dulcissime Damoeta (ep. no. 26; similarly, no. 36, etc.) and others of the same kind. There is no obvious pattern in the inclusion or omission of these farewell-clauses in copies of the letters, but where they do occur the copyist sometimes starts a new line or distinguishes them in some other way, as if they were distinct in his exemplar; for the ‘autograph’ character of those clauses and of occasional postscripts in early-mediaeval and early-Carolingian letters, see the cautious comments of H. Hoffmann, ‘Zur mittelalterlichen Brieftechnik’, Spiegel der Geschichte: Festgabe für Max Braubach ed. K. Repgen and S. Skalweit (Münster, 1964), pp. 141–70, at pp. 151–4. 97 T. Sickel, ‘Alcuinstudien I’ SB. Akad. Wiss. Wien Ph.-Hist. Kl., 79 (1875), 461–550, is the only comprehensive account of manuscripts of the letter-collections, prompted by the deficiencies of Ph. Jaffé’s (posthumous) Monumenta Alcuiniana, ed. Dümmler and Wattenbach (Berlin, 1873); ‘. . . II’ was never published. Re-editing the letters in 1893–5, Dümmler generally followed Sickel’s descriptions of particular manuscripts in his prooemium (MGH Epist. IV, pp. 1–17), but did not always appreciate some of their implications. Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, pp. 266–74, is titled ‘The origin of the manuscript collections of Alcuin’s letters’: it is directed against a supposedly widely-held view that ‘pupils and admirers are . . . the probable originators’ of the letter-collections: the arguments for the opposite view are basically sound (see especially p. 272), although unacceptably generalised; Wallach relied exclusively on textual links between a small number of the letters, he disregarded their relative dating and he did not re-consider the manuscripts themselves. My own conclusions and inferences, based on a slightly larger body of material than Sickel’s and with new datings and origins for some of the key manuscripts, were at several points anticipated by him although largely overlooked subsequently.

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     .  

scribes of different formation: it is the unique source of the explanatory preface and of the (subsequent) letter in which Alcuin laments that the definitive version cannot be published until he has received the comments of Court scholars and the king has signified his approval.98 A notably-different book is Vienna Nationalbibliothek lat. 795 (siglum S) + Ser. nov. 3755, formerly at Salzburg.99 This, except for the final (added) quire, i.e. fols 200–205, and some additions on previously blank leaves, was written by a remarkable array of scribes at (Arch)bishop Arn’s northern-French abbey of St.-Amand during, almost certainly, the year 799. The late Professor Bischoff ’s suggestion that the copying of most of the letters can be linked with Arn’s period of residence in the (north-)west in the previous year cannot be right. The main sequence of Alcuin’s correspondence with the archbishop in the second half of 798 leaves little doubt that when Arn returned from Italy with the pallium he did not go to his northern monastery, although he may have paid a brief visit to the royal Court—not necessarily at Aachen—before making a visitation of his archdiocese. There is doubtful evidence for his presence at St.-Amand for a time before Christmas 798, and he was almost certainly there in January. It is not excluded that Arn had brought with him the exemplar of the two Roman topographical texts copied in one of the later quires. But the probably slightly later copy of one of them in a Salzburg manuscript (Vienna, Nat. bibl. lat. 1008, at fols 189v–191) is not dependent on the St.-Amand book; and neither the codicological con-

98 Epp. nos 203, 202, respectively on fols 3–3v and 4–5v. Fol. 3 was originally the beginning of the text, coming immediately after a blank leaf or bifolium: the present fol. 2 properly belongs after fol. 12v. For its ‘probably Tours’ origin see Bischoff, MaSt 2, 15 n. 29. (The apparent reference to BNF, lat. 2386 in the original version (1983) of my ‘Alcuin and the Kingdom of Heaven’ p. 50 n. 114 and Index is an unfortunate misprint for ‘2388’, corrected in the 1991 reprint.) The other manuscript is BNF, lat. 2848, which is not of s. x as B.N. Cat., 3, 406 but of s. ix in, from St.-Denis (according to Bischoff, pers. comm. in 1983; but Jean Vezin has expressed doubts). For the chronology (second half 799), see W. Heil, Alkuinstudien I (Düsseldorf, 1970), pp. 30, 44–5, 70. 99 Complete facsimile of cod. 795 as Alkuin-Briefe und andere Traktate with Introduction by F. Unterkircher (Codices Selecti 20; Graz, 1969). The first, and still notable, palaeographical and codicological description is that of Sickel, ‘Alcuinstudien’, pp. 468–86, who—happy days!—was allowed to borrow manuscripts from Munich for comparison. The most recent and most precise (and including Ser.nov. 3755) is that of Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen 2, 115–120 (nos 75a, 75b), on which I rely heavily: but compare next note and n. 105. Sickel distinguished the scribal hands with letters of the Greek alphabet, Bischoff with a numbering (1) to (29).

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     .  

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text nor the identification of the scribes helps with the latter’s dating.100 Copies of twenty of Alcuin’s letters are in S, in four separate blocks interspersed with other texts, that are partly of Alcuin’s own composition but including also apparently inherited ‘school’ material. Eight of them are in the first and last blocks, which may have been copied originally into a single scheda or codicellus of fourteen bifolia, now divided by the intervening folios 21–191v, or else into two originally distinct schedae;101 seven (or more probably six) of them are addressed to Arn as bishop or archbishop, the other one or two, respectively on fols 4–4v and 197–197v, are to another (anonymous) bishop or to a favoured disciple, closely associated with Arn at the time of writing. The opening item, which has no heading or title but the text of which begins with a hexameter, is a long letter on true conversion and the nature of baptism. It and the other letters in this group are evidently taken from the recipient’s copies.102 For the most part they are the work of a single scribe—Sickel’s ‘gamma’, Bischoff ’s (1)—who is also the principal hand of another block on fols 172–183v and was responsible for copying letters from Angilbert, unique to this manuscript, on subsequent folios: he can perhaps be 100 Not until ep. no. 159 (which is not copied in any St.-Amand or Salzburg book!) of ?November is there anything to suggest that Arn may have been at the monastery. When, however, in ?late January 799 Alcuin responded with his ep. no. 165 (which is in S, at fols 195v–196v) to Arn’s most recent letter, it is apparent that this had come from St.-Amand, although without any indication as to how long Arn would remain there. On the datings indicated by Dümmler, that letter of Alcuin’s is the latest in the Vienna codex: I argue below against a proposed postdating by a full year, with obvious implications for the terminus post quem of this section of the manuscript. The texts of the letters in S which have no connection with Arn or his churches (below) could have been brought to St.-Amand by Alcuin in August 798 (ep. no. 150) or, more probably, spring 799 (below). The two topographical texts (Codice Topografico della Cittá di Roma, 2, ed. R. Valentini and G. Zucchetti, Fonti per la Storia d’Italia, 88 [Rome, 1942], pp. 72–99, 106–31) are on fols 184–91v, the concluding quire ‘z’ of the ?primary codex; their copying was begun by a scribe who does not figure elsewhere and was then completed by two who had contributed to earlier sections of the codex. For Vienna 1008, see Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen 2, 94 (no. 23). 101 Folios 21–191v have a sequence of quire-signatures ‘a’–‘z’, possibly added by the Salzburg magister Baldo in the (early) ninth century (so Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen 2, 115); fols 1–20v, of which fols 5–18v have a text of Alcuin’s De orthographia (versio II) and fols 19–20v were originally left blank, and fols 192–99v have no signatures. The six (originally eight?) leaves which now constitute Ser.nov. 3755 belong textually with fols 59–87 but are not included in the ‘numbered’ quiresequence: for the possible significance of this see below. 102 For the distinction between ‘recipients’ copies’ and ‘register (al. letter-book) copies’, see Sickel, ‘Alcuinstudien’, and below.

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     .  

regarded, therefore, as a St.-Amand monk or cleric in Arn’s immediate circle.103 The second block of Alcuin’s letters, beginning on fol. 150v and concluding with an EXPLIC[IT ] on fol. 155 (the verso, which is the end of the quire, being blank) is a group of three which had probably never formed part of a correspondence stricto sensu: they are in fact short treatises in letter form, one on a theological or philosophical problem and two on exegetical (numerological) ones, directed in the first instance to named discipuli; and they are preceded by Alcuin’s reported answers, found only here, to questions about four passages in the Pauline Epistles.104 The nine letters in the third and largest group, which take up three quires and a binio—folios 156–183v in the manuscript as now constituted and with the ninth-century signatures ‘t’, ‘v’, ‘x’, ‘y’— are the work of two principal scribes and several others, and are addressed to a variety of recipients. The opening letter of the group, written by Bischoff ’s hand (9) and no. 136 in Dümmler’s edition, is an exceptionally long and complex one, filling six-and-a-half folios. Uniquely among the letters in the St.-Amand book, it is addressed to the Frankish king. It has acquired a considerable notoriety in modern scholarship because it is among the earliest and very probably the earliest of Alcuin’s letters in which he alludes to Charles’s

103 Compare Alcuin’s allusion, in a letter to Arno (above, p. 41 and n. 92, to ‘the person who looks after my letters’. Bischoff says (Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 2, 115): ‘An allen Stellen kopiert (1) an Arn gerichtete Briefe’, which is not the case, since although he only copies letters, those on fols 172–183v are not to Arn, and that on fols 197–197v is almost certainly not to the (arch)bishop but possibly to the copyist himself: details below, p. 49 and esp. n. 112. If Bischoff ’s identifications are accepted, scribe (1) is one of only two of those involved in Vienna 795 who subsequently moved to Salzburg, where he reached his calligraphic peak in copies of exegetical texts in Salzburg, St. Peter, Stiftsbibl., a X 3 (pp. 7–214) and Vienna 997 (the entire original manuscript, except for a few interruptions by other scribes: the anonymous Irish commentaries on Luke and John, uniquely here, are edited by J.F. Kelly in CCSL 108C [Turnhout, 1974], pp. 3–101, 105–31). Already at St.Amand, if the hand is indeed that of one and the same writer, he had contributed to the three exegetical manuscripts Vienna 964 pt. i (‘eine vorwiegend didaktische Textsammlung zum Bibelstudium’: Bischoff ), Budapest Nat. mus. Clmae. 1 and Salzburg, St. Peter, a XI 16: Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 2, 113–15, 120–1 (nos 73, 74, 76) and idem, 136–7 (nos 107, 108) with pl. Vb. At Salzburg, he played no part in the copying of Alcuin’s (or anyone else’s) letters. 104 The letter-treatises are epp. nos 133, 81 and 135 in Dümmler’s edition. Their copyists here (Bischoff ’s scribes (20) and (21)) do not seem to figure elsewhere. The preceding fols 148v–150v were mostly written by Bischoff ’s scribe (15), who was responsible also for eight leaves in the preceding exegetical section. The comments on the Epistles were published from this manuscript by Frobenius = PL 100, cols 1083–6.

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     .  

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responsibility for ‘authority over the Christian world’ (cunctum christianitatis imperium)’. It is, however, primarily concerned with answering questions previously raised at the Court about the literal and spiritual meaning of the references to swords in the Passion narratives of Luke and Matthew: a point emphasised by the title or headnote subsequently added at Salzburg, and its counterpart in an early Tours copy. But Alcuin links his exposition with the importance of ‘the proclaimers (al. teachers, praedicatores) of Christ’s church’, and of the king’s constant personal encouragement of them and of all those who can teach others by their example. He takes the opportunity of protesting about bishops who will not allow clergy to teach in their own churches; and he concludes the letter rather incongruously with a call to the king to draw bishops’ attention to the fouling of altars in unroofed churches!105 A different hand (Sickel’s ‘b’, Bischoff ’s [22]) is responsible for the almost equally-long letter that follows. Apparently written originally for circulation among the clerical and monastic communities of Gothia and Provence, it touches initially on the errors and dangers of Adoptionism and concludes with a brief account of the observance of Holy Saturday, which may be moderately joyful (omni veneratione habeatur iocundus). Its most substantial section, however, is concerned with the forms and ceremonies of baptism and their significance, incorporating the standard version of the (pre-Alcuin?) text Primo paganus catechumenus fit, which also circulated independently; and this was emphasised by the Salzburg magister Baldo when he later added running-titles to the letter—Contra eos qui negant trinam mersionem esse faciendam in babtismo.106 The same scribe copies the letter addressed 105 Vienna 795, fol. 156: Explanatio gladiorum qui dicuntur in passione; id. fols 157v–158: Explanatio gladiorum qui in evangeliis dicuntur, both apparently due to the Salzburg magister Baldo; Troyes bibl. mun. 1165 [T ] fol. 12v: Item ad domnum regem de eo quod in evangelio legitur: Domine duo gladii hic sunt; ed. Dümmler, ep. no. 136. For the implications of (p. 209) Mirum est quod legere licet et interpretare non licet ut ab omnibus intellegatur (Dümmler wrongly emending to -pretari ), see below. 106 Ep. no. 137, on fols 162v–167v, the titles on fols 162v–163 (with additional phrase et quod non sit sal in sacrificio) and fols 166v–167. The letter lacks an addressclause in all the manuscript testimonies (from three different collections, as defined later in the present chapter). Dümmler’s [Ad] monachos Gothiae sive Septimaniae has been generally accepted by subsequent commentators; the question Quae est monachorum vita nisi caritas . . .? is asked early in the letter; but Gothia(e) is not be found there, and the island of Lérins and its monastery, to which a postscript in the copies in the K and T collections asks that an exemplar be sent, is in Provence (dioc. Fréjus, archd. Aix), not Septimania. The heading Ad monachos Gothorum epistola Albini is peculiar to one sub-branch of the tradition, the manuscripts K1 + K‘3’, where the letter

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     .  

initially to Viris fratribus et patribus in provincia Gothorum, which is Alcuin’s most sustained statement of the importance of confessing sins to priests, drawing an analogy between the different kinds of sinner seeking forgiveness with the three instances of Christ’s raising the dead.107 Several hands in collaboration, including the scribe g (Bischoff’s [1]), copy successively (fols 172–178v) one of the very few purely ‘business’ letters of Alcuin’s to survive, a general letter of recommendation for messengers on the way to Rome, the manuscript tradition of which is quite distinctive;108 then two letters to Eanbald of York on how he should conduct himself as archbishop, separated by a letter to the widowed Northumbrian queen Æthelthryth (preserved only here), all of 796 or perhaps 797; and a beseeching letter to a one-time disciple who had become Alcuin’s bitter enemy (tentatively dated by Dümmler to before 796/7, on no very good grounds).109 The copying of the final letter in the group, on fols 179–183v, was is both divided and heavily abbreviated (indeed mutilated): it is not in St. Gallen Stiftsbibl. 271 (K2), nor in BAV Reg. lat. 272 (T *), which has Albinus ad quendam. The emphasis on the ‘full’ version of baptism and its ceremonial and on the eucharistic elements is not obviously directed to a monastic audience; and the text in S, a copy made within only a few months of the earliest possible date for Alcuin’s letter, effectively disposes of any inference from the abbreviated K text that Primo paganus catechumenus fit may not originally have been part of it (as suggested by S. Keefe, ‘Carolingian Baptismal Expositions’, Carolingian Essays ed. U.-R. Blumenthal [Washington, D.C., 1983], p. 186). It is possible that the letter circulated in southern Francia in more than one version, but if so these seem not to be directly reflected in the several letter-collection texts. 107 Ep. no. 138, for which Baldo’s added title (fols 168, 170v–171) is: Contra eos qui nolunt sacerdotibus [add. Dei fol. 170v] dare confessionem. Dümmler characterised the addressees as Gothiae incolas; others have supposed that it was directed rather to monks and clergy. Uncertainty is evident even before the end of the Carolingian period: an isolated copy in a north-Italian manuscript of s. ix/x, Milan Bibl. Ambr., I 89 sup., fols 166–9, has the heading Epistola hec Alcuini magistri missa ad viros illustros fratres ac presbiteros qui sunt in Gotie partibus constituti de confessione peccatorum mirifice edocet. But Dümmler was almost certainly correct: for viri fratres (also on p. 219) as (leading) laymen, compare ep. no. 18 (p. 52) to the king and principes of Northumbria. 108 Ep. 140; for the manuscripts and textual variations, see Additional Note III. 109 Epp. nos 116, 105, 114, 58; nos 116 and 114 are also in the English lettercollection (below), nos 105 and 58 are uniquely in S. There is evidence of careless copying in all four letters and in the following one (the result of haste?). But Dümmler was not always justified in relegating ‘incorrect’ spellings or accidence to the apparatus; and he was certainly or probably wrong in several places in epp. nos 114, 116 where he preferred the readings of the English manuscripts to those of S: e.g., his text of no. 116 reads a sanctae predicationis verbo lingua sileat, where S has a sancta praedicatione lingua sileat and verbo is a ‘correction’ by Archbishop Wulfstan not supported by London, BL Cotton Tiberius A. xv fol. 64 (to which it was added in the sixteenth century—apparently not by Joscelyn: and similarly Wulfstan’s habeas for pergat).

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     .  

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divided (in Bischoff ’s view) between several different hands, of varying degrees of skill: addressed to bishop Felix of Urgel and an important testimony to the development of Alcuin’s arguments against his ‘heretical’ doctines, it is almost certainly to be dated—on quite other grounds than its unique occurrence here—to (late) 797.110 Most of the letters in this third group have an obvious relevance to Arn, whose pastoral responsibilities now embraced the missionary regions of the south-east and whose bishopric of Salzburg had, on 20 April 798, been raised to an archbishopric;111 and the prominent part played by Bischoff ’s scribe (1) in the writing of fols 172 ff., as well as the first part of ep. no. 113 on fols 1v–2, is surely no accident. The simplest explanation of the seemingly anomalous inclusion of the Æthelthryth letter is that it was already associated with the texts of the letters to Eanbald in the exemplar of this section of the St.Amand collection, and that that exemplar was, directly or through an intermediate, part of a ‘register’ of drafts or copy-texts maintained by Alcuin or in his immediate circle. Alcuin’s abortive attempts to meet Arn at his monastery in the late spring of 799 are an obvious context for passing on these copy-letters; but whether they were solicited or unsolicited there is no means of knowing.112 Very few of Alcuin’s letters contain unequivocal dating-evidence and objections have been or can be raised to many of Dümmler’s inferential dates; but there are no good grounds for dating any of the letters copied into the first 183 folios of S later than 798. This is not true, however, of the block of six letters occupying fols 192–197v, addressed to Arn, or in the case of the last of these,

110

Ep. no. 23; for the several scribes (as against Sickel’s scribe ‘gamma’), see Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 2, 117 (although a degree of scepticism is permissable). The title Epistola Albini ad Felicem hereticum was added by Baldo on fol. 179, and figures again on fol. 180 (by another hand?). The running-titles of letters in the earlier folios are repeated only towards the end of the manuscript-text; the repetition here after only one folio is perhaps because fol. 180 is the beginning of a new quire (g), and the book was still in unbound quires or else had been dis-bound for the addition of fols 200–205. 111 Jaffé Ewald 2498, Germ.Pont. 1, 8 no. 7, new ed. Salzburger UB. 2, no. 2a; cf. JE 2495 f., Germ.Pont. 1, 8 f. nos 8, 9, ed. MGH Epp., V, pp. 58–60 (nos 3, 4), Salzburger UB. 2, nos 2b, c; Ann. Iuvav. maiores s. a. 798, ed. Bresslau, MGH SS, XXX, p. 736. 112 Ep. no. 167 (not in S but in several Salzburg copies), dated Febr. ex by Dümmler, re-dated by me to Apr./May. For the ‘registering’ of Alcuin’s letters and the material form of the ‘register’ (quaternions or bifolia with copies of two, three or four letters, rather than single sheets), see Sickel, ‘Alcuinstudien’.

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     .  

almost certainly to some other person in his immediate circle and plausibly to the scribe himself.113 The first three and last two are generally accepted as having been sent during the summer and autumn of 798, the latest of them probably some time in October: although it may be that one of them (ep. no. 158) should be antedated to October 797. The fourth letter in the group (ep. no. 165), written when Alcuin was still impatiently waiting to hear how the work of strengthening the church in the south-east was progressing, is certainly later than these. On internal evidence, including Alcuin’s hope of a full oral report during Lent, Dümmler dated it to (late) January 799; Wilhelm Heil, as part of his radical revision of the chronology of the years 798–800 (mid) and of the Alcuin letters that are the principal evidence, wanted to put it more than a year later.114 The fifteen-month interval, at least, between this and the next-latest letter in the collection is troublesome; Alcuin only knows of rumours that the king may pay a visit to St. Martin’s orationis causa, and there are no grounds for thinking (with Heil) that it was prompted by Northmen’s raids on the Atlantic coast, supposedly in 799. Moreover, Arn’s letters have previously reported his reversio (from Italy) but given no hard information about how long he would be in the north, whether at the Court or at St.-Amand—and in

113 Epp. nos 156, 158, 146, 165, 150, 153. The address-clause of no. 153 reads: Carissimo filio in vere caritatis dulcidine salutem. Dümmler surprisingly prints Clarissimo, the reading of Vienna 808 fol. 108, even though this part is a direct copy of Vienna 795 and clarissimus is a form of address used by Alcuin only once in his extant letters; and he goes on to suggest that the vir clarissimus [sic] is Arn rather than, as Sickel thought, Candidus. This is most improbable: neither in language nor in tone does this letter resemble those written to Arn in these months; and its addressee is evidently in north Francia, Arn being at that time almost certainly in his archdiocese. For some of the same reasons, as well as on chronological grounds, it is unlikely that it was directed to Candidus. The recipient was evidently someone highly placed in the St.-Amand community and/or Arn’s familia: it is very tempting, therefore, to identify him with Bischoff ’s scribe (1) (Sickel’s ‘gamma’), whose final letter from Alcuin this is and the only one without a named addressee; for his scribal career, see above, n. 99. Equally to be rejected are Dümmler’s ‘corrections’ of the manuscript readings to dulcedine (in the address), despicias (ms. disp-) and—probably—profectu (ms. -fecto), since there is other evidence that Alcuin treated the noun in the sense of ‘success, outcome’ as a neuter. 114 W. Heil, Alkuinstudien I (Düsseldorf, 1970), pp. 46, 71. The dating of ep. no. 158 (‘798 Oct. med.’: Dümmler) is not discussed by Heil; but if his re-dating of ep. no. 193 is correct (and I believe it is), the October referred to in ep. no. 158’s opening lines cannot be 798 but must be a year earlier.

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     .  

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January/February 800 Arn was, again, in Rome!115 The re-dating in this instance is to be rejected. The three letters that follow the last of those from Alcuin (usque hic Albinus magister on fol. 197v) and with which the manuscript apparently originally concluded, have all had the names of both author and addressee eliminated. The former is identified in a marginal entry by the scribe Bischoff ’s (1), Sickel’s g, the copyist both of the preceding letters and of this group of three although apparently only after an interruption, as it[em] Ang[e]lb[er]t[us]. The manuscript context implies that the recipient was Arn, and the first of them refers to the intercessions of the St.-Amand community on his behalf: in which case they were almost certainly addressed to the bishop in the summer of 797 (as I prefer to believe) when Arn was apparently in his diocese, less probably in the summer of 798 when he was trying to meet up with the king in eastern Francia after his first return from Rome, and subsequently transmitted to St.-Amand as a group in formulary form.116 The incomplete text (incomplete only because a further leaf has been lost?) of the poem sent to Candidus while he was on his way to Rome, may, however, have been added on the previously blank fol. 199 (after l. 14)–199v when the book was already at Salzburg, even though the hand is probably that of one of the major contributors to the earlier part of the manuscript (Bischoff ’s scribe (5)).117

Salzburg Copies of the Letters What is beyond question is that, very soon after ‘completion’, the St.-Amand manuscript (or manuscripts, if fols 1–20 + 192–199 still constituted a unit separate from the now-intervening quires) was 115

To which, indeed, ep. no. 186 was declaredly sent at the end of 799, and perhaps also the slightly earlier no. 185, although until recently Alcuin had been uncertain where Arn was. With other letters to Arn datable to 799, these two are in the main Salzburg collection of the letters (S1), the second also in what I believe is Alcuin’s ‘personal’ collection (H ), for which see below. 116 Epp. 147, 151, 152. Beginning with the words usq[ue] hic Albinus magist[er] added in a blank half-line at the end of ep. 153, scribe (1) writes in a slightly smaller hand and with fewer spaces between words; and the final binio (fols 198–199v) was taken from a different pile of—unlined—parchment. 117 So Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 2, 117.

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     .  

taken to Arn’s archiepiscopal see, Salzburg, and remained there. A decade previously, Arn had commissioned a detailed record (notitia) of his church’s acquisitions of land, tenants and dues, now imperilled by the Bavarian duke Tassilo’s overthrow; and at about the same time the earliest known Salzburg-area formulary-book was being compiled from recent letters.118 In 802/3, not long after the preparation of new Breves Notitiae of the church’s property,119 the archbishop or the master of the cathedral scriptorium organized the production of a codex of one-hundred-and-thirty-four folios entirely devoted to works of Alcuin: the two letters that name the king as their ‘author’ were almost certainly Alcuin’s compositions. The letter-collection of sixty-two (or sixty) different texts occupies the folios now numbered 101–221 in the composite manuscript Vienna, Nationalbibl. cod. lat. 808 (Dümmler’s S1), where it is followed successively by the Disputatio Pippini cum Albino, without the title, and by the earliest extant collection of Alcuin’s carmina.120 The Salzburg copyists, at least nine in number and apparently working partly contemporaneously, partly consecutively, began with the penultimate gathering of the St.-Amand book (or of the libellus of which it was 118 The Notitia Arnonis is ed. W. Hauthaler, Salzburger Urkundenbuch 1, (1898), 4–16 and by F. Losek, in Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Salzburger Landeskunde, 130 (1990), 80–97: the extensive recent literature is reviewed and summarised by H. Wolfram, ‘Die Notitia Arnonis . . .’, in: Recht und Schrift im Mittelalter, ed. P. Classen (Vortr. u. Forsch. 23; Sigmaringen, 1977), pp. 115–30, by H. Wanderwitz, ‘Quellenkritische Studien . . .’, DA 39 (1983), 29–55 (cf. Losek’s introduction to his edition, 19–57), and very succinctly by P. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance (Princeton, 1994), p. 88. The formulary-book is the ‘III. Sammlung’ in Bischoff ’s Salzburger Formelbücher u. Briefe aus Tassilonischer u. Karolingischer Zeit (Bayer. Akad., Ph.-Hist. Kl., SB. Jg.1973, H.4: Munich, 1973), pp. 42–57, to be read in conjunction with B. Löfstedt’s and C.D. Lanham’s review in Eranos 73 (1975), 69–100, esp. 78–83, 87–97; for its origin and date, see Bischoff, Salzburger Formelbücher, pp. 16–26. 119 Ed. by W. Hauthaler and F. Martin, Salzburger Urkundenbuch 2 (1916), 1–23 and by F. Losek, Mitteilungen cit., 102–45: for the date of compilation see Wanderwitz (as last note) and Losek, pp. 34–42. Formulary, Notitia and Breves are preserved only in later copies (the formulary, indeed, only in an eighteenth-century one), and nothing can be said about the scribes of the lost ‘originals’. 120 Described by Sickel, ‘Alcuinstudien I’, pp. 486–96 and (in tabular form) pp. 546–50, and by Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 2, 135 (no. 105). Both Sickel and Bischoff were prepared to date the book in its entirety to the year 802; but some of the letters seem to be of the next year. Fols 1–100 are Isidore, written in the time of Arn’s successor Adalram: Bischoff, ibid., pp. 150–1 (no. 142). The exemplar(s) and sources of the more than thirty poems copied on fols 225v–234 seem to be indeterminable. Not until fol. 231 do they have any specific connection with Arn or Salzburg; and the verses on these leaves include tituli of which there is a fuller text elsewhere.

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     .  

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then a part) in front of them. From its group of six letters to Arn— or Arn and his circle (ep. no. 153)—the first scribe (Sickel’s a) made copies of five: the omission of the sixth (ep. 158) is probably simply explained by his having no more space in the quire allocated to him; and it was left to the writer of the fifth quire to transcribe it as his first item. Scribe ‘ß’, by contrast, fills the second quire less its final page (fol. 116v) with three letters to Arn, two of which are among those sent to him at Salzburg from late October 798 onwards.121 Scribe g takes over from ‘ß’ in the middle of a letter to an un-named and not certainly identifiable daughter of the Frankish king, which was introduced to use up the last page of the quire, previously left blank; and he then fills six-and-a-half folios (117–23) with Alcuin’s tirade against Theodulf addressed to an un-named bishop, who must be, in spite of Sickel’s and Dümmler’s contrary view, Arn himself. He (or perhaps scribe a) subsequently completed the quire with a letter written in sorrow rather than in anger to a one-time discipulus Britannicus with deplorable (apparently, masturbatory) habits: a second copy—perhaps in fact the earlier of the two—by a different hand is to be found in the second part of the collection (below).122

121 Epp. nos 173, 107, 167. Ep. no. 107 is found only here, in its direct but abbreviated mid-century copy in Munich clm. 14743 (below, n. 122) and in the probably also dependent Munich clm. 4650 (Salzburg area?, third quarter of s. ix: Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen 2, 201–2). It was a response to a letter received on 25 May 796, written when Arn was about to set out for Pannonia with an army led by King Pippin. Ep. no. 173 also occurs only in these three related manuscripts (strictly speaking, in clm. 4650 the letter is preserved only to rivulos sanctitatis = MGH Epp. IV, p. 286 l. 18, at the bottom of fol. 79v: but in the original quiring fols 72–79v came after the now concluding fols 80–85, and at least one further gathering has been lost). Dümmler’s date for this letter was May 799; but, on the grounds that in its middle section (omitted from the copy in clm. 14743) Alcuin is rejoicing in the Papal bestowal on Arn of the archiepiscopal pallium, an ante-dating to the previous autumn has been suggested. In fact, on other grounds, even May in 799 may be somewhat too early. Ep. no. 167, which has a much broader manuscript base, the Tours ‘register’ version being included in the collections T and K (below) and thence in the duplicate copy on fols 195–6 of the present manuscript, was written after Alcuin had failed to find Arn at St.-Amand, in the course of a journey to Belgica in the spring and early summer of 799. 122 Epp. nos 164, 246, 294. For the scribe responsible for the first and last of these cf. Sickel, ‘Alcuinstudien 1’, pp. 488, 546 with Bischoff, Schreibschulen 2, 135: ‘Leere Reste der Lagen sind meist von derselben Hand gefüllt (nach Sickel sämtlich von ‘alpha’ . . .)’. The text of ep. 164 in the eleventh-century English manuscript London, BL Cotton Tiberius A.xv fols 63–63v alone preserves two crucial passages towards the end of the letter, omitted from Vienna 808 and its abbreviated copy, Munich clm. 14743. Ep. no. 246 is found only here (it is one of the few omissions from

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     .  

The next scribe in S1, Sickel’s d, squeezes no fewer than six letters to Arn on to his first six-and-a-half folios, the blank space at the end of the quire (fols 131v–132v) being filled later with a letter to Macharius (Archbishop Richbod of Trier). One of the letters to Arn is a duplicate of one already copied in the first quire (ep. 165). Two others (epp. 194, 252, respectively of 800 and ?802) are found only here and in an abbreviated mid-ninth-century copy in clm. 14743; while a fourth is the recipient’s text of the earliest extant letter from Alcuin to Arn, sent from northern England in 790 and independently transmitted in English copies of the version ‘registered’ at the time of dispatch.123 Four scribes, rather then three as Sickel thought, transcribe letters to Arn, the majority of them preserved only here and (abbreviated) in clm. 14743, on to the fifth to the eighth quire; and again two letters to non-Salzburg recipients, of much earlier date, are added on originally blank leaves at the end of the first of these.124 Folios 163–234, quires nine to seventeen, may originally have constituted a separate book: the (limited) duplication in the two sections of the codex points in that direction, although there is no unequivocal codicological evidence.125 Folios 163–212v (except for part of

clm. 14743). Surprisingly, ep. no. 294 is the opening item (when the last two quires have been correctly re-arranged) of the small group of Alcuin’s letters, apparently copied from Vienna 808 quires 1–3, in Munich clm. 4650. 123 Ep. no. 10, a semi-diplomatic edition of the Cotton Vespasian A. xiv text also in Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/6 (pp. 29–30): the differences between the Salzburg and the English texts and some of their implications are considered below. Clm. 14743 was written in the time of Archbishop Liuphramn, and specifically 854–859 (Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 2, 160–1), by—probably—five scribes; fols 1v–156v are Alcuin’s (and one of the king’s) letters in Vienna cod. 808 adapted to formulary texts, with the heading Incipiunt quaedam epistolae de quorundam nobilium doctorum libris excerptae. It is of no interest for the establishment of the text of Alcuin’s letters, but it is of some interest as a guide to the epistolary forms and language in which a younger generation was to be instructed in mid-century: thus, in the present letter the original Dilecto patri Aquilae episcopo Albinus salutem is replaced by Dilecto in Christo patri humilis sanctç Dei ecclesiç filius salutem. 124 For the scribes see Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 2, 135. Ep. 158 with which ‘epsilon1’ begins his quire is the ‘missing’ letter from the penultimate quire of Vienna 795 (above); his fourth letter (ep. 239) is also exceptionally in the H collection. The letters added (by scribe ‘epsilon1’ or by ‘alpha’) are ep. no. 11 (much shortened and with the identifying names omitted) and ep. no. 34, a lengthy exhortation to a discipulus who is unnamed in all manuscript-versions. For the letters also in clm.13561, see below. 125 The duplicates of the Arn letters, epp. nos 156 and 167, and the adding on previously blank leaves in quires ii to v of epp. nos 13, 11, 34 and 294, which figure

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189v) are the work of a single scribe (y), whom Bischoff traced elsewhere only as a very modest contributor to the Salzburg ‘Abavus’ glossary manuscript later at Klosterneuburg,126 and who here copied no less than twenty-nine letters, twenty-seven from Alcuin and two from the king. The group is distinctive in several ways. With the exception of a letter to the Salzburg fratres and two letters to Arn, duplicating respectively the initial item in the codex and one in the second quire, all are addressed to non-Salzburg recipients; none is certainly of later date than (early) 797, and the majority belong to Alcuin’s pre-Tours years; with only two exceptions (one of them another of the letters also included in the first part of the manuscript, although perhaps as an added item), they are also to be found in one or more of the letter-collections originating elsewhere than at Salzburg or St.-Amand.127 Finally, what is demonstrably Alcuin’s original wording has, in a small number of the letters, been modified or edited to make them more intelligible and usable as didactic texts or letter-exemplars at Salzburg: in the one addressed to the monks of Wearmouth and Jarrow after the attack on Lindisfarne, for example, canonic(a)e (vel ) has twice been added before or after regularis; and references to living on the sea, from which the pagan attacks have come, are re-phrased so that the threat is one from enemies generally!128 Halfway through fol. 212v, however, scribe y hands over to also in scribe y’s quires ix to xv as integral elements, are a strong argument for believing that two distinct manuscripts were originally envisaged. The two letters of Charles’s are epp. nos 93, 92, also found together (but in the reverse order) in BAV, Reg. lat. 272. y’s penultimate letter is ep. no. 168, addressed fratribus Iuvavensis ecclesiae, which has six non-Salzburg witnesses. Note that of the duplicated letters epp. nos 13 and 34 are certainly ‘early’, i.e. not later than 795, and ep. no. 294 may be (despite Dümmler’s date ‘796–804’). 126 Klosterneuburg, Stiftsbibl. 848; Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 2, 135–6 (no. 106). The glossary is a copy of that in the originally St.-Amand book, Vienna Nat. bibl. cod. 89, fols 10–163v, idem, pp. 112–3 (no. 72), the opening folios of which mark the northern-European recovery of the late-fourth-century (Rufius) Festus’s Breviarium (ed. J.W. Eadie; London, 1967) independently of the early Spanish manuscript El Escorial Real Bibl. R.II.18 (CLA X 1631), which had no progeny. 127 To the fratres, ep. no. 168; to Arn, epp. nos 156, 167. Ep. no. 129, to the Kentings, must be of 797, ep. no. 36 (dated by Dümmler ‘c. 793–795’) could be later: see Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, ASE 22, 111 and n. 63. The duplicated letter occurring only in Salzburg and Salzburg-related collections is ep. no. 294 (above, p. 54 and n. 122). Ep. no. 267, which is only here and abbreviated in clm. 14743, is surely not to Arn but to an unidentifiable bishop probably in mission-territory: compare the allusion to Mt 9.35, the quotation of I Cor 9.16, and the condemning of auguries. 128 Ep. no. 19. Similarly, the changes to the text of ep. no. 17 (scribe y’s opening letter) include the substitution of huius provincie or illius provinciae nostrae for the original

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     .  

the scribe of the first quire (a): and he completes the letter-collection by transcribing another six addressed to Arn, all of them apparently of 802 or 803 and preserved only in this collection and its midninth-century abbreviated copy in clm. 14743.129 What, then, were the exemplars of the letter-texts not already in the St.-Amand manuscript(s) that were copied in the Salzburg scriptorium or school130 ca. 802–4 to make Vienna 808? For the letters addressed personally to Arn, or at least the overwhelming majority of them, the answer seems straightforward. They were the actual epistolae (letter-sheets) received from Alcuin and kept in the episcopal archive in no particular order, although there may have been some roughly chronological assemblages: this is suggested by the fact that each of the scribes (Bischoff ’s d, j and e) begins his quire with a letter datable to the last months of 799.131 These are ‘recipient’s texts’. The distinctive character that they may have in the manuscript tradition is well illustrated by the text of Alcuin’s first known letter to Arn (indeed, one of the earliest now extant to anyone), written from England in 790: the version in two later English manuscripts, derived from a common exemplar and archetype, has Saluta obsecro N. consocium et amicum meum, where the Salzburg text preserves the name Laedredum (the future bishop of Lyons); and it omits two sentences and the final greetings-clause at the end of the letter.132 Britanniae (MGH Epp. IV, pp. 45, 47); the address-clause of ep. no. 18 with its succession of English names (not repeated in the text) is not copied; the names of English Dei famulos are omitted from the text of ep. no. 37, so that at this point it reads simply Saluta amicos nostros; and so on. For ep. no. 20, see Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, p. 96 nn. 11 and 12, where it is noted that, conversely, the Salzburg scribe has preserved the correct Northumbrian orthography of the name Cuthbert. I refer henceforward to the ‘Salzburg text’, as distinct from the ‘Tours text’, of the letters in question. There is clearly no Salzburg ‘elimination’ or rejection of the Lindisfarne Saint. Only two decades later a copy—much the oldest extant—was made there of the Anonymous Life of the Saint (Munich clm. 15817 fols 100–119v), which, perhaps because it lacks I 1–2 and other chapters, has apparently escaped the attention of all modern editors and indexers: see D.A. Bullough, ‘A neglected early-ninth-century manuscript of the Lindisfarne Vita S. Cuthberti ’, ASE 27 (1998), 105–37. 129 Epp. nos 260, 264, 258, 265, 266 and 259. 130 At least two of the hands of Vienna 808 besides ‘theta’ are among the multiplicity of scribes responsible for the Abavus-glossary on poor-quality parchment in Klosterneuburg, Stiftsbibl., 848. 131 Epp. no. 185 on fol. 125, no. 186 on fol. 141 and no. 179+184 on fol. 149 (for this group of letters, see above). This may, of course, be pure coincidence: ‘epsilon1’’s first letter, ep. no. 158, which is both earlier and already in S, on fol. 133 breaks the sequence; and this scribe’s other letters are spread over a period of several years. 132 Ep. no. 10. For the English tradition, see below, pp. 442–445.

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     .  

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A very different explanation is obviously required, however, for the twenty-six letters to other recipients copied by y, several of which (as has already been noted) were also copied on to previous folios by other scribes. It will be forthcoming only after analysis of overlapping letter-collections in manuscripts which originated in scriptoria unconnected with Archbishop and Abbot Arn.

The ‘Basic Tours Collection’ of the Letters The importance of Troyes, BM 1165 pt. i (fols 1–86v), Dümmler’s T, as a source for Alcuin’s letters has been universally recognised since its (re)discovery in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The light it can throw on the process of compilation and early circulation of the letter-collections has, however, been obscured by an erroneous dating and localisation which began with Sickel. This part of the Troyes codex is in fact the work of at least five Tours St. Martin’s scribes writing for the most part what Rand called ‘embellished cursive’, with occasional Tironian notes (at ends of sentences) and minimal punctuation, probably in the earlier years of the abbacy of Alcuin’s pupil and successor Fridugis. Part ii (fols 87–210v, following an inserted bifolium numbered 86bis, 86ter), in which a dogmatic trilogy of Alcuin’s is combined with short exegetic and other texts, was written at Lyons in the second quarter of the ninth century; but since the sixteenth century Pierre Pithou’s signature appears on fol. 86v (i.e. at the end of part i), it is unlikely that this later section can throw any light on the ninth-century home of the letter portion.133 In its present mutilated form—it has lost a quire after fol. 78v and either two or three quires at the end—the Tours-origin Troyes 1165 pt. i has texts of seventy letters from Alcuin, plus one letter from the king; additionally, there are two computistic items on fols 44v–46, which may be Alcuin’s own compositions, not (like others

133

Sickel, ‘Alcuinstudien’, pp. 499–501, 509–17; MGH Epp. IV, pp. 6–7. Compare Rand, Manuscripts of Tours, 1, 40–1, 45–50, 102–114, with Koehler in Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen, 193 (1931), 324–6, 328–31, and Rand in Manuscripts, pp. 340–2, 344–5: Troyes 1165 does not figure in their lists. I am grateful to the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (Paris and Orléans) for providing me with a complete microfilm print-out of this manuscript. The dating and localisation of the second part are due to the late Professor Bischoff (pers. comm., Nov. 1979); there is unfortunately no note on this manuscript in his Handschriftenarchiv (MGH Hilfsmittel XVI; Munich, 1997).

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     .  

associated with them in later assemblages or editions) older texts annexed by him or his circle as part of their teaching material. It would originally have contained at least ninety-four letters, two of the now-missing ones being in the king’s name, as we learn from a seemingly complete copy of the collection in a very handsome midninth-century (Hincmar period) Rheims book, now BAV Reg. lat. 272 (siglum T *), of which Dom Wilmart provided a characteristically precise codicological description.134 Dümmler supposed that this part of T * (the manuscript used by Duchesne for his 1617 edition) was a direct copy of T while it was still complete, and accordingly only occasionally reported the results of a ‘third-party’ collation of the former where T is available as a witness. In this he was almost certainly mistaken: T * must be regarded either as an independent copy of the exemplar of the Troyes manuscript or, which seems more likely, as a copy of a collateral (‘twin’) of the latter. Wilmart’s description does not adequately record the book’s meticulous punctuation, in which (e.g.) almost all of Alcuin’s innumerable rhetorical and other questions are concluded with a typical Rheims mark of interrogation, and for which there is no trace of ‘copyist’s marks’ in T. The implication that T * may have been intended for public reading is strengthened by added marginalia (not by the text-scribe but evidently near-contemporary) such as admonitio utilis (fol. 35) to Dümmler’s ep. no. 197, on the death of Liutgarda, and optima admonitio (fol. 119v) to the letter on confession to the congregation of St. Martin’s (ep. no. 131), copied from a different collection. The textual affinity of the two manuscripts is certainly very close. There are nonetheless significant differences between them: firstly, in the letters’ head-notes (Dümmler’s lemmata) in the two manuscripts, not all of them easily accounted for as mis-copying or ‘correction’ of his supposed exemplar by the Rheims copyist; secondly, and probably more telling, instances where readings in T * not reported by Dümmler differ from and are often superior to those in 134 A. Wilmart, Codices Reginenses Latini, 251–500 (Vatican City, 1945), pp. 66–8; the origin and dating were confirmed by Prof. Bischoff (pers. comm., 1979). Dümmler’s tabulation (MGH Epp. IV, p. 7) of the letters in T and in T * is, as he subsequently acknowledged (MGH Epp. V, p. 643), unfortunately ex parte turbatus: ep. no. 137 is the table’s ‘69+70’; the manuscript T re-starts with ep. no. 138 (defective at the beginning) and continues to ep. no. 139 (defective at the end), which is properly the table’s ‘81’ (not ‘80’). The two computistic items were first published by Duchesne from the future Troyes 1165 and re-published by Frobenius Forster, re-printed in PL 101, cols 981–4; see further below, Pt. II ch. 3.

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T, and again are not simply to be regarded as ‘editorial improvement’ in the Rheims scriptorium.135 The first three folios of the Tours-Troyes manuscript have lost approximately one third of each leaf, but neither of the letters affected is unique to it. The collection begins with the words, in uncial: Ad domnum Car[olum regem] de remittendis aliq[uibus disci]pulos <sic> [?in patriam], i.e. the head-note for a letter to the king written a few months after Alcuin had moved to Tours (no. 121 in Dümmler’s edition); and this is followed by twenty-three other letters to Charles, nineteen or twenty of them as King, the remainder as Emperor, but none of them later than (autumn) 801.136 After the two computistic texts and a letter to Angilbert, found only here, come twenty-seven letters predominantly to recipients in England, including about half of all the surviving letters to Mercian addressees and concluding with one to a clerical courtier of Offa’s: none of these are certainly later than the early months of 796, although that to the king’s daughter Eugenia-Æthelburg could be.137 The remaining forty letters in the 135 Up to and including the collection’s forty-ninth item (= ep. no. 19), letters in both manuscripts have head-notes that are usually identical. When, however, they differ it is not obvious that T *’s version is a simple departure (unintentional or deliberate) from T ’s: thus, to ep. no. 33 T, fol. 59, has ad Magenharium comitem Sensoniae[sic] civitate, T *, fol. 55, ad Magenhardium comitem Senonicae civitatis, the recipient’s place of office being named neither in the address nor in letter-context; to ep. no. 162, T, fol. 26, T *, fol. 42, the latter has the head-note Epistola Albini ad Homerum and the address-clause Flaccus Albinus Flavi Homeri obtat salutem, while the former has the words Flaccus Albinus Flavi Homeri obtat as a lemma and no separate address-clause. After ep. no. 19, most of the letters in T lack a heading, T * continuing to provide them, although they could be ‘inventions’ of its scribe, based for the most part on the address clause. Among the variant readings, the more significant are: in ep. no. 44 to Eanbald I of York, against sum optimum and in te et elimosinarum in T, T * has summi optimum (sicut optimum in K manuscripts [below]) and integritate et elimosinarum; the address-clause of no. 82 to the Mercian Beornuuin has Alchuinus diaconus in T * against T ’s Achuini (sic) diaconus (in K, Alcuinus), the text delibutas and falsiloquae aliorum narrationi in T * against delibutos and falsiloqua aliorum narratione; and the non-standard quotation of Mt 25.40 in ep. no. 74 is without the final mihi fecistis in T (but present in T *), where also the reading verbis iudicundus (verbis iocundus in T * ). 136 The words in patriam complete the head-note in T *, where also Karolum and the corrected discipulos. The other letters are listed by Dümmler, MGH Epp. IV, p. 7 nos 2–24 (epp. nos 143 etc.), the latest being no. 23 = ep. no. 229, which could be of October 801, and the latest in the entire collection. Ep. no. 231, on T fols 36v–37, is probably to be dated slightly earlier that same year. I regard ib. nos 238, 240 as pre-801. 137 I.e., nos 28–54 in Dümmler’s list, MGH Epp. IV, p. 7; letters to non-English recipients are nos 31, 34, 35, 42, 43, 51 (epp. nos 51, 13, 33, 11, 12, 71). For Alcuin’s Mercian correspondents, cf. Bullough in ASE 22, esp. 115–20, and below, Pt. II ch. 4.

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     .  

unmutilated collection, beginning with one to Alcuin’s pupil Hrabanus Maurus and ending with one to Paulinus of Aquileia, none of them datable later than 799, show no such obvious coherence.138 It is nonetheless possible to recognise certain sub-groups, such as the three of which the king is the named ‘author’, but also, it seems, letters linked by being written and dispatched at roughly the same time.139 It is very striking that of the more than thirty letters addressed to Arn only one, together with the unique extant letter to the Salzburg ‘brethren’, finds a place in this third section of the Tours-Rheims collection. Both, moreover, figure in scribe ‘theta’s’ quires in Vienna 808, although the ‘recipient’s version’ of the Arn letter had also been copied into an earlier quire of that manuscript.140 That same Salzburg scribe had made copies of eighteen (out of twenty-seven) of the letters in the ‘English addressees’ section of the Tours book, and often in the same or similar sequences, as well as copies of two of the letters from the king in the final section—but none of those to Charles!141 On both chronological and textual grounds, the book now at Troyes cannot have been the exemplar of this section of the Salzburg book, written in 802–3. Equally clearly, that exemplar was strikingly similar to but not identical with the corresponding sections of the letter-collection completed in or shortly after the autumn of 801, and copied at Tours, for an unknown recipient, not long after Alcuin’s death.142 Can their common source be more clearly defined? and does this enable us to reconstruct the transition from copies of indi138 T fols 72v (cf. Dümmler) –86v and subsequent missing folios (containing the end of ep. no. 139 and fourteen other letters, beginning with ep. no. 60 and concluding with ep. no. 96); T * fols 67–95v. For ?799 as the date of the letter to Hrabanus (ep. no. 142: which does not, despite Dümmler, address him as magister) see Freise in Kottje-Zimmermann, Hrabanus Maurus, p. 60. 139 Epp. nos 92, 93, 87, the latter—to Offa and probably but not certainly earlier than the other two—transmitted only by T (on the folios now missing) and T *. Letters linked by date include (I believe) the last four, viz. epp. nos 97, 25, 98, 96 (Dümmler’s date for the second of these is certainly erroneous; see below, Pt. II ch. 4). Compare Sickel’s previously-quoted view (above, n. 139) of the form of the Tours ‘register’. 140 Epp. nos 167 and 168, respectively of Apr./May in. and ?March 799. For the copies of no. 167 in Vienna 808, see above, pp. 54, 55 with n. 127. 141 Epp. nos 12, 17–19, 30, 31, 36–9, 43, 61 to English recipients, nos 11, 13, 33, ?34, 35, 49 to non-English ones; the letters from the Frankish king are epp. nos 92, 93. 142 In fact, seventeen of the eighteen letters listed in the preceding note (the exception is no. 30, to the Northumbrian King Æthelred) are also included in the earlier and shorter collection represented by the K manuscripts (below). ‘Theta’ also copied one of the very few letters in K not also included in T, namely ep. no. 99, on his concluding folios 210v–212v; as well as one further letter to an English addressee preserved otherwise only in the ‘recipient’s version’ (ep. no. 20) and, on

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     .  

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vidual letters, retained (it may be presumed) at Tours from 796, whether in draft or engrossed version and ‘filed’ at least in part according to recipients, into an edited assemblage of recent correspondence in the familiar codex form—what I will call henceforth the ‘basic Tours collection’? As Sickel discerned a century-and-a-quarter ago, although he failed to develop his arguments fully and their significance seems to have escaped Dümmler,143 crucial evidence comes from a different but substantially overlapping collection of sixty-five letters from Alcuin, into which a single letter from Charles as Emperor (an. 811) has been inserted. Here, more than one-quarter of the letters are in demonstrably incomplete text-versions—as the ‘first’ copyist, at least once, remarked—and in one branch of the tradition one of those is split into two.144 This shorter collection, too, is transmitted complete in two ninth-century codices widely separated in date and place of writing. The earlier (St. Gallen, Stiftsbibl., cod. 271: Dümmler’s K2) was written at St. Gallen in the 820s, about the time when the community entered into a confraternity with Tours and its Abbot Fridugis. It is an undistinguished small-format book (presumably one of the two Libelluli epistolarum Albini entered in the main St. Gallen library catalogue)145 written by undistinguished scribes, apparently working

successive folios before the royal letters, two Alcuin letters, epp. nos 129, 295, not in T or K, but in a different Tours-connected collection. But the royal letters are otherwise only in T; the order in which the Alcuin letters are copied is much closer to that in T; and S1 and T often share significant readings against K, although by no means consistently. 143 Sickel, ‘Alcuinstudien’, pp. 501–6. 144 Dierum hic multum dimisimus is in the text of ep. no. 149 in all three K manuscripts (below; K1 om. hic), immediately before a substantial omission extending from ep. no. 4, p. 223 line 12 to 224 line 26. Confirmation (if indeed confirmation is needed) that the omissions were a feature of the archetype is shown by the existence of an isolated copy of ep. no. 65 in the composite manuscript BAV, Reg. lat. 598, fol. 25v (this part W. Germany, s. ix2/4: Bischoff, pers. comm.), with the heading EP AL. AD QUENDAM inc. Karissimo (all manuscripts, despite Dümmler) and similarly ending with the words hodie vadis in incendio; the text has readings that are a mixture of K1’s and K2’s. The abbreviated letter made into two in K1 and K‘3’ is no. 137; the entirely characteristic omission of the entire section on baptism has helped to mislead Keefe about the letter’s original form (above, p. 47 and n. 106). 145 Bibliothekskataloge, 1, ed. Lehmann, p. 80. The account of the ninth-century St. Gallen catalogues in R. McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 182–5, is seriously muddled, and almost all the references to Lehmann’s edition and to Grimalt’s (private) library are erroneous; only one of the several copies of parts of the standard Vulgate Old Testament (which included books later treated as Apocrypha) was ad scolam (ed. Lehmann, p. 72) and Paralippomenon is Chronicles, not Kings; and so on.

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     .  

in a hurry. The letter-collection fills the entire volume, except for the last four pages which have the text of three Roman inscriptions; titles or head-notes (Dümmler’s lemmata) are very much the exception; the penultimate letter is a duplicate text of one copied earlier in the book, the address-clause of which has been reduced to formulary language (Dilecto amico illi ).146 The other ninth-century copy (BL Royal 8.E. xv: siglum K1) was written in north-east France, almost certainly at St.-Vaast (Arras), probably in the third quarter of the century. Although it contains the same letters as the St. Gallen book in an identical sequence, it is not derived from it. It has a prefatory index numbered ‘i’ to ‘lxvi’ on folios 1v–2v and many more ‘titles’ or rubrics, sometimes indicating a letter’s main theme; it omits St. Gallen’s penultimate (duplicate) letter-text; and while the address clause of ep. no. 74 in the St. Gallen text is the shortened formulary version Dulcissimo dileccionis filio ill. ill sal, the Royal manuscript text (fol. 51v) has retained the names of both Alcuin and Rado (abbot of St-Vaast in the 790s) in its shortened version, Dulcissimo dilectionis filio Radoni Albinus salutem, and similarly in the index.147 A third copy now lost, which it will be convenient to call K‘3’, was the ancestor through at least one intermediary of a later copy of the same collection, with some deliberate omissions, in an eleventh-

146 The fullest but unfortunately far-from-accurate codicological description is A. Bruckner, Scriptoria Medii Aevi Helvetica 2: Schreibschulen der Diözese Konstanz, St. Gallen I (Geneva, 1976), p. 77 (wrongly specifying ‘one hand’). Changes of hand do not normally coincide with the ends of quires: on p. 81, which is the beginning of a quire, there is more than one change of hand and similarly on p. 83. The duplicated letter on pp. 229–30 is ep. no. 53, addressed to an Aeda al. Eada presbiter. This manuscript is the source of Canisius’s editio princeps of Alcuin’s letters (1601). For the association with Tours, see St. Gallen Confraternity Book (Stiftsarchiv, C3 B55) pp. 4–5, ed. Piper, p. 13; J. Autenrieth in FmSt 9 (1975), 221–2, with an illustration of p. 5 at pl. XXXIV; O.G. Oexle, Forschungen zu monastischen und geistlichen Gemeinschaften im westfränkischen Reich, Münster Mittelalterliche Studien 31 (Munich, 1978), p. 35. 147 Warner and Gilson, Catalogue 1, 256 is a sound, although over-concise, description. The late Prof. Bischoff ’s view of the book’s origin (indicated to me verbally in 1988, after we had independently re-examined St. Gallen cod. 271) was that it is ‘certainly north-east French, perhaps Arras St-Vaast, because of the Lorsch-type hand on fols 3v ff.’ (Warner and Gilson, 4, pl. 60a—part of fol. 45v—is a different hand.) But he was unaware of, and I had temporarily forgotten (!) the retention of Rado’s name in the address-clause, for the ‘full’ version of which see the manuscripts T and T *). Note that in K1’s index the abbreviated ep. no. 137 is both ‘viii’ and ‘ix’, the Emperor Charles’s letter is ‘x’, ‘lxv’ is Epis[tola] ad Paulinum (i.e. ep. no. 60) and ‘lxvi’ is Litterae commendaticiae (ep. no. 12). Examples of lemmata enunciating themes are (fol. 63; ep. no. 63) Alcuinus exortatoriam [sic] ad abbatem, (fol. 78; ep. no. 65) Albinus de lapsu cuiusdam.

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     .  

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century English book (London, BL Cotton Tiberius A. xv): sharing with K1 the prefatory index, the distinctive (shorter) address-clause of ep. no. 74 and innumerable ‘proper’ readings, it is tempting to regard it as a direct descendant of the St.-Vaast book; but the occurrence of apparent K2 readings in a number of letters suggests at the very least contamination of the tradition.148 What was evidently another (lost) copy of the same collection, and may indeed have been the exemplar—less probably a twin—of the St.-Vaast book, figures among the early additions to the first Lorsch Abbey catalogue in the ‘made-up’ manuscript Vatican Palatinus lat. 1877: Epistulç eiusdem [sc. Albini magistri ] ad diversos numero. lxiiii in uno volumine.149 The interruption of the sequence of Alcuin letters by one from the Emperor Charles to the Greek Emperor Nicephorus, written in the early part of 811 and included in both copies of the index,150 provides a terminus post quem for the archetype of the group although not necessarily for the date of the first copying of the Alcuin letters (which could be earlier, if the Imperial letter had been added on previously blank pages). The index may have been in the archetype or it may have been a feature of one ninth-century branch of the tradition only: in either case it is an unusual and relatively early example of 148

See Index of Manuscripts Cited, s.v. London, BL, Cotton Tiberius A. xv. Fol. 77 col. 2: a slightly later addition by a hand different from the main one, and therefore of ca. 840. The sequence and datings of the catalogues in Pal. lat. 1877 (and of a fourth in Pal. lat. 57), the contents of which are chaotically conflated in G. Becker, Catalogi Bibliothecarum Antiqui (Bonn, 1885) no. 37 (pp. 82–119), were magisterially established by Bischoff, Lorsch2, pp. 18–26; for the creation of palaeographical and library links between Lorsch and St.-Vaast by Adalung (ob. 837) as abbot simultaneously of the two houses, see id., pp. 40–4, 62. For R. McKitterick’s substantial misrepresentation of the make-up and character of Pal. lat. 1877 (and particularly of the presence in it of a Fulda catalogue also) and of their supposed implications, frequently reiterated since 1989, see my comments in ‘Alcuin’s Cultural Influence’, in: Alcuin of York, ed. Houwen and MacDonald (Groningen, 1998), p. 5 n. 12. 150 MGH Epp. IV, pp. 546–8 (no. 32), where Dümmler’s account of the manuscript sources should be corrected to read ‘London BL Roy. 8. E xv fols 22–23v (K1); St. Gallen 271 p. 63 (K2); Londin. bib. Brit. Cott. Tib. A. xv (A1) fols 81v–82v; etc.’ The two index entries corresponding to the letter head-notes, Epistola Karoli imperatoris ad imperatorem Constantinopolis (a noteworthy ‘style’ which does not figure in the letter itself: cf. P. Classen, Karl der Grosse, das Papsttum und Byzanz. Die Begründung des karolingischen Kaisertums, rev. ed. by H. Fuhrmann and C. Märtl (Sigmaringen, 1985), p. 93) are K1 fol. 1v and A1 fol. 67. The preservation only here of the first known letter from a Western to an Eastern Emperor is typical of the transmission of epistolae Karoli (with which compare the inclusion of another letter of two years later in the H collection: see below). Was the intermediary in this case Fridugis? see Pt. II ch. 1. 149

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     .  

a growing concern for textual ordinatio and accessibility.151 Whereas the letters in the T collections include some of the year 801 but, unlike the Salzburg book, nothing after that year, none of those in manuscripts of the K family is of later date than end-August 799.152 All but four of the Alcuin letters in K are also in T, and the omissions form a distinct group or groups.153 Within both collections some identical or similar groupings are recognisable: e.g., epp. nos 44 (one of K ’s shortened texts), 40, 82—all probably to English recipients— followed immediately in K (although only with the intermission of other letters before 74 and after 83 in T ) by epp. nos 74, 83, 167; or the ten letters to the king in K (epp. nos 3–7, 10–14) which correspond to the opening letter in T and three sub-groups in the next fifteen slightly re-arranged and five letters omitted. The head-notes, however, are often quite different, those in K (2 and ‘3’) tending to be much more summary. From a few of the letters in T which are also in the smaller K collection, the latter has eliminated the names of the addressees and, in three instances, names in the body of the letter—but ‘outlandish’, predominantly English, names—replacing them by a formulary version with ill. or illos. The variousness of the subjects treated and of their putative addressees is the one apparent link between the letters so treated. It is, however, probable that none

151 M.B. Parkes, ‘The influence of the concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the development of the book’, Medieval Learning and Literature. Essays presented to R.W. Hunt, ed. J.J.G. Alexander & M.T. Gibson (Oxford, 1976), pp. 115–41; M.A. Rouse & R.H. Rouse, ‘Statim Invenire: Schools, preachers and new attitudes to the page’, [1982], Authentic Witnesses (Notre Dame, Ind., 1991), pp. 191–219. 152 I.e. ep. no. 178. For the late letters in the Salzburg collection, see above, p. 52 and n. 120. The greatest number of letters datable to 801 (twenty or twentyone) is, however, in the very different collection H. 153 Epp. nos 99, 28, 65, 73. They are all from very near the end of the K collection, being its sixtieth and sixty-second to sixty-fourth items, and are followed there only by the anomalous ep. no. 60 and the Litterae commendaticiae, ep. no. 12 (so K1 and K‘3’ ), with a duplicate of ep. no. 53 interposed between them in K2. The first two belong to a group of six letters to Paulinus of Aquileia of which T has the other four, not as a group; and ep. no. 28 is—exceptionally—also in the early section of the English collection A1, although in an often divergent text-form (for a possible explanation, see below). The third letter (no. 65) is much abbreviated and effectively a ‘formulary’ text. The fourth in the group (ep. no. 73) has the address-clause reduced to the formulaic Dilecto amico salutem, only the text in A1 preserving the name of the original addressee, Dagulf. While almost all the letters in K (and in T ) are to be dated after Alcuin’s return to Francia in 793, ep. no. 73 evidently belongs to his period of residence in England 790–93; and the letter to Paulinus was probably written either then or even before 790.

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     .  

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was written after the last months of 796 or early months of 797; and one or more of the letters not in T but similarly treated in K may be among the earliest included in that collection.154 The letters in this particular category seem to reflect an attempt, not long after Alcuin’s arrival at St. Martin’s, to create a ‘formula letter book’, perhaps intended for his pupils rather than for himself and reflecting his own earlier experiences in the York community.155 The collection (K ) of which it subsequently became an integral part is, by contrast, the first Tours attempt at a more comprehensive, but still selective, collection of Alcuin’s recent correspondence. Surprisingly, perhaps, the compilation of this collection was not followed by the destruction or dispersion of the ‘original’ letter texts, whether in libelli (as some of the groupings suggest) or on individual sheets, although St.-Amand seems to have been the recipient of the ‘originals’ of three letters to Northumbrian addressees not included in K (or T ), and others may have been sent elsewhere.156 For, when a year or two later the more extensive collection represented by the T manuscripts was assembled, letters incompletely copied in the earlier collection were transcribed in full and details characteristic of the ‘originals’ were preserved. A particularly good example is its text of a letter of ?794 to Eanbald I of York, of which we also have a complete copy (plausibly the ‘recipient’s version’) in a later English manuscript, but which in K breaks off two-thirds of the way through.157 In both ‘Tours collections’ the address-clause’s Salutem is written in 154 Ill. etc. for the names of addressees, epp. nos 31, 38, 73, 74 (K2 text only), 82, 97 (part only); for names in the texts, epp. nos 12, 37, 117. All these letters are in T (or T *); three (nos 12, 37, 38) are also in S1 and D, with names replaced by ill. or—no. 37 text-names, no. 38 address—simply omitted. It is necessary to say ‘probably not later than 796/7’ because I. Deug-Su has argued that Alcuin’s Vita S. Vedasti, of which ep. no. 74 is the letter-preface, was written ‘near to ca. 800’: Opera Agiografica, pp. 79–80. I think he is wrong, the presence of the preface here (the only one that figures in any of the Tours letter-collections) being one but not the only reason; but since there is nothing in the Vita to show conclusively that it was not written in, say, 798 rather than late 796, the note of caution is necessary. For ep. no. 73, a ‘formulary style’ letter in K and not in T, see above, n. 153. 155 St. Martin’s already had a documentary (notarial) formula-book, the Formulae Turonicae (ed. Zeumer, MGH Formulae, pp. 133–59), assembled in the mid-eighth century but transmitted in manuscripts of the early ninth century and later, with varying additamenta; for Warsaw, Bibl. Univ. 1 (still frequently cited under its old signature ‘480’), see Mordek, BCRFM, pp. 898–903. For York letter-writing, see below, Pt. II ch. 1. 156 Epp. nos 116, 105, 114. 157 Ep. no. 44, which in K ends at the words perpetui pro nobis.

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     .  

Tironian notes; and the same T scribe also used notes for the concluding words of the preceding ep. no. 71 (in Christo), and of ep. no. 74 (carissimi ) several folios later.158

Omissions from the ‘Basic Tours Collection’ Although seemingly comprehensive in scope, the ‘basic Tours collection’ in both its expanded (T ) and its shorter (K ) form has some very conspicuous omissions. As already noted, it includes almost nothing of Alcuin’s correspondence with Arn, which is preserved overwhelmingly in collections assembled by or on behalf of the latter. It is difficult to regard this as accidental, whether or not the Tours compilers were already aware in 798/9 that a collection was planned at St.-Amand or Salzburg. Among individual letters, the two Tours collections lack the littera (al. epistola) commendaticia carried by messengers to Rome (ep. no. 140) which was none the less so widely disseminated,159 but surely because it belonged to the category of ‘business letters’. More strikingly, both versions of the ‘Tours collection’ omit the familiar and much-quoted ‘letter on the confession of sins, to the young of St. Martin’s’, which Dümmler dated ‘796–798’ and has been generally and uncritically followed. The address-clause alone shows that Alcuin was not addressing a community of which he was abbot; and a careful reading of the text leaves little doubt that the filii and discipuli who are being advised at length are not his, but those of the monastery’s sancti patres in whose care they are.160 The omission is explained by the letter’s having been written before Alcuin became abbot of St. Martin’s, either in 793/5 or (as I incline to think) in 158

Ep. no. 74 is the letter to Rado of St.-Vaast. Additional Note III (below). 160 Ep. no. 131. The incompatibility of the letter-text with the 796–798 dating was noted a century ago by W. Pückert, Aniane und Gellone. Diplomatisch-kritische Untersuchungen zur Gesch. der Reformen des Benediktinerordens im 9. u. 10. Jh. (Leipzig, 1899), p. 252 n. 11. M.S. Driscoll’s recent Alcuin et la Pénitence à l’Époque Carolingienne (Liturgie-wissenschaftliche Quellen und Forschungen 81, Münster in Westf., 1999) accepts Dümmler’s dating without discussion and provides on pp. 181–96 (and also in Traditio 53 (1998), 37–61), what are purportedly a re-examination of the letter’s manuscript tradition and a new edition; like the rest of the larger work (below, Pt. II, ch. 3, n. 80), these are completely without scholarly value, typified by the listing of ten manuscripts (out of nineteen or twenty), more than half of them misdated and an Eporediensis, i.e. at Ivrea, identified as from York! 159

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     .  

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789, and was not therefore ‘registered’, although he carefully retained a complete text: for when, early in the next century, he was asked to compose a letter ‘on confession and penitence’ for the young men of the Salzburg community, he simply copied his earlier one; and shortly afterwards he included it in a devotional Manualis libellus sent to Archbishop Arn, which was in its turn widely copied. At an early date, moreover, it was added to another and textually independent collection of Alcuin’s correspondence that was to be copied more than once at Hilduin’s St.-Denis and subsequently excerpted at Hincmar’s Rheims, with the letter to St. Martin’s as the final item.161 Most conspicuous of all, yet largely ignored in previous discussions of Alcuin’s correspendence and career, is the omission of much of the documentation of his engagement with the Adoptionists. His letter on the subject to Abbot Beatus of Liébana is among the isolated survivals in a later manuscript, presumably ultimately from the recipient’s copy. The probably slightly earlier letter to Felix of Urgel was preserved uniquely by Arn’s St.-Amand, not even being copied at Salzburg.162 Others are included in a substantial anti-Adoptionist dossier which has an independent transmission history. Its most complete copy, and for several texts (three Alcuin letters among them) the earliest, is a major part of a Trinitarian compendium from Archbishop Hincmar’s ?later years at Rheims (now Rheims, Bibl. municipale, 385: fols 61–160); an earlier and in some respects better witness to the dossier’s first part, in which the letters and libelli produced for or sent from the Council of Frankfurt in 794 are included, is one of Bishop Baturich of Regensburg’s books (Munich, clm. 14468), precisely dated to 821. It has been suggested, not unreasonably, that the dossier was compiled at the Court while Adoptionism was still a live issue and subsequently disseminated from there: the arguments are certainly not conclusive, and the existence of a compilation at Tours which was kept distinct from the main epistolary collections may be a sufficient explanation.163

161

The letters to Arno are epp. nos 258, 259 (both only in S1 and in the abbreviated clm. 14743); for the copy or copies sent to Salzburg, see below, Pt. II, ch. 3, p. 387. The letter-collection copied at St.-Denis and excerpted at Rheims is discussed below. 162 Beatus: above, p. 36 n. 79. Felix: ep. no. 23; above, p. 49 and n. 110. 163 Note that there is no overlap with the contents of the manuscripts Paris BNF, lat. 2386 and 2848, p. 44 and n. 100). Rheims 385: H. Loriquet, Catalogue général des Départements, t. xxxviii (Paris, 1904), 505–8; Heil, Alkuinstudien, 1, 49–51; Bullough,

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     .   Manuscripts of the T Collection in England

At least once during the ninth century, and perhaps more often, an unidentifiable scholar or teacher extracted a number of thematicallyrelated Alcuin letters from one of the primary collections and made them the basis of a handbook. The only one to survive apparently complete is a distinctive astronomical-computistic compilation, the unique copy of which is part of a miscellaneous manuscript of s. x/ xi, possibly from northern or eastern France. The six letter-texts— but not the texts De saltu lunae and De bissexto that follow—are demonstrably taken from a manuscript of the ‘expanded Tours collection’ (T manuscripts) and can throw no light on the origins of this and other letter-collections. The handbook’s concluding item, however, on the years Ab origine mundi, has an annus praesens of 824: if this is a reliable or even approximate guide to its date of compilation, it provides some additional evidence for the circulation of the primary collections and for Alcuin’s reputation at that time.164 By contrast, a modest-sized collection of the letters and two fragmentary leaves, both of English origin and of tenth-century date, do unexpectedly throw new light on the early form as well as on the dissemination of the T collection. The interest and potential importance of the one-time Bury book, London Lambeth 218 pt. iii (fols 131–208), were sensed by Sickel, but he felt that he had insufficient information for a proper judgement; and the additional details ‘Alcuin. Evidence of the manuscripts’, p. 11. Clm. 14468 (whose fols 30v–88 correspond with Rheims 385 fols 61–95): Bischoff, Südosdeutsche Schreibschulen, 1, 200; Mordek, BCRFM, pp. 335–9; also Bullough, cit. Most but not all of the second part is included also in two lower-Loire region manuscripts, Paris BNF lat. 5577 and Vatican BAV, Reg. lat. 69 (twins? or one a copy of the other?), the latter well described by Wilmart in Codices Reginenses, 1 (Vatican City, 1937), 152–5, the former analysed in part by J.-P. Bouhot, ‘Un florilège sur le symbolisme du baptême de la seconde moitié du viiie siècle’, Recherches Augustiniennes 18 (1983), 151–82, here 157–9; but for corrections and amplification see Mordek, BCRFM, pp. 557–9, 805–7 and Bullough, ‘Reminiscence and Reality’, pp. 176–7. S. ix or ix/x has been the generally accepted dating of both manuscripts; but in the 1980s Bernhard Bischoff was persuaded by Jean Vezin that BNF 5577 belongs with an ‘archaizing’ lateeleventh century manuscript-group from scriptoria at Angers or in the lower Loire region; and Reg. 69 seems to have a similar origin, although probably earlier in that century. For the dossier’s supposed dissemination from the Court, see Heil, Alkuinstudien I, p. 50 n. 307a. 164 Vatican City, BAV, Reg. lat. 226 fols 1–33v, with texts of epp. nos 148, 155, 126, 170, 145 (shortened text) and 143 on fols 1–17v.

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     .  

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supplied to Dümmler were not always accurate. The text script is English ‘square minuscule’ of a distinctive kind, almost certainly from a southern or eastern-English centre: Prof. David Ganz has suggested that palaeographically it ‘show(s) an attempt to assimilate the script of a Carolingian exemplar’ and, with the support of art-historians, favours a date close to 900. Conspicuous, indeed unique, among extant letter-manuscripts (and highly unusual in its period) are its lavishly-decorated opening lines, written in display-capitals, which hint at some wealthy patron, lay or clerical. The quire-signatures show that it was defective from an early date. In its present form it contains the complete or partial texts of twenty letters and the addressclause (only) of a twenty-first. The first letter, ep. no. 155, lacks its first half, beginning in mid-sentence at cursus redigere; the eighteenth letter, ep. no. 198, has lost nearly two-thirds of its text, breaking off at the bottom of fol. 200v (which is the end of the penultimate quire) at the words sciamus caros nostros. The sequence is precisely that of the fifth to the twenty-second letters in Troyes 1165 and in its midninth-century Rheims counterpart: the last six, moreover, are part of a distinctive group of letters written in 800/1 which are found only in this manuscript family.165 The two mutilated leaves identified a few years ago in the Newberry Library, Chicago (where they are catalogued as ‘Fragment 15’) are also written in a ‘square minuscule’ with occasional Caroline elements, of smaller module than the Lambeth book and with at least one unusual abbreviation-form that seems to be of Welsh origin. They contain respectively (A) part of the middle third of ep. no. 149, and (B) parts of the last sentences (as printed) of ep. no. 155 and of the beginning of ep. no. 136: that is to say, the fourth, fifth and sixth letters in the T collection, although with the total loss (up to now) of five to seven leaves. The K collection—all three copies—includes 165 Sickel, ‘Alcuinstudien I’, pp. 511–12; MGH Epp. IV, (Introd.) p. 8. M.R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in Lambeth Palace Library (London, 1930), pp. 350–2, is a full description of the manuscript, correctly reporting the wrong ordering of fols 131–133. For its palaeography and date, see D. Ganz, ‘An AngloSaxon fragment of Alcuin’s letters in the Newberry Library, Chicago’, ASE 22 (1993), 167–77, at 170–1, 177. David Dumville at one time favoured a post-950 date but seems latterly to have abandoned this for a pre-945 one (private correspondence in Febr./Mar. 1988); and the incidental reference in English Caroline Script and Monastic History: Studies in Benedictinism, A.D. 950–1030 (Woodbridge, 1993), p. 78 n. 360).

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     .  

epp. nos 149 and 136 on successive folios, but omits the second half of the latter’s opening sentence, from illius sedula to dilatare dignetur; and ep. no. 155 is only found in the T manuscripts and in the astronomical-computistic collection previously referred to, which has taken its text from a T-class manuscript. Even in its very fragmentary condition, it is apparent that N(ewberry)’s text of ep. no. 136 is markedly close to that of L(ambeth); palaeographically it would appear to be later, although still within the first half of the tenth century. N could, therefore, have been a copy of L before it lost its opening leaves. But the fact that its script seems to have been influenced independently by that of its putative exemplar makes it more likely that the two manuscripts were copied, in different centres and some decades apart, from the same imported Carolingian-period book.166 That the latter was neither directly nor indirectly a descendant of the Tours or the Rheims book is, however, demonstrated by the presence in L’s text of ep. no. 145, and nowhere else, of the absolutely crucial sentences in which Alcuin explains that he has sent to the king for comment a copy of his latest critique of the Adoptionists ‘still in unbound folia’;167 and this independence is confirmed by the presence of the address clauses (David regi ) of epp. nos 170 and 174 only in L and by other, smaller but still significant, differences in the texts of other letters. It follows that even after the compilation of the second, expanded, ‘basic Tours collection’ from copies of Alcuin’s letters still retained at St. Martin’s, the texts of some of them were, for whatever reason, still subject to ‘editorial’ changes. Moreover, if it is accepted that the Rheims manuscript is descended from a collateral and not a copy of the Tours-Troyes book, the omission of the passage about the anti-Adoptionist treatise from both establishes it as a feature of their archetype, which was necessarily written at latest within a year or two of Alcuin’s death; while the lost ancestor of the unfortunately-imperfect English books, with the additional passage in ep. no. 145, could well go back to his own lifetime.

166

Compare Ganz, ‘An Anglo-Saxon fragment’, pp. 171–7. See ep. no. 43, for a passage relating to Adoptionism and Alcuin’s response to it which is omitted from the copies in T (and K ), but preserved in a later (eleventh-century) English copy, in this case probably from the ‘recipient’s text’. 167

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     .  

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An Anomalous Collection One small collection of early date, for which both Salzburg and Tours connections have been claimed, remains to be considered. Sixteen (or fifteen) of Alcuin’s letters, several of them in incomplete texts, are copied on seventeen folios (226v–42v) of the one-time St. Emmeram, Regensburg (and subsequently Regensburg Dominicans) book, now Munich clm. 13581. In its final form—it was originally two separate codices which were combined at an early date—this is a characteristic ‘school’ collection of the period, written by ‘countless hands’: its contents are predominantly works of OT and NT exegesis and ‘theology’, amongst which writings by or associated with Alcuin and his disciples, or falsely attributed to him, are prominent. In part ii, the Alcuin letters are, however, preceded by Augustine’s substantial Tractatus X in Iohannis epistolam ad Parthos, and followed by a mini-corpus of Amalarius ‘of Trier’s’ correspondence ca. 813–815, occupying a single quire. There is no obvious intellectual link between these three items; but no attempt has been made to distinguish the letter-collection with an initial title or other codicological feature.168 All the Alcuin letters in the St. Emmeram book are also to be found in some form, but not always an identical one, in one or more of the major collections already discussed. Only the early-ninth-century Salzburg book Vienna cod. 808, however, has texts of all but one of the sixteen (or fifteen), four (or three) being only there; and, conspicuously, these include nine of Alcuin’s letters addressed to nonSalzburg recipients, plus two to Arn, which had been copied there by the one scribe ‘theta’—the remainder being in the quires of three different scribes. It is natural to suppose that the principal exemplar was either Vienna cod. 808 or an intermediary, and nineteenthcentury editors generally took that view: but there are serious objections. Clm. 13581, according to Bernhard Bischoff in an acutely-argued section of the first volume of his Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, belongs to ‘the Isanberht group’, from the name of the peripatetic monkscribe who provides the link and appears occasionally as a corrector in this manuscript: the predominant script-style of the ‘countless hands’ (in 168

For the codicology, see Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 1, 230, cf. 234; pt.ii is fols 147–284 of the combined book, the folios with the letter-collection forming quires ‘XI’ and ‘XII’ plus the last leaf of qu. ‘X’. For the Apocalypse commentary in Pt. I, see above, p. 10 and n. 16.

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     .  

Bischoff ’s view) points to the vicinity of Tours as its place of origin and a dating ‘around 820 or shortly after’.169 That dating may be valid for what is perhaps the earliest manuscript in the group, clm. 14614 (likewise at St. Emmeram from an early date), where among approximately fifteen hands a ‘clearly-formed (klare) Tours’ one, which probably occurs again in clm. 13581 pt. i, is responsible for the greater part of a group of Alcuin texts (fols 197v–243); and it is acceptable also for Vienna Nat. bibl. lat. 966—whose mediaeval library-home is unknown—which includes the only complete copy of a letter to Arn from Alcuin, probably from his very last years.170 But as regards clm. 13581 (and other manuscripts) there are formidable counterarguments. Some of its non-Alcuin texts are not easily dated before the 830s.171 Several of the letters are demonstrably in the local Salzburg text-version which has modified the wording of the original one. The one Alcuin letter not in Vienna cod. 808 is the fragmentary ep. no. 65, a complete text of which, almost certainly derived from the original recipient’s version, is to be found only in the two later English collections of Alcuin’s letters. But the presence of a (part-)copy at Salzburg in the late 790s is seemingly established by its imitation in one of the rare letters of (Arch)bishop Arn;172 and

169 Bischoff, idem, p. 234. In conversations over several years, the last in February 1990, Professor Bischoff confirmed that he had found no new evidence that would help with a dating and localisation of this admittedly-anomalous group of manuscripts. He acknowledged, however, that he had been unaware of the apparently contrary evidence of some of the contents, and that he would certainly not exclude a somewhat later date. For a recent reiteration of Bishoff ’s interpretation of Isanberht’s formation and later career, see below, p. 73 n. 174. 170 Ep. no. 268, at fols 33v–34 and therefore in a section which appears to be in Isanberht’s own hand. For the ?Salzburg-area codex with extracts from ep. no. 268, see below. 171 The contents of the the Munich ‘Isanberht-group’ manuscripts are very inadequately indicated by the printed catalogue: they include a complete or ‘conflate’ text of the De dignitate conditionis humanae (nearly three centuries earlier than the date originally proposed by Dr. Marenbon for the creation of that version), a text of the All Saints’ sermon Legimus in ecclesiasticis historiis earlier than any used by Prof. J.E. Cross for his edition (Traditio 33 [1977], 101–35, the text at 105–23), and texts of other sermons usually attributed—rightly or wrongly—to Walahfrid Strabo. I have for many years hoped to produce a comprehensive account of the entire group and its distinctive collection of texts; but I have made almost no progress with the palaeographical problems (see, however, below, n. 174). 172 Ep. no. 66, Chase, Two Letter-Books, pp. 20–1 (no. I/2). Chase, p. 20 note, suggested that it had in fact been composed by Alcuin: on chronological and other grounds, this is most implausible; and the larger collection in which it occurs, London BL Cotton Tiberius A. xv, is not a ‘collection of epistolary formulae’ (Chase, p. 3, who has here been misled by his own title).

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     .  

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those sections imitated at Salzburg were not incorporated in any collection made at Tours, although other parts of Alcuin’s letter were.173 The fact that the text in clm. 13581 consists of only two later sections of the letter in an incorrect (reverse) order, directly after another letter which had been copied several times previously at Salzburg, suggests—but cannot prove—that the scribe of this section, or of its exemplar, had been copying a defective set of bifolia and loose sheets, the last of which had been reversed. It is theoretically possible that at the date at which the ‘Tours’St. Emmeram manuscript was written the more comprehensive collection of letters used by the compilers of what became the archetypes of both the K and T families had already been dispersed, and that it was necessary to turn to Salzburg, or somewhere in its region, for the texts of a short selection to include in a Tours-area ‘school’ collection of exegetic and homiletic writings. Improbable as this seems, it cannot be absolutely excluded as an explanation. It still seems more likely, however, that at least the later ‘Isanberht-group’ books were after all written in the vicinity of Salzburg, not before the early or even mid-830s and although Isanberht himself had then been for some time a professed monk at Fulda: in which case the Tourstrained scribes (and others?) were the incomers, writing ‘conservatively’. The circumstances in which this migration took place and where actually the mixed group of scribes worked and preserved the memory of Alcuin remains, however, quite obscure.174 For the moment, 173 I.e. in the K collection (above), where the letter ends hodie vadis in incendio ignis aeterni. The complex manuscript-testimony of this letter is unfortunately almost impossible to work out from Dümmler’s apparatus. For the Salzburg-version letter texts, see above, pp. 55–56 and n. 130. 174 Clm. 14391 (Alcuin, Expositio evangelii Iohannis), fols 28–59v, are written in a weaker version of the hand of the scribe Munipert who wrote three Salzburg manuscripts and contributed to a fourth in the early years of Archbishop Adalram, while the index and fols 122–89 are the work of Isanberht: Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 1, 231 and 2, 149–51 (nos 139–42). The fullest treatment of the non-palaeographical evidence for Isanberht’s career is in K. Schmid (ed.), Die Kloster-gemeinschaft von Fulda im Früheren Mittelalter, Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften 8 (Munich, 1978), 2.1: Kommentiertes Parallelregister, p. 256, cf. 2.3: Untersuchungen, pp. 1007–8 (Freise), emphasising that his membership of the Fulda community began before 825/6 and that his connections with the scriptorium at Tours cannot be satisfactorily dated. None of the manuscripts or scribes, except for Isanberht himself, has any demonstrable association with Fulda. Bischoff ’s original arguments for a Tours-area origin for the group have recently been re-stated by Herrad Spilling, suggesting that even a dating ‘um oder bald nach 820’ may be too late, because of the archaic features of the hands: see her ‘Die frühe Phase karolingischer Minuskel in Fulda’ in: Schrimpf (ed.), Kloster Fulda, pp. 249–84, at pp. 279–82. For the reasons stated in the text, I find this very difficult, if not impossible, to accept.

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     .  

the palaeographical, prosopographical and textual evidence cannot be convincingly reconciled; but clm. 13581 does confirm the earlier dispatch to Salzburg of copies of letters to other addressees, of which ‘register copies’ had been made at Tours, without adding to our understanding of the early history of the basic letter-collection(s). Some time after mid-century, an unidentified scriptorium ‘probably in the Salzburg area’ copied seven letters of Alcuin’s and fragments of two others as an appendix to a substantial formulary-collection (now Munich clm. 4650: siglum B). One section of the latter makes considerable use of Salzburg’s principal collection of Alcuin’s letters, i.e that in Vienna 808 (S1); and it also includes two extracts, in Int[errogatio]-R[esponsio] form, from the letter known otherwise only from Vienna 966.175 Sickel believed that the letters in the appendix were copied from the first three quires of S1, and Dümmler followed him. Assuming at least one intermediary, this is almost certainly right: if so, however, B’s scribe or the copyist of his exemplar was sufficiently learned to make improvements to the orthography and Latinity of the originals, sometimes with implications for their interpretation, simultaneously with introducing or retaining obvious errors.176 175

For the manuscript (later at Benediktbeuern), see Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen 2, 201–2. The quires have been mis-bound, the correct sequence of the final folios being 40–55, 80–85, 72–79; the first of the Alcuin letters, ep. no. 294, is on fols 84v–85v + 72–72v, ep. no. 173 to rivolos sanctitatis on fols 79–79v and the opening words of ep. no. 156 at the bottom of fol. 79v (but def. after dubitationem aliquam only because of the loss of one or more leaves?). For the preceding Formulae Salisburgenses, see Zeumer, MGH Formulae, pp. 438–55, with the important complementary remarks and corrections by B. Bischoff, Salzburger Formelbücher und Briefe aus Tassilonischer und Karolingischer Zeit (SB. Bayerische Akad. der Wissenschaft, Ph.-Hist. Kl., 1973 Heft 4), pp. 9–11. The extracts from ep. no. 268 are in the formulary section at fols 48v–49, and the non-Alcuin ep. no. 180 at fols 55–55v + 80. Another formulary-text of the latter is in Frobenius Forster’s transcript of a lost Salzburg Liber Traditionum in Regensburg, Staatliche Bibliothek, Rat. ep. 422, identified and partly published by Bischoff, Salzburger Formelbücher, here p. 35. 176 Ep. no. 294 is among the letters ruthlessly normalized by Dümmler, with or without the support of B: the rejected spellings Hierusalem, paginola, diliciarum etc. are almost certainly Alcuin’s own, as well as standard in early Salzburg; in scripturis sanctis in S1 and D is ‘corrected’ (with B ) to i. s. sacris, although Alcuin uses scripturae sanctae three times and the singular scriptura sancta once in the letter he wrote in the name of the Frankish bishops in 794 (MGH Conc. II, pp. 147, 154 and 156) and the singular form twice in his ‘York poem’ (ed. Godman, lines 1307–8 and 1448), and never scriptura(e) sacra(e)! and so on. Dümmler’s text of ep. no. 146 (p. 236) has quid de Graeciae sublimitatibus audieras (remarkably interpreted in the editorial heading as de Grecorum superbia!). Here the reading of S and of its direct copy S1 is de Grecia solimitatibus, which B changes to de Gretia suplimitatibus. Sublimitas was used in lateAntiquity of ‘a person of high rank or superiority’ and as a form of address (‘your

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     .  

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A ‘Personal’ Collection of Letters? The Tours origin of all or parts of the several overlapping collections of letters written to a range of addressees c. 793–801 seems clear; and the omission from them of letters in particular categories which are preserved independently of any of the major collections is surely (generally) deliberate. Quite distinct from these is an assemblage of eighty-nine or ninety letters, interrupted after the sixty-fifth or sixty-sixth letter by a group of three of Alcuin’s poems, two of them found only here.177 Complete copies are to be found in twin manuscripts written at St.-Denis ca. 820 or a little earlier, evidently for different destinations, and now respectively London, BL, Harley 208 (Sickel’s and Dümmler’s H ) and Paris, BNF, n. a. lat. 1096 (unknown to editors of the letters; my siglum H2): before the end of the century the latter was, on the evidence of additions, at or in the vicinity of Orléans; a century or so later the former was in England.178 In both manuscripts the Alcuin collection is followed by Highness’); and from the second quarter of the ninth century it is a not-infrequent epithet for Carolingian rulers. It is therefore a plausible emendation of the meaningless solimitatibus; and a year later (ep. no. 174 [p. 288]) Alcuin himself—exceptionally—uses it of the Pope, although here too it seems to have given trouble to copyists (sublitas in T and T *, suplimitas in K2). 177 Namely, carm. nos xlviii, xlvi, xlvii, ed. Dümmler, MGH Poet. I, pp. 259–61. 178 For the St.-Denis origin of both, see Mirella Ferrari, ‘«In Papia conveniant ad Dungalum»’, Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 15 (1972), pp. 3–4 (ex inf. B. Bischoff ) and J. Vezin, ‘Les manuscrits copiés à St.-Denis pendant l’époque carolingienne’, Paris et Ile-de-France 32 (1982), at 278–9. The Paris manuscript was made known to scholarship and its contents briefly presented by J. Ramackers, ‘Eine unbekannte Handschrift der Alchvinbriefe’, Neues Archiv 50 (1935). It had, however, been read and studied with some care in the eighteenth century: collat. has been written in the margin at the beginning of each letter and what is probably the same hand has subsequently noted against some of them that they figure in the novissima editio, i.e. Frobenius Forster’s of 1777. The annotator seems to be different from the M. de Bréquigny who in ?1766, as we know from his own account (Mémoires de l’Acad. des Inscriptions, XXXVII [Paris, 1774], 531) transcribed the contents of BL Harl. 208—which he passed on to Forster—and observed correctly that it contained annotations by the ‘savant Usserius’ (who had borrowed it from its then owner D’Ewes in 1641) ‘qui avait eu problement dessein de publier’ the letters. (But see below, n. 201.) For the Orléans-area additions on BNF n. a. lat. 1096 fols 95v–98, see B. Bischoff, Anecdota Novissima: Texte des vierten bis sechzehnten Jahrhunderts (Stutttgart, 1984), pp. 123–35. An alphabet including the four additional OE letters on Harley 208 fol. 87v and a scribble which is almost a line of Beowulf (!) (line 869) on fol. 88 are datable s. x/xi: Ker, Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, p. 304 (no. 229) An ex-libris Ebor’ and other evidence that I hope to publish elsewhere show that in the later Middle Ages it was for a time in the York Austin Friars library.

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     .  

a smaller group of letters written, or probably written, by Dungal, interrupted by one of 813 from the Emperor Charles to his Greek counterpart (composed by Dungal?); both originally concluded with an added single letter of Alcuin’s (ep. no. 131).179 The copies provide slight, but reasonably convincing, indications that their common exemplar was also a St.-Denis book.180 Either that exemplar or a copy (not necessarily one of those that survives) was available to the mid-ninth-century Rheims copyist of the ‘expanded Tours collection’: from it, he or his master selected a mere thirteen letters (actually fourteen, one of them defective at the beginning), plus the one uncertainly-attributed letter in the Dungal group and the added ep. no. 131, carefully preserving the sequence of his exemplar.181 Because it includes six (or five) letters addressed to Abbot Adalhard of Corbie, which are not included in ‘the basic Tours collection’ or its expanded version, Sickel and Dümmler after him supposed that H(arleian 208) was a Corbie manuscript and that its Alcuin lettercollection originated there.182 That the collection in its present form may indeed be linked in some way (not now clearly determinable) with Corbie, even though its surviving early copies were written elsewhere, is not excluded. The letter with which it opens, a ‘dialectical’ summary of the arguments against Adoptionism, is addressed to a filia in Christo carissima at the Aachen Court: she is commonly identified with Adalhard’s sister Gundrada, which is plausible if

H fols 117v–119v, H2 fols 92–95v. Apart from the shared Dungal dossier (which could easily have been added to a book that had originated elsewhere), the best evidence for a St.-Denis exemplar comes from misunderstood abbreviations: notably, the text of ep. no. 209 (p. 347 line 31) in H2 fol. 114, with the unintelligible reading quia post vos, which is that also of T * (below). H has here, however, qui ap’ vos, correctly extended in an eleventh-century English copy (in the manuscript A1: below) to qui aput vos; and the eccentric abbreviation ap’ for apud is also that of Paris BNF lat. 2384 (after the first text), BAV Reg. lat. 96 and 310, all probably of St.-Denis origin, s. ix1/3 or ix1. An older St.-Denis book, Paris BNF lat. 528 (c. 800 or s. ix in, except for the added fols 91–92v and later marginalia, etc.), has at fols 132–133 the unique text of Alcuin’s earliest extant poem, inc. Cartula perge cito pelagi trans aequora cursu (ed. Dümmler, MGH Poet. I, pp. 220–3). 181 I.e. BAV, ms. Reg. lat. 272, fols 96v–122v. A marginal annotation by the copyist or an early reader of the opening letter of the sequence, the first also in the complete H collection, Alcuin’s ep. no. 204 reads: Epistola de multis necessitatum causis. 182 Epp. nos 175, 176, 181, 220, 222 and 237, no. 181 not certainly to Adalhard; Sickel, ‘Alcuinstudien I’, pp. 496–9, followed by Dümmler, MGH Epp. IV, (Introd.) p. 5. 179 180

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unproved; the one extant letter in which she is named as the addressee (using her by-name Eulalia) is also in this collection, as is a letter to ‘the most loved ones, Sister and Daughter’, whom Sickel suggested were Gundrada and her younger sister Theodrada.183 Paschasius would certainly have found in the collection the evidence that Alcuin addressed Adalhard as Antonius, although equally he could have read the ‘recipient’s copies’ of these or other letters. He would also have read there the letter in which Alcuin tried to explain to the Emperor, who had raised the matter, what was the hymnus which the Evangelists say (Mt 26.30; Mc 14.26) was recited after the institution of the Eucharist but fail to quote—a letter of which he made use in the final section of his great Expositio in Matheo.184 The small group (or groups) of letters to Adalhard and those to Gundrada cannot, however, properly be compared with the letters to Arn that form the basis of the St.-Amand and Salzburg collections; and it is difficult to envisage the compilation of the H collection ex novo at Corbie, or indeed at St. Denis, in the ten or fifteen years after Alcuin’s death in 804. The letters here are addressed to a very wide range of recipients, English and Continental, commonly represented by a single letter, although Adalhard is not the only one privileged with several: Benedict of Aniane is the addressee of three (one of them jointly), a Bishop Speratus whom I identify with Unuuona of Leicester of two of the letters; and there are two to Archbishop Arn which are not included in the Salzburg collections.185 One letter, the only one to the short-lived Northumbrian King Eardwulf, is copied twice: the second copy omits the Farewell clause. Chronologically, they range over the whole period from the earliest letters now extant (pre-785!) to the last months of Alcuin’s life. Very few of them are included in any of the other collections.186 In conjunction,

183 Ep. no. 204: for its date (mid-799 rather than mid-800?) and content see below; epp. nos 241 (with the lemma in both manuscripts Ad Gundradam virginem cognomento Eulaliam), 279. There is, of course, a certain circularity in these identifications. 184 Ep. no. 308, in all three manuscript-copies of the H collection; Pascasii Radberti Expositio in Matheo Libri XII (IX–XII), ed. B. Paul, CCCM 56B (Turnhout, 1984), p. 129 (lines 1023–32, 1045). Paschasius’s quidam volunt does not mean that he did not know who was the author of the letter: he was citing a ‘modern’, who was typically unnamed. 185 Benedict: epp. nos 56, 57 and 303 ( jointly); Speratus: epp. nos 124, 285 with Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, ASE 22, esp. 101–2, 109–15. Arn: epp. nos 218, 227, the former certainly, the latter possibly, of 801. 186 The exceptions include ep. no. 115 (to Eanbald II of York), ep. no. 230 (to

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     .  

those characteristics perhaps provide the clue to an understanding of the collection. If the collections represented by the K and T manuscripts are in some sense ‘notarial’ or ‘pupil’ ones, that in the H manuscripts is seemingly more personal to Alcuin: apparently letters written by him at various dates and in various places of which he chose to retain copies, to provide models for subsequent correspondence187 or for other reasons which we can now only guess at, but may have ‘autobiographical’ significance. This notion gains some support from the unexpected evidence of a work by one of Alcuin’s contemporaries and indeed friends, Patriarch Paulinus of Aquileia. In the late 790s the latter wrote a Libellus exhortationis for (it seems) his secular counterpart, Count or Duke Erich of Friuli, who was killed in action in 799.188 Much of it is a characteristic mosaic or paraphrase of Patristic and later writings, most substantially the pseudo-Basil Admonitio ad filium spiritualem. Albert Hauck long ago noticed that cap. viii (in fact capp. viii–ix) of Paulinus’s work quotes verbatim, or only slightly adapted, almost two-thirds of Alcuin’s early and distinctive ‘admonitory letter’ to Charles’s sister Archbishop Æthelheard of Canterbury), ep. no. 300 (to Abbess Æthelburga) and ep. no. 308 (above, n. 184), all in the later English manuscript A1 and no. 300 also in T *. There is nothing obviously in common to link these particular four letters, and only the text of ep. no. 230 has variants suggesting that H may preserve its ‘register’ version and A1 its ‘recipient’s’ one (below, at p. 87 at n. 212); for ep. no. 308, compare further, p. 79 at n. 192. 187 As, for example, epp. nos 280, 54, 55 and 56 if, as seems likely, these are to be dated to before mid-796. 188 PL 99, cols 197–282. Erich’s life and career are comparatively well-documented, thanks not least to the verse-lament which Paulinus wrote after his death, MGH Poet. I, pp. 131–3, new ed. by D. Norberg, L’oeuvre poétique de Paulin d’Aquilée (Stockholm, 1979), pp. 100–2 (no. III), cf. pp. 34–8. The text of the Libellus in PL 99, cols 197–282, reprints the edition by the early eighteenth-century Oratorian G.F. Madrisi, which was dependent on earlier printed editions, from unidentified manuscripts; and although Dom André Wilmart claimed in one of his last letters, of February 1941, that he had ‘prepared an edition’, it was never published and seems not to survive. The name of Paulinus as author figures apparently only in the oldest manuscript, Paris BNF lat. 2996 (?Italy; sec. IX2/3); and it is not clear from partial listings of extant manuscripts (as by Dom Rochais in RevBén, 63 (1953), 251 n. 3) or from modern library catalogues which—if any—name Erich as the frater (laicus) for whom it is written. London BL Royal 5 B. III of s. xii in, from Worcester (not Canterbury: see Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, p. 208), fol. 59v has the title Liber ex[h]ortationis ad comitem quendam which, however (since there is no reference to a comes in the body of the text), clearly indicates the presence at an earlier stage of a personal name. Ad comitem quendam is similarly not uncommon in the title of manuscript-texts of Alcuin’s treatise De virtutibus et vitiis, which was written some years later and certainly dedicated to comes Wido: Bullough, ‘Alcuin and Lay Virtue’.

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Gisla. But capp. iv and vi have shorter quotations from at least three later letters to different recipients in both England and Francia. The common link between all four letters is their inclusion in the collection transmitted by the H manuscripts, three of them indeed only there. At the date of composition of Paulinus’s libellus (797? 798?) it is difficult to see how he would have been able to quote from them unless copies had been sent to him by Alcuin himself.189 The text of ep. no. 308 in the English collection of letters, originating in the 790s but only preserved in later manuscripts, may well have a similar pre-history. The insertion in the H manuscripts of a group of carmina between one of the letters to Archbishop Arn and the second text of the letter to King Eardwulf, moreover, accords well with the notion of a ‘personal’ collection. All three are ‘letter-poems’, a genre initiated by Alcuin’s earliest extant and datable poem; one, explicitly from St. Martin’s, Tours, is to (probably) the English priest Monn, who is about to set out on his travels; the second is to a Friducinus who may be an English abbot or, possibly, a bishop. The third— the first in the manuscripts—is to Arn: of this, a more complete text is preserved in Salzburg or Salzburg-connected manuscripts, evidently taken from the version which reached its addressee.190 Almost all the single Alcuin letters and small assemblages of his correspondence—apart, of course, from the letter-prefaces and the four short treatises—that are copied in other, more miscellaneous, ninth-century and later Continental manuscripts are demonstrably dependent on one of the early letter-collections, and in several instances 189 Ep. no. 15, with A. Hauck, Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands, 2 (ed. 3/4; Leipzig, 1912), p. 162 n. 4; epp. nos 115 (the letter to Eanbald II of York), 123, 188, cf. ep. no. 217. The sending of the copy-letters to Paulinus would, therefore, have been earlier than the dispatch of sections of the ‘basic Tours collections’ to Arn and—as I argue below—to York. Conversely, unless I have overlooked something, Paulinus’s Libellus is nowhere used by Alcuin. 190 Carm. 48, 46, 47 (MGH Poet. I, pp. 259–61); in H fols 78v–79v, in H2 fols 61–62v. In H2, fol. 61v is the end of a quire and the scribe has copied carm. 48 vv. 1–16 only, leaving more than half the page blank; a new scribe begins fol. 62 with vv. 16–20, the first verse however being marked for deletion. The same scribe rubricated the last line (23) of carm. 47, apparently as a (pseudo-)lemma for the following letter, numbered ‘lxvii’. The variants in the H text of carm. 48 (sanctae in v. 7, te and voluntas for tibi and voluptas in v. 9, promat for placeat in v. 14—affected by the preceding line) are not such as to suggest that it is taken from an uncorrected draft. The complete text is one of only two—unattributed—poems of Alcuin’s in the collection in Munich clm. 14743 (Salzburg, 854/59), and was also in the lost St. Emmeram manuscript which was used by Frobenius Forster.

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     .  

are taken from an extant exemplar. The group of seven (or eight?) letters, in the particular text-forms and sequences of the T collection, which constitutes one section of the ‘twin’ ?eleventh-century manuscripts from the lower Loire region (Paris BNF lat. 5577; Vatican BAV Reg. lat. 69) is, however, almost certainly derived indirectly from another lost copy that had remained at or in the vicinity of Tours; and a Tours book (the same one? or another?) is the most likely source of the letter, transmitted only here, in which an alarmed Alcuin wrote to Candidus-Wizo and Fridugis in 801/2.191 Fewer than a dozen letters are preserved only outside the main collections, in miscellanies of this kind: the addressees of a group of four in copies of early date make it highly improbable that the compiler was using ‘recipients’ texts’, and again point to Tours itself as the source of the exemplar(s).192 Most of the other exceptions relate to the struggle with Adoptionism c. 798–800, and are letters included in the dossier compiled and kept separately at Tours or at the Imperial Court, and for a time perhaps available at both. Only for Alcuin’s letter to Beatus of Liébana and that to an unidentified (Frankish) Bishop Elegius and (less certainly) for the independently-transmitted letter to King Offa of Mercia, the earliest of three still extant, does manuscript context point to dependence, through an unknown number of intermediaries, on the addressee’s copy.193 191 The seven correspond to the items numbered 10–16 in Dümmler’s list, MGH Epp. IV, p. 7, although items 10–13 = epp. nos 170, 174, 177 follow instead of preceding the other four; and the rubrics or lemmata have clearly been created for this particular selection—in both manuscripts, that for no. 178 (of pre-, not post-, 800 date), which follows a part-copy of no. 131, is Epistola eiusdem ad Karolum imper. It follows that readings in these manuscripts (sigla P, P*) will have no independent value for the establishment of the text; and that (e.g.) the interpretatively-important Parce populo TUO christiano in ep. no. 178 (p. 294) was not Alcuin’s phraseology, since tuo is peculiar to them! The 801/2 letter is ep. no. 245. For the two manuscripts and their dating, see above, p. 36 and n. 78. 192 ‘Complete’ only in the mainly-theological miscellany Paris BNF lat. 2826 (written s. ix 2/4, at an unidentified scriptorium south of the Loire [Bischoff ] and subsequently at St.-Martial, Limoges; Li ), where fols 136–141 are the texts of epp. nos 210 (to the patriarch of Jerusalem; only here and in its incomplete ?‘twin’ BNF lat. 17448 [Loire reg., s. ix1/4]), 234 (to Pope Leo III in 801; only here, in BNF lat. 17448, and in the English manuscript R), 140, 257. Clearly related in some way to Li is London BL Royal 6.B. viii (R), fols 28–28v (a ?Canterbury, St.Augustine’s, book, this part s. xi—E. Temple’s account of the make-up of this section of the codex, in her Anglo-Saxon Mss., pp. 73–4 [no. 54], being seriously misleading), which has the three-letter sequence epp. nos 234, 140 (commendaticia), 257: but here ep. no. 257 is correctly followed (fols 29v–52) by the complete text of the De fide sanctae Trinitatis, of which Li gives only an extract, at fols 126–9 (= B.N. lat. 17448 fols 103–6). 193 For the ‘Adoptionist dossier’, see above, p. 67; for the Beatus and Elegius

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The English Collections of the Letters In one of the paradoxes typical of Überlieferungsgeschichte, both the largest number of additions to this corpus and the majority of the surviving early (pre-793/4) letters of Alcuin come from the latest of the major manuscript-collections. In its final form, this is represented most completely—since we cannot know what may have been omitted—194 by the southern English (?Canterbury, Christ Church) book, London BL Cotton Tiberius A. xv (Dümmler’s A1; hereafter Tib[erius]): its 173 folios, now bound with others, contain very nearly one hundred and fifty letter-texts, one hundred and seventeen of them (one hundred and eighteen, if the concluding letter in King Charles’s name is included) certainly or probably composed by Alcuin, and several ‘poems’ (verse-texts), all of them in the concluding—non-Alcuin— folios. Seriously damaged (by water rather than burning) in the 1731 fire, it had fortunately been transcribed almost in toto by the estimable Thomas Gale, for the most part with great accuracy but with occasional ‘improvements’ to the Latinity of the original.195 Tib. has traditionally been dated on palaeographical grounds to the mid-eleventh century or even later; but the revised sequence of Canterbury’s script-styles c. 970–1070 proposed by Prof. David Dumville demands a date nearer to the beginning of the century.196 On internal evidence, its collection of Alcuin and non-Alcuin letters had been put together in several distinct stages, partly in northern letters, above p. 36. For the possible intermediate context of the letter to Offa (above, n. 79). 194 But for the probable dropping-out of two Alcuin letters at a late stage see below, 195 The most recent and fullest description of Tib. is that of Caroline Brett, ‘A Breton pilgrim in England in the reign of king Æthelstan’, France and the British Isles in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. G. Jondorf and D.N. Dumville (Woodbridge, 1991), at pp. 51–2. Dümmler’s table of the contents, MGH Epp. IV, pp. 10–11, which did not claim to report fully the non-Alcuin material, may mislead; and, having been misled, Colin Chase’s description and table in Two Alcuin Letter-Books, Toronto Medieval Latin Texts (Toronto, 1975), pp. 9, 12 are seriously inaccurate. Gale’s transcript is Cambridge, Trinity College, O. 10. 16, Dümmler’s A1*. The letter ep. no. 69 has been omitted, which is unfortunate because its legibility in Tiberius seems to have deteriorated in the course of the nineteenth century. The leaf (Gale pp. 17–18) is lost, which is even more un-fortunate, because the K and A traditions of the letter edited by Dümmler as his ep. no. 28 (with readings sometimes taken from the one and sometimes from the other) vary so greatly as to suggest that they transmit two quite distinct (draft?) versions. 196 D.N. Dumville, English Caroline Script and Monastic History: Studies in Benedictinism, A.D. 950–1030 (Studies in Anglo-Saxon History 6; Woodbridge, 1993), pp. 107–108. He has not, however, convinced all his fellow-specialists.

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     .  

England and partly in the south-east and south, between Alcuin’s lifetime and (it seems) the years immediately either side of A.D. 1000. The late Christopher Hohler’s judgement that this is the ‘one major monument of [English] scholarship’ from the last years of the Old English kingdom, the assembling of which ‘will have involved serious research in continental and English libraries’,197 is a characteristic if attractive exaggeration: the unidentified final compiler certainly found all his material in England, although apparently gathering it from more than one library or book-owner. Consequently, the Alcuin letters on folios 2–143, with interruptions, and the letter from King Charles to Offa of Mercia198 that follows on fols 143–44v—its unique manuscript source—constitute the most comprehensive collection in any codex, or in any printed book, before Frobenius Forster’s edition! Canterbury is Tib.’s most likely medieval home, despite its omission from Neil Ker’s listings, and John Leland might have seen it there in the sixteenth century. Prof. Rodney Thomson has, however, argued that the vetus codex from which Leland excerpted sixty Alcuin letters (the first post-medieval scholar so to do) for inclusion in his collectanea was not in fact Tib. but a transcript by the twelfthcentury William of Malmesbury, which he had found in that house’s library and has since been lost.199 Tib.’s evidence for the earlier English letter-collections is partly complemented by that of a distinctive selection from at least some of its component elements made for or by Wulfstan, archbishop of York 1002–23 (and until 1016 simultaneously bishop of Worcester) for one of his didactic collections, now BL Cotton Vespasian A. xiv pt. iii (Dümmler’s A2; hereafter Vesp[asian] ).200 In the last third of 197

C. Hohler, ‘Some Service Books of the Later Saxon Church’, Tenth-Century Studies ed. D. Parsons (London-Chichester, 1975), pp. 60–83, 217–27, at p. 74. 198 Ep. no. 100. 199 R.M. Thomson, William of Malmesbury (Woodbridge, 1987), Ch. 8, esp. pp. 163–4, cf. p. 161: more precisely ‘a transcript of [Tib.] and the exemplar of its non-Alcuin last section’ (below). I am not entirely persuaded. On my decipherment of Tib. at least two of his supposed ‘better’ readings (ibid. pp. 160–61) are in that manuscript, and the variants are only in Gale’s transcript (A1*), on which Thomson relied; but other readings in William’s versions do (I agree) differ from Tib. 200 Typically of Cotton manuscripts, the substantial part i (fols 1–105) and the short part ii are totally unconnected with part iii. The first of these is a Welsh, probably Brecon, ms. of s. xii2, most fully described by R. Flower in Vitae sanctorum Walliae ed. A.W. Wade-Evans (Cardiff, 1944), pp. viii–xi; the second (fols 106–113v) is ?S.Engl. of s. xii ex (c. 1200), the contents of which are listed by J.A. Robinson, Gilbert Crispin, Abbot of Westminster (Cambridge, 1911), pp. 55, 70–2 with Flower, cit., p. viii. Evidence for an earlier, independent, foliation of pt. iii is how-

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the sixteenth century both manuscripts were for a time simultaneously in the hands of Archbishop Parker’s ‘secretary’ John Joscelyn, as his characteristic annotations show; and both were borrowed from the Cotton Library by Ussher.201 In the nineteenth century they benefitted from the critical acumen of scholars as different as Pertz and Stubbs. More recent studies in several different fields (palaeography, AngloLatin, Old English language and literature, etc.) have added in various ways to our understanding of them, but have also unfortunately introduced some new errors and misconceptions;202 and they have not adequately explored the relationship between them, nor uncovered the evidence they apparently encapsulate for Alcuin’s earliest known ‘register’ of outgoing letters. The substantial middle section of Tib., beginning with the index on fol. 67 and continuing to fol. 122, has a pre-history which is quite distinct from the rest and is, I believe, crucial to an understanding of the assemblage as a whole. Introduced by an index, many of whose entries are independent of the head-notes and/or the address-clauses of the letters themselves, it depends indirectly on a lost copy (K‘3’) of the Tours K collection which was very close to but ever to be found in a sixteenth-century cross-referencing in Cotton Tiberius A. xv: e.g. fol. 127 (ep. no. 128) ‘alibi fol. 42’ = Vesp. fol. 155 (actually 155v). For the origin and contents of pt. iii, see below. 201 The late Richard Hunt, like the eighteenth-century M. de Bréquigny (above, p. 75, n. 178), believed that Ussher intended to produce an edition of Alcuin’s letters, at least as a supplement to Duchesne. But Mr. W. O’Sullivan (Trinity College, Dublin) in a letter of 4 February 1975 declared that ‘To the best of my knowledge Ussher did not plan an edition of the letters of Alcuin’. 202 None more so, unhappily, than Colin Chase’s Two Alcuin Letter-Books, Toronto Medieval Latin Texts 5 (Toronto, 1975). As a ‘semi-diplomatic’ presentation of six of Vesp.’s eight quires, i.e. printing essentially what is in the manuscript with the appropriate folio indications, it is useful and at times illuminating; and the editor’s syntactical notes are invaluable. But its utility in the first respect is diminished by the introduction of ‘correct’ readings from Tib., and even from other manuscriptcollections; and at several points it fails to distinguish between the uncorrected text, corrections by Wulfstan and corrections by sixteenth-century hands. The attempt to derive from it ‘Two Alcuin letter-books’ by changing the order of the quires to bring Vesp. partly into line with the letter-sequence in Tib. and excluding the contents of one quire—in part, it seems, because of a misunderstanding of Dümmler’s reports of its contents and of the corresponding section of Tib.—in conjunction with a failure to recognise that the formula-letters in quire 7 are only a selection from a genuine early-ninth-century letter-book (probably not Alcuin’s, however) seems to me entirely misconceived. ‘Two WULFSTAN Letter-Books’ would have been a better but still, in my view, unwarranted title. The further misunderstandings of later writers depending on Chase’s edition and analysis (e.g. R. McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians 751–987 [London, 1983], p. 8) are, however, their own.

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     .  

not certainly a direct descendant of the extant St.-Vaast book (K1).203 Moreover, the evidence of the letters that are the components of this particular collection and of distinctive readings in the Tib. version of K‘3’ combine to show that the latter was already available in south/south-west England at least a decade and perhaps even several decades before A.D. 1000. A letter from Abbot Ælfweard of Glastonbury to Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury (990–94, but probably of 990 or 991) combines long excerpts from at least four of Alcuin’s letters and verses from a fifth, all of them transmitted in K collection manuscripts.204 An earlier letter to Dunstan (ob. 988), for which both Ælfweard and Æthelwold of Winchester have been suggested as author (on no very good grounds) uses another of its Alcuin letters to provide a prose framework to twenty-seven lines of verse!205 Tib.’s principal divergences from its putative exemplar are generally skilful and deliberate. Where the same letter was an integral part of another collection that had become available earlier and may already have been transcribed separately, the magister or copyist responsible for combining the two simply omitted the K‘3’ text. The unique

203 Thus, the index-entry for ep. no. 74 is xxvi. Albin[us] Radoni abbati; the headnote is Epistola Albini ad Radonem abbatem and the address-clause appears to be Dulcissimo dilectionis filio Albinus salutem. Among the many readings shared with K1 against K2 (and other testimonies) are: in ep. no. 17 (p. 46) contumeliam A K1, -as K2, apud Dominum A K1, apud eum K2, apud Deum all., om. magis A K1, temetipsum A K1, te ipsum K2 all., (p. 47) testante A K1, dicente K2 all.; in ep. no. 52 (p. 96) om. satis A1 K1, nunc Deo nostro oportet A1 (and not as Dümmler, app.) K1; in ep. no. 121 (p. 176) qua suos amabiliter considerare solet A1 K1, quam suos amabiliter consolebat K2. 204 Ed. W. Stubbs, Memorials of St. Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, RS 63 (London, 1874) pp. 400–3 (no. xxviii), from this manuscript fols 170–72v only. The Alcuinletters used are epp. nos 39, 17, 40 and 43 (also 190?), and ep. no. 174 for the concluding verses. Particularly telling is the latter’s line 2, reading Protegat, exaltet, ornet, amet, foveat, the last four words with K1’s text against K2’s and T’s exaltet defendat (-et, K2) ornet et amet): which enables us to reconstruct lines 3 and 4, now not easily legible, as Nec(?) precor aspiciat clementi lumine nostras/Litterulas scripsit quae pietatis amor. Similarly, the initial quotation from ep. no. 39 has K1’s linguis (-uas K2 T etc.), flamma ardescit ( flammula ard. K2 T etc.) and respue ( prohibe K2 T etc.); and the quotation from ep. no. 40 has K1’s corrupt filii minores (for fili mi, mores). Note that ep. no. 40 is omitted from the Tib. copy of K’3’, probably inadvertently: the preceding two letters, epp. nos 39 and the shortened 44, are omitted because both are copied from other exemplars in the earlier folios of Tib. For evidence of non-K1 readings, see next note. 205 Ed. Stubbs, Memorials of St. Dunstan, pp. 370–71 (no. x). The Alcuin letter is ep. no. 26; but quod dentes, obliviscas (contra -viscaris), pietas in pauperibus gesta and reducat (contra redeas) are not K1 readings, although pascitur and refocilantur are. No source has so far been identified for the verses, inc. Mutiplices grates tibi sint laudesque salutes (Schaller-Könsgen no. 9863).

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     .  

85

exception, a duplicate of ep. no. 73 (Tib. fols 15–15v and 121v), is easily explained: the K index and head-note describe it as epistola Albini ad amicum; the address-clause is, characteristically in parts of K, simply Dilecto amico salutem; and the opening words here are Placuit caniciem vestram (the lectio difficilior, unique in Alcuin’s letters) against Tib. fol. 15 Placuit mihi caritatem.206 That other collection is represented here by folios 2–66v, and possibly although debatably by the contents also of folios 122v (bottom)144v. Good reasons exist, I shall suggest, for supposing that the contents of the first and major part, i.e. to fol. 66v, originated in northern England (presumably at York or at a now-unidentifiable centre closely associated with the cathedral), although it was almost certainly no longer there at the end of the tenth century. There is a marked distinction between the character of the letter-texts in this part, which overall are similar to those predominating in the earlier Continental manuscripts, and the twenty-two that follow the last of the K collection letters incorporated in Tib. The overwhelming majority of the latter are found only here or otherwise only in Vesp.; and most seem to be of the years 796–803(804). They include letters from Alcuin to Offa and to pontifices Britanniae in 796 and to a Mercian ill. patrico (identifiable as Brorda) in 797; and a letter of 796 from the Frankish king. Two others are addressed to Archbishop Æthelheard of Canterbury in 797 and to a daughter of Offa in c. 797 × ?798, the former exceptionally also in the Salzburg collection, the latter also in Alcuin’s ‘personal’ collection H.207 Furthermore, of the twenty letters probably from Alcuin himself, plus one from an unnamed York cleric (Eanbald?), a total of twelve, and from fol. 139v to fol. 143 line 2 an uninterrupted sequence of eight, which are duly copied as a block into the Wulfstan book Vesp., have the character of formula letters. The original addressee’s name is omitted or replaced by ill., and the writer’s name is often dropped also; and while some have unspecific but recognisable allusions to ‘current events’, the contents of others are quite banal, a purely formal treatment of conventional themes—‘thank-yous’, good advice and excuses. A letter to an unnamed superior expresses Alcuin’s pleasure at reversione vestra ad sedem pristine 206

For the letter-text and the addressee, see further, below. Epp. nos 101, 104, 122 (for the identification of the addressee, see Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, ASE 22, 117–19; ep. no. 100; epp. nos 128, 300 (for their dates and the identification of Offa’s daughter, see ASE 22, 116 n. 77). 207

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86

     .  

dignitatis vestre, three letters are addressed to an archiepiscopus who has previously been in correspondence with Alcuin and who is clearly not Eanbald II of York; one (?Eanbald’s), in which Alcuin is named in the text as a third party, is to a summus pontifex who equally clearly must be located in southern England; another is to a priest who is now teaching the young in servitio sancti Agustini primi predicatoris nostri.208 One of the letters transmitted only in Tib. is addressed to an unnamed bishop, who is asked to ensure that a second letter is passed on to a fellow bishop.209 The focus of the correspondence is evidently the church of Canterbury in the time of Archbishop Æthelheard, although not all the letters were addressed to its clergy. From letters and copies of letters available at the beginning of the ninth century in the southern English metropolitan church, or possibly in some other place within its jurisdiction, an individual or a schola has created a modest-sized ‘formulary’, comparable with but distinct from the letter-formula book incorporated in the Tours collection K. The remaining four Alcuin letters included in Tib.’s later folios, one only also in Vesp. and another additionally in H, form an equally distinctive sub-group: they belong certainly or probably to Alcuin’s very last years, 801–4; and the only addressee is Æthelheard.210 That man, indeed, is second only to Arn of Salzburg—although by a considerable distance—as a recipient of surviving Alcuin letters. The possibility that another small-scale ‘recipient’s text’ collection, in this case an English one, has been combined with or incorporated in a more comprehensive assemblage of Alcuin’s letters is suggested by a minor but significant difference between the H and Tib. texts of the 801 letter, ep. no. 230, and less certainly by a codicological feature of a letter of 802 uniquely in Tib. In the latter the main text, which is devoted to the archbishop’s desirable future conduct, concludes with the characteristic clausula exaltare et conservare dignetur.211 Then, on a new line with the opening words in capitals, comes an elaborate collective ‘greeting’, apparently with a verb-clause missing, and 208 The four letters transmitted only by Tib. and all with Alcuin’s name in the address-clause, are Dümmler’s epp. nos 291, 288, 130 and 89 (a most unfortunate editorial re-arrangement); the eight letters in both Tib. and Vesp. are epp. nos 45, 46 (?Eanbald’s), 103, 235, 256, 274, 292, 293. Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/7–I/14. 209 Ep. no. 89. If a genuine letter underlies the formulary-text, the bishops’ sees were perhaps two of Rochester, Selsey and Winchester. 210 Epp. nos 230 (also in H ), 255, 290, 311 (also in Vesp., fols 154–55v). 211 Ep. no. 255 (p. 413), with which compare a letter of 802/3 to Arn, ep. no. 264, ending ubique conservare dignetur; also the slightly earlier letter to Gisla, ep. no. 214, perdonare dignetur.

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     .  

87

the record of an accompanying gift of vestments for Æthelheard: almost certainly this section was distinguished in some way in the original letter, perhaps even being an ‘autograph’ addition. In the earlier letter, Tib. has the farewell-clause Bene valeas, vigeas, et floreas in omni bonitate, domine sanctç which the twin copies H and H2 omit.212 It is obviously not now determinable whether this little group was added to an already-existing formula-letter collection or whether the latter, possibly compiled after the deaths of both Alcuin and Æthelheard (805), supplemented a libellus of complete letter-texts;213 nor is there anything to indicate when or where letters written a few years previously to addressees in the Mercian kingdom proper were first associated with one or both parts of the ‘Canterbury’ collection. Equally, no single explanation will account for the combination of letters in the earlier part of Tib.; it is clear only that key elements for resolving the puzzle are missing. Those on the folios immediately preceding the K-collection index (from fol. 37v? or from fol. 37? the latter ep. no. 30 to the Northumbrian King Æthelred) are a very miscellaneous lot, in no consistent relationship with other collections or their particular text-forms. Thus, the last is a letter to Charles as emperor, on an exegetical matter (ep. no. 308), otherwise in the ‘personal’ collection (H/H2); the one preceding it is a truncated text of a letter to Archbishop Eanbald (II) of York, the quite lengthy ‘missing’ final section, including a farewell-clause, being transmitted in the only other testimony, the St.-Amand book Vienna 795. Earlier in the sequence, Tib. copies only the first half of an already short letter to Archbishop Peter of Milan, the full text of which is in the ‘personal’ collection; while a long letter to the (York) priest and monk Calvinus is complete in both, although with some interestingly divergent readings.214 Conversely, the first letter, to the York 212 Ep. no. 230 (p. 375). Compare the inclusion of final wishes and the farewell clause Pax vobis, etc. in the Salzburg recipient’s text of ep. no. 10, and their omission from the copies in A1 and A2, which in this case represent the ‘register’ version (below). Note that Dümmler’s edition of ep. no. 230 (p. 375 l. 19) prints, with H (and H2), the surely meaningless secundum quod habeam facultatem; A1, although damaged, almost certainly reads here . . . habeant . . . (Gale, habent), which the context clearly requires, cf. the preceding nostri honorifice vos suscipiant. 213 For possible evidence of Canterbury scriptorial activity in the time of Æthelheard’s successor Wulfred (805–32), see M.P. Brown, ‘Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 10861 [vitae sanctorum] and the scriptorium of Christ Church, Canterbury’, ASE 15 (1986), 119–37 and pls. 214 Ep. no. 190, in Tib. at fols 59–59v; ep. no. 209, in Tib. at fols 44v–48v (and in Vesp. at fols 160v–162v).

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88

     .  

congregation (ep. no. 43), has a substantial and biographically very significant section which is omitted alike from the Tours collections (both K and T ) and from those of or linked with Salzburg! in this case at least it is difficult not to regard the version copied in Tib. as the ‘recipient’s text’.215 One letter in this section, addressed to the clerical community at Candida Casa, and a further one on the earlier fols 34–37 (ep. no. 16 to King Æthelred of Northumbria) are also in Vesp. but not in any other collection; six, both from before and after 796 and including a very distinctive one to Archbishop Arn of Salzburg, are found only here.216 The four (probably, in fact, five) non-Alcuin items that interrupt the sequence of his letters in this section of Tib.—two of them also in Vesp. but not contiguously— strengthen the case for its having been assembled initially at or near York in the late-eighth or early-ninth century, but also for its having been supplemented some decades later. These are, successively on fols 48v–53v, a late-eighth-century letter from the anchorite Alchfrid to Higlac lector et presbiter (both of them independently recorded); a letter of ?701 from Pope Sergius I to Abbot Ceolfrith of WearmouthJarrow—the genuine text, later falsified by William of Malmesbury; and a letter from Pope Paul I to (Archbishop Egberht and) King Eadberht, written presumably in 757/8.217 Then, on fols 62–63,

215 Ep. no. 43 (= Tib. no. 31), of which almost one-fifth, including the passage defending himself and attacking the Adoptionists (p. 89 lines 4–13), is preserved only in Tib., Vesp. (Chase, Two Letter-Books, II/6) and the later copy of the latter in BL Cotton Faustina B. iv, fols 194a–194va (below). Is this another instance of early Tours copyists ‘editing out’ a reference to Adoptionism? 216 Tib. and Vesp.: epp. nos 273 and 16. Tib. only: epp. nos 21, 24 (both ‘recipient’s texts’?), 159 (to Arno), 287, 288, 299. Strictly, there is a third text of the complete no. 16 in London, BL Cotton Faustina B. iv. 217 Alchfrid: first edited by Levison (England and the Continent, pp. 297–300) from T. Gale’s transcript of Tib., fols 48v–50v (the British Museum manuscripts being unavailable during the Second World War); Chase, Two Letter-Books, II/7 (pp. 61–4) is a semi-diplomatic edition of the text in Vesp., fols 133–36. For the ‘original’ letter-text and some of its sources, see below, Pt. II, ch. 1, Additional Note. Sergius: JL. 2138; Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 248; Thomson, William of Malmesbury, p. 172. Paul: JW. 2337; Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, pp. 394–5, from Wilkins, MGH Conc. I, pp. 144–5 and BL Cotton Vespasian A. xiv (fol. 163: text defective after ad excidium animç tuç, and already so in s. xvi); BCS. no. 184, from Cotton Vespasian A. xiv cit. and Haddan and Stubbs (but rejecting some of their readings—usually wrongly); a useful English translation in Whitelock, EHD.2, no. 184 (pp. 830–1). Whitelock, like others, asserts that Wilkins ‘used a manuscript belonging to Ussher’: in fact, Wilkins’s text is from Ussher’s transcript of BL Tib. A. xv (fols 52–52v), which had been lent to him by Cotton. On Paul’s letter, see further, below, p. 152 (Pt. II ch. 1).

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     .  

89

between a letter to Bishop Higbald of Lindisfarne and a circulating commendatory letter that on stylistic grounds must be denied to Alcuin but may be Northumbrian, is one from Bishop Ecgred of Lindisfarne to Archbishop Wulfsige of York (datable 830 × 837, therefore) denying any complicity in the bizarre heresies in libro Pehtredi scriptos and including the one early English reference to a ‘letter of God’ fallen from Heaven.218 With due caution, it seems none the less possible to identify at least two distinct groups or layers in the Alcuin or Alcuin-associated letters copied in Tib.’s opening folios, two major sequences of which— with some other letters—also figure in Wulfstan’s manuscript Vesp. The source of one of those groups, consisting of eleven or twelve letters which occupy the greater part of fols 15v–34 (questionably also fols 37–37v), must be one of the collections made on the Continent in Alcuin’s lifetime, represented now by the early copies in S/S2 and T manuscripts: at several points the assemblage in Tib. (and occasionally Vesp. also) preserves their letter-sequence. Where texts of those letters are included in the K collection also, it is evident on grounds of textual affinity and, less categorically, from their grouping that a manuscript of that family was not Tib.’s source.219 All the letters in this group were written by Alcuin on the Continent, often

218 Dorothy Whitelock, ‘Bishop Ecgred, Pehtred and Niall’ in: Ireland in Early Medieval Europe. Studies in Memory of Kathleen Hughes, ed. D. Whitelock, R. McKitterick and D. Dumville (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 47–68 has re-edited (at pp. 48–9) and discussed Ecgred’s letter, with particular reference to related Irish and later English texts. The opening Auctoritatis tuç litteras . . . suscepi does not occur in Alcuin’s or earlier letters; and indeed if auctoritas is here used of the archbishop, as a dignified form of address, it seems to be without parallel. For the ‘authorship’ of ep. no. 299, see Additional Note III, ad fin. 219 Dümmler’s folio-references for this part of A1 are almost all erroneous. Of his sequence of letters 18 to 28 and 30 (29 being found only in the two English manuscripts), eight and a shorter text of a ninth are in both S1 and T, one is in S1 only and two in T only. The unfortunate ‘flagging’ of most of these with their K sequence-number (and of others in this section of Tib., to which should be added ep. no. 73 at fols 15–15v = K 64) simply means that a copy is to be found there as well as in T/S1. For the evidence that their exemplars were not in a manuscript of the K family, see e.g.: the apparatus to ep. no. 35 = Tib. no. 19, correctly at fol. 16 (A1 does not figure there among the testimonies because it has provided Dümmler with his text throughout!); ep. no. 39 = Tib. no. 20, correctly at fols 16v– 17v); ep. no. 51 = Tib. no. 23, at fols 18v–20v, with several additions to be made to the editor’s apparatus (and note that the last, verse, line as printed is certainly not Alcuin’s but a later copyist’s ‘improvement’ of the text in the small selection of letters from a T-collection manuscript in Paris BNF lat. 3244, of s. xii/xiii, at fol. 121). For ep. no. 43, see above, p. 88 and n. 215.

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90

     .  

to Continental addressees, although it does include two to King Offa of Mercia. Their presence in Tib. (and Vesp.) is most satisfactorily explained by their originally having reached Northumbria (York) in similar circumstances to the letter-copies sent or taken from Tours to St.-Amand and Salzburg either side of the year 800, and those sent to Paulinus of Aquileia earlier, i.e. before 797/8.220 A second group, the most interesting for the history of Alcuin’s letter-collections, is that of the eleven letters transmitted only in Tib., together with a further six found otherwise only in Vesp. and an early letter to Bishop Arn of which a fuller text, the recipient’s, was copied also at Salzburg: in Tib. these collectively occupy fols 3v–14 l. 2, 14–15, 34–37(?) and 40–44v. In part at least, they are chronologically the earliest, several of them being securely datable to the period of Alcuin’s return visit to Northumbria in 790–93, while others were very probably written in this same period. The addressees are both English and Continental, the latter including members of the Frankish royal family, although not King Charles himself.221 Tib. is distinguished from Vesp. not only in its scale: until the final ‘letter-book’ group, virtually every letter is preceded by a head-note or lemma. These head-notes are overwhelmingly of two kinds: a simple reference to the addressee—effectively a shortened version of the address-clause—sometimes with a reference to the addressee of the preceding letter (epistola alia ad N.); or a fuller reference to the addressee incorporating a title or other information which is not in the addressclause or in specific terms in the text. A third type of head-note, referring to the subject-matter of the letter, which we have seen was not uncommon in earlier Continental collections, occurs only once or twice. A few, but only a few, of the letters common to Tib. and Vesp. have identical or near-identical head-notes, usually quite distinct from those in other manuscript copies of the same letter.222 220

See above. Certainly of this period are epp. nos 8, 9 and 10 (to Arn, the first to survive), probably of this period are epp. nos 29, 68–70, 72, possibly also no. 67 (unless it is of 789/90). The letters to ‘royals’ are epp. nos 29 and 72, although that to Liutgard nobilissima femina (no. 50) which in Tib.—the only manuscript source for all three—figures between them cannot be of so early a date. Also not of this period is the unique Arn letter, ep. no. 66, which immediately follows the first Alcuin letter (ep. no. 65) in Tib., fols 2–4v (and not as Dümmler). 222 Thus Epp. nos 16, 30 which follow one another in both Tib. (fols 34–37, 37–37v) and Vesp. (fols 125v–129v, 129v–130) have the head-notes Epistula Albini magistri ad Adelredum regem and Alia epistola ad Adelredum regem. T ’s text, but not S1’s, of ep. 221

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     .  

91

Among the head-notes peculiar to Tib. are several that remind us that in Alcuin’s time and for a century-and-a-half thereafter all English scribes were grounded in a script which had added the letters wen (p) and ‘crossed d’ to the standard alphabet, to the bafflement of later copyists who also easily misread ‘insular (minuscule or halfuncial) f ’ as e, ‘insular minuscule s’ as r and so on. Thus the first of the two texts of ep. no. 73 in Tiberius is titled Ep[isto]la Alb[ini] magistri ad Dogpuleum; the address-clause, in this version only, shows that it was written to Doguulfo scriniario, sc. the Frankish Court ?chaplain and outstanding scribe al. Dagulf.223 A letter in both the Vespasian and the Tiberius manuscripts addressed to pio patri Uulfhardo abbati (ep. no. 70: Tib., -lh-) has the heading in the second of these: Epistola Albini magistri ad Pulehardum abbatem Hoddahelmi. The head-note of the one letter to King Ecgfrith of Mercia (ep. no. 61) in Tib. reads Ep[isto]la Alb[ini] mag[istri] ad Ecgerium, although in T it is Nobilissimo iuveni Ecgfrido regi Merciorum. The mis-readings of ‘insular f ’ as e and of p as p are not peculiar to the Alcuin and other early letters in the two manuscripts, since they have affected at least one of the tenth-century ones, namely Tib. fol. 166: ad Pulehelmum archiepm., sc. Archbishop Wulfhelm of Canterbury (ob. 941). A misread f lies behind the rendering of the anchorite Alchfrid’s name as Alcheridi in the head-note to his letter, certainly in Vesp. and possibly in Tib.;224 both mis-readings are found in Tib.’s head-note (fol. 61v) Epistola Albini magistri ad Pulesigum archiepiscopum, i.e., correctly, Ecgred of Lindisfarne’s letter to Wulfsig of York.225 Clearly the head-notes could have been introduced at several different stages in the transmission of the English letter-collection, as was the case with their Continental counterparts. There are a few, however, which because they contain information that cannot easily

no. 30 has Ad Aedilraedum regem (ep. no. 16 is not in the Continental collections). Chase, Two Letter-Books, p. 57 n., suggested that no. 30 was a private note sent along with no. 16—in the second half of 793, therefore? but its inclusion in T rather argues against this. A distinctive reading in both English manuscripts of no. 30 (dignitatis against S1’s and T ’s sublimitatis) and the presence there of a sentence that is omitted by T (but not by S1) are strong, although not conclusive, arguments for regarding the A text of ep. no. 30, as well as of ep. no. 16, as a copy of the ‘recipient’s version’. 223 The other text is in the K‘3’ section. For Dagulf/Dogwulf and the interpretation of this letter, see below, Pt. II ch. 3. 224 Vesp. fol. 133, Tib. fol. 48v: the damage to Tib. makes it impossible to be sure whether its scribe did in fact write e rather than f. 225 See above.

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     .  

(or at all) be deduced from the extant letter would seem to go back to the earliest phases of its textual history, the time of drafting and dispatch. It is obviously not inconceivable that a later Northumbrian scribe reponsible for the head-note of a letter to an Abbot Adelbaldum, whose congregatio is named neither in the address nor the text, could have inferred from a passing reference to the fundator Benedict and his successor Ceolfrith that he was Uuiorensis familie abbatem, sc. of Wearmouth, and even supplied an apparently correct archaic form of the name which he would not have found in Bede.226 It is also possible that the same or another copyist would have known enough to supply the head-note Epistola Albini magistri ad Adelberctum episcopum ad Hegstalding, sc. Hexham, to a letter addressed to Aedilbercto episcopo et omni congregationi in ecclesia sancti Andreae, although the vernacular form of the name, even if mistaken, certainly seems to favour the earlier date.227 A headnote to a letter to Adalhard ‘of Corbie’ describing him as propinquum Karoli (Tib. only) must surely be contemporary with it, whether or not it figured on the exterior of the letter as sent, to distinguish the recipient from other Adalhards at the Frankish Court. Finally, and most remarkably, are the concluding words abbatem Hoddahelmi in the Tiberius-manuscript head-note of the letter to a Uulfhardo abbati whose monastery is nowhere indicated in the letter-text: no community, or indeed place, of that name is known, but its second element is plausibly the rare helm ‘shelter in an exposed place, esp. for cattle’, recorded in local names in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and possibly once in Worcestershire, which fits neatly with the evidence that a Wulfhard was bishop of Hereford 800–22.228 The conclusion seems 226 Ep. no. 67; Tib. fol. 4v. Fratribus Viorensis (a)ecclesiae is also in the address-clause and head-note of ep. no. 19 in both Vesp. (fol. 118v) and Tib. (fol. 26). For Wior as the possible Pr. W. form of the name which Bede reports as Uuiri or Uiuri ( fluminis) see K. Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain (Edinburgh, 1953), p. 362, cf. B. Cox, ‘The Place-names of the earliest English records’, English Place-Name Society Journal 8 (1975–76), 12–66, at 46. 227 Ep. no. 31, with Dümmler’s apparatus; Tib. fol. 32v. Not copied in Vesp., it is in the Continental collections K, S1 (and D) and T, the bishop’s name being omitted from the address-clause in all except the last! For the complex early history of the name Hexham see V. Watts, ‘The place-name Hexham: a mainly philological approach’, Nomina 17 (1994), 119–36, and D.A. Bullough, ‘The place-name Hexham and its interpretation’, Notes and Queries, Vol. 244 [n.s. 46] (1999), 422–7. But if Tib.’s text of this letter was of Continental origin, a Northumbrian copyist must necessarily have added the title. 228 Bullough, ‘ “Albuinus deliciosus regis”. Alcuin of York and the Shaping of the Early Carolingian Court’, in: Institutionen, Kultur und Gesellschaft: Festschrift für Josef Fleckenstein, ed. L. Fenske et al. (Sigmaringen, 1984), pp. 73–92, at p. 77 n. 14: but for a note of caution, see P. Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, p. 172 n. 135.

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inescapable that the letters in Tib. (and in some instances also in Vesp.) datable between 790 and the early part of 793 were ‘registered’— in the sense that transcripts were made and retained—at the place and time of composition, although not necessarily from the final version that was actually sent; and that letters from that ‘register’ are among those included in the eleventh-century English manuscripts. When Alcuin returned to Francia in 793, this first register-collection evidently remained in (presumably) York; but at an early date it or some parts of it were combined with other assemblages of letters that were predominantly but not exclusively also composed by him. By whom and where? The only clue, and it is not a very strong one, is provided by the two letters with which the collection in Tib. begins and which were subsequently copied, with others that immediately follow, in identical order, in a later quire of the Wulfstan book, Vesp. (Fols 1–1v are a fragment of an unidentified and largely untranscribable letter to Higbald, which may not be from Alcuin; Dr. Caroline Brett, however, supposes that it is, but is now out of order.) The first of the two is addressed to a Dodo, a delinquent former disciple of Alcuin’s, almost certainly at York. The complete text is found only in these English manuscripts.229 The opening section only (about one-quarter of the letter), with its initial verses, is included in the K collection, which points to a date not later than 799 and not before 793/4. A copy, complete or incomplete, was (as we have seen) sent to Salzburg, which preserved a copy of its text’s last third, although without Alcuin’s concluding verses; and it seems to have provided the model for a letter addressed by Bishop Arn to Cuculus, which is the second letter in the English collection, and preserved only here.230 Neither Dodo nor Cuculus is named elsewhere in Alcuin’s correspondence, although Cuculus is the subject of a poem with several manuscript-testimonies; and it is an old crux whether they are, in fact, a single individual, who like others had been given a Latin by-name (‘Cuckoo’). I incline to the view that they are; and I conclude (with all due reservations), as Sickel did more a century-and-a-quarter ago, that Dodo-Cuculus should be 229

Ep. no. 65; Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/1. Ep. no. 66; Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/2. Chase, p. 20 n., implausibly suggests that ‘Alcuin may have composed’ this letter also; and the remarks in his Introduction pp. 2–3 certainly do not, as he claims, explain the ‘collocation’ of the two letters in the two English manuscripts. For the Salzburg copy of ep. no. 65, see above. Arn’s letter to Cuculus is one of fewer than nine (perhaps only four or five!) to survive from his once extensive correspondence. 230

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     .  

credited with assembling this part of the letter-collection, presumably after reforming his behaviour, not long after the year 800.231 It is impossible to say when a copy of the Cuculus collection and the other letters in the earlier folios of Tib. travelled south, to be combined there with the skilfully-edited K‘3’ collection; and whether the early-ninth-century ?Canterbury collection and other letters in the later folios were immediately associated with that assemblage. The earliest evidence of the former’s availability at the metropolitan church is a letter addressed by Sigeric or his successor Ælfric to Bishop Wulfsige (III) of Sherborne, preserved in a near-contemporary copy in the opening folios of the ‘Sherborne Pontifical’ (Paris, BNF lat. 943): for a substantial part of it is excerpted from Alcuin’s ep. no. 114 (to Archbishop Eanbald II of York) and its final section may have drawn on other letters in the same collection.232 Verbatim copying of the text-version preserved in Tib. and departures from it are equally revealing. Among the first of these are the Canterbury letter’s mitem te et humilem ad meliores (for humiliores) and omnia vera honesta (for adv. honeste); a notable example of the second is the exhortation sit modesta in conviviis laetitia sit casta in ieiuniis perceptio, where Alcuin had almost certainly written sit modesta in conviviis LAUTITIA sit casta in ieiuniis laetitia but a succession of copyists, having difficulty with the uncommon lautitia, destroyed the word-play by replacing it with laetitia, which prompted an ingenious attempt at emendation by the Canterbury dictator;233 and the latter similarly, apparently having

231 Poem: MGH Poet. I, pp. 269–70 (carm. lvii), S.-K. no. 12034; letters as preceding notes; Sickel, ‘Alcuinstudien I’, pp. 525–6. Sickel is perhaps a little too eager to rescue Dodo-Cuculus from accusations ‘als Trunkenbold . . ., sondern nur als Freund einiger Gläser guten Weins’(!). 232 Ed. Stubbs, Memorials of St. Dunstan, pp. 406–8 (no. xxxi); Whitelock et al., Councils and Synods, 1.i, ed. pp. 226–9 (no. 41); for the manuscript, see most recently Dumville, Liturgy, pp. 82–4, 91, 93 (although his views are not universally accepted). Stubbs’s suggestion (p. 406 n.) that the writer had adapted Ælfweard of Glastonbury’s letter to Sigeric (‘paraphrased’ according to Brooks, Church of Canterbury, p. 281) is quite mistaken: remarkably, the true source had already been recognised by John Lingard in his History and Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church (London, 1845), 2, 309 n. 1. Note, however, that if Alcuin’s ep. 190 really is the source of a short phrase in Ælfweard’s letter, it would follow that at least part of the larger collection was available at Glastonbury at the beginning of the decade. 233 Lautitia may indeed be the reading in Tib., all other testimonies (including the early Vienna 795 fol. 175) having letitia: Chase’s ‘correction’ of the text in Vesp. (Two Letter-Books, p. 66), is misleading. It is defined by Paul the Deacon’s Festus (where Alcuin had encountered it?) as epularum magnificentia: alii a lavatione dictam putant,

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failed to appreciate the force of the probably uncommon rosea confusio (‘blushing in shame’), changed the original phraseology to si rosea CONFESSIO poenitentiae prçcedat. The first categoric evidence for the combining of several older collections into the one represented by the ?Canterbury-written Tib. may still be Wulfstan’s (or his amanuenses’) selection of letters from it for inclusion in Vesp. and occasional quotation elsewhere.234 But the letter to Wulfsige provides a probable terminus ante quem, and in conjunction with the Glastonbury texts supports the case for a southern English, but not precisely localized, origin. The final section of the Tiberius codex, the present folios 144v– 173, is quite distinct from the rest. Although commonly described (since Stubbs) as a Dunstan/Canterbury dossier or as ‘a collection of tenth-century letters’, it contains in fact a considerably more miscellaneous collection (never completely listed) of either twenty-seven or twenty-eight texts, depending on whether the Ovidian verse confection on fol. 144v is counted or not. The twenty-third (al. twentyfourth) item is likewise a confection of verses on the Sacraments and on two of the Virtues. Two of the ‘letters’ are also verse compositions, partly cento, which have not been traced elsewhere. The longest text is Augustine’s epist. ccv, Ad Consentium, on fols 146v–154; equally extraneous are the letters exchanged between Archbishop Ebo of Rheims and Bishop Halitgar of Cambrai on the latter’s compilation of a penitential: none of these seems to have been noticed in descriptions of the manuscript since Leland’s or indeed elsewhere.235 Likewise ignored is the twenty-fourth (twenty-fifth) item, a so-far unidentified prose text inc. Pulcherrimo perpulchro divineque theorie. Of the twenty tenthcentury prose letters, the majority found only here, six (only) are addressed to Dunstan as Archbishop, another six to Æthelgar or Sigeric who successively followed him at Canterbury (988–994), and two are addressed to King Edgar. Of the remaining six, one is an epistola quia apud antiquos hae elegantiae, quae nunc sunt, non erant, et raro aliquis lavabat: ed. W.M. Lindsay, Glossaria Latina, 4 (Paris, 1930) p. 117. The Canterbury letter’s perceptio seems to have the sense of ‘taking part’. 234 See below. 235 The Augustine letter is overlooked even by Römer, Handschriftliche Überlieferung Augustinus, II/2; for its possibly-Insular early transmission, cf. Goldbacher’s account of Boulogne 58 (63, 64) (CLA VI, no. 737) in Epist. Augustini 4, CSEL vol. 58, p. xxxv and Lowe in CLA cit. Leland’s listing (there are no excerpts) is Collectanea, 2, pp. 403, 404.

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     .  

commendatoria of unknown origin, one is almost certainly from Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester to a foreign duke or count (Arnulf of Flanders?),236 one—detached from Lantfrith’s Miracula s. Swithuni—is to Winchester, one is a letter about Glastonbury from a Pope John to a layman, not earlier than 983 (and therefore long after Dunstan’s departure from the abbey), and one is the previously-quoted letter from the abbot of Glastonbury to Archbishop Sigeric (of 991 or later?).237 The last item in the book, on fols 172v–173 purports to be a Papal letter of March 991, which was for that reason much cited by English twelfth- and thirteenth-century chroniclers. It is hardly possible to accept as authentically ‘papal’ a text dated at Rouen on 1 March 991 and lacking some of the most basic features of a product of the Roman chancery: but this is no reason for denying that it embodies a genuine record of a treaty, undocumented elsewhere, between King Æthelred and ‘Duke’ Richard of Normandy, in which a Papal legate (Bishop Leo of Trevi) was involved.238 There is no obvious theme or combining thread in this extraordinarily eclectic assemblage of material, except such as is provided by three successive archbishops of Canterbury. A possible interpretation is that Tib.’s exemplar for this section had originated as one of the earliest compilations of a new generation of Christ Church monastic scribes creating a new library in the early 990s: in which case, the pseudo-Papal letter might have been added later. An alternative, although a less likely one because the amanuenses or scribes responsible for the Wulfstan book Vesp. were already able to copy 236 Ed. Stubbs, Memorials of St. Dunstan, pp. 361–2; for its author, see Lapidge, ‘Bishop Æthelwold as scholar’, in: Bishop Æthelwold: his Career and Influence, ed. B. Yorke (Woodbridge, 1988), pp. 96–8. 237 Papal letter: Tib., fols 169v–170, printed Stubbs, Memorials of St. Dunstan, pp. 396–7 (no. xxv) and Whitelock et al., Councils and Synods, I.i, 173–4 (no. 36). There are no good grounds for doubting the letter’s authenticity or that the version inserted by William of Malmesbury in both his Gesta Regum (ii.151C: ed. Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, pp. 246–8) and his De antiquitate Glastoniensis ecclesiae is an interpolated one; it remains uncertain whether Johannes episcopus is John XIV (983–984 in) or John XV (985–996). H. Zimmermann, Papstregesten 911–1024, no. 623, opts for the former; the editors of Councils and Synods, cit., suspend judgement. 238 Ed. Stubbs, Memorials of St. Dunstan, pp. 397–8 (no. xxvi) from this manuscript only; ed. Whitelock et al., Councils and Synods I, 177–9 (no. 38), with improved readings from William of Malmesbury’s copy in his Gesta Regum, ii. 166 (ed. Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, pp. 276–8). The fullest account of its manuscript sources and use by later chroniclers is Zimmermann, Papstregesten, no. +695. The letter is strangely described by Thomson, William of Malmesbury, p. 161 n. 14 as ‘the latest precisely dateable letter of Dunstan’.

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several of its letters, is that the linking element is a connection with the English royal court, possibly after King Æthelred’s marriage to Emma of Normandy in 1002.239 Professor Rodney Thomson has indeed argued that, because of the ‘better’ readings he has identified in some of the partial copies of Alcuin’s letters in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum and Gesta Pontificum, the twelfth-century historian’s source was the putative exemplar, conjoined with the exemplar of the preceding twenty-two folios (beginning with the text of Alcuin’s ep. no. 311).240 Vesp. (Dümmler’s A2), BL Cotton Vespasian A. xiv pt. iii, is an interesting counterpart two centuries on to Vienna 795, although behind its miscellaneous didactic material and several scribes is a single and identifiable directing mind. Moreover, extending to only sixty-six leaves measuring 205 × 145 mm, it was evidently created for portability and personal use rather than for the school-room or scriptorium. The first seven of its eight quires (the sixth is a ‘ten’) provide the texts of thirty-seven letters, twenty-seven (or twenty-six) Alcuin’s, ten (or eleven) by other authors, and two non-letter items: all the letters are also in Tib.241 More than half-a-century’s debate over ‘York or Worcester?’ as its place of origin seems latterly to have been resolved on palaeographical grounds (although not unanimously) in favour of Worcester, which may also point to a dating not later than 1016: indeed, the arguments for York were perhaps always misconceived, since they depend very largely on the assumption—explicit or implicit in the late Dorothy Whitelock’s seminal studies of Wulfstan—that it would have been there that he found the collection of Alcuin and other letters from which his own selection was made.242 239 Brooks, Church of Canterbury, pp. 267–9 neatly summarises the manuscriptevidence for Christ Church scribal activity either side of A.D. 1000, as previously worked out by Ker, Bishop, Gneuss and others; but for some contrary views, see Dumville, English Caroline Script, Ch. III. A Canterbury origin of this final section was assumed by both Hohler and Thomson, who then (unwarrantably in my view) drew conclusions about the history of the entire collection from that fact: neither of them was aware that K‘3’ or a congener was used in the composition of letters written at Glastonbury as late as 990/94. For the six non-Alcuin letters from this section in Vesp. quire 6 and the one in Vesp. quire 7, see below. 240 Thomson, as above, p. 82 and n. 199. 241 Cf. Chase, Two Letter-Books, p. 12, who omits the letter ed. Stubbs, Memorials of St. Dunstan, pp. 384–5 (no. xx)—in Vesp. between his nos 16 and 17—and misrepresents the contents of Tib. corresponding to Vesp. quires 6 and 7. 242 Dumville, English Caroline Script, pp. 65–7 and esp. n. 290; J. Morrish Tunberg in: The Copenhagen Wulfstan Collection, Copenhagen Kongelike Bibliotek Gl. Kgl. Sam. 1595

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     .  

The probable relationship between the smaller and the larger collection turns, in the first instance, on the date to be assigned to Tib., and on the stage in Wulfstan’s life at which the compilation of Vesp. began. On Prof. David Dumville’s revised chronology of ‘English Caroline’ it is not absolutely excluded, although unlikely, that Tib. is the earlier of the two.243 The evidence of text-readings is unfortunately more equivocal than one would wish. The scribes of Vesp. were often careless, a fact which is apparent from Chase’s ‘Textual notes’ and Dümmler’s apparatus rather than from the first-named’s text; and the damage to Tib. makes the reading of some crucial places quite uncertain; shared error, not least in omission, is common. Nevertheless there is enough to indicate that Tib. cannot have been Vesp.’s exemplar. Thus, the third line of the verses that conclude the letter to Dodo read in Vesp.: . . . fert palam pagina patris; Tib. (and not merely Gale) has . . . olim feret pagina vitam.244 In ep. no. 7 Tib. has sub suae dicioni for Vesp.’s suç subegit dicioni; Tib.’s text of no. 8 has the readings Adelpaldi, Canfrido (probably) and mitte ad Rufam, which in Vesp. are Adelwaldi, Eanfrigdo (sic) and mittantur Rufu . . . Ut aliorum relationum compertum habeo famam tuam in Vesp.’s text of ep. no. 274 is (almost certainly) quia ex aliorum relationibus compertum habeo etc. in Tib.245 A common source for the two manuscripts must be supposed. William of Malmesbury’s supposed use of the final section of the pre-Tib. exemplar is not the only indication that this, which the ?Christ Church scribes copied more or less in its entirety and from ed. J.E. Cross and J. Morrish Tunberg, EEMF 25 (Copenhagen, 1993), pp. 36, 46. It is particularly unfortunate, therefore, that having made a palaeographical case for Worcester, Dumville only a few years later revived the possibility of a York origin ‘because its main contents (Alcuin, Epistolae) favour the latter’: see St. Oswald of Worcester: Life and Influence, ed. Nicholas Brooks and Catherine Cubitt, Studies in the Early History of Britain: The Makers of England 2 (London and New York, 1996), pp. 213, 239. Note, however, Morrish Tunberg’s observation (p. 46 n. 53) that ‘I do not recognise the two principal scribes’ of quires 1–5 among the Worcester scribes of other manuscripts. 243 See above. 244 Compare MGH Epp. IV, p. 109 (text and app.) and Chase, Two Letter-Books, p. 20. The verses are unfortunately not included in the fragmentary text in clm. 13581 (D). In the last of the prose part, however, Tib.’s Dum pauca tibi scribere curavi is supported by D, Vesp. having curå and the editions curaveram: ‘Dum meaning “while” generally takes the indicative’ in Alcuin; and although this is promptly contradicted by semel et iterum tinxeram, it is supported by Arn’s imitation (MGH Epp. IV, p. 110, Chase, Two Letter-Books, p. 21) . . . tinxi dum hanc cartulam scripsi. 245 Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/10 (p. 32), punctuates with a parenthesis before habeo and a full stop after tuam, and supposes that compertum is the rare Anglo-Latin substantive ‘fact’ (as in Bede, HE IV 25): for once, I am unpersuaded.

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which Wulfstan’s amanuenses had earlier copied their letter-texts, was in fact in the form of loose-bound libelli, rather than a bound codex. Vesp.’s first four-and-a-half quires (fols 114–148v line 2) are devoted to a mere ten letters, written by two hands successively. The first hand copies the texts of six Alcuin letters in an identical sequence, with one omission, to that on Tib. fols 21v–40, followed by the first two-thirds of the letter from Alchfrith the anchorite.246 The second hand, taking over part way down fol. 134v, completes the Alchfrith letter and then copies three letters of Alcuin’s which are the fortieth, fiftieth and fifty-second in Tib. The seemingly anomalous item here is the last, since it is ep. no. 17, the first letter in the K collection. The possibility that the putative exemplar might have had a lettertext from another collection, before the inclusion of K‘3’, seems clearly excluded by a whole range of non-T/S1 readings in Vesp.’s copy; and this could well have been the beginning of a new libellus. The originally blank fol. 148v (after line 2), was subsequently filled with a dedicatory poem, by Wulfstan himself.247 The rest of the quire is then used for the unique manuscript-source of the acts of the Chelsea synod in 816, written by two identifiable Worcester hands.248 The remaining three quires originated independently and are the work of several partly-identifiable Worcester scribes. The sixth quire begins with the very late letter to Archbishop Æthelheard which in Tib. comes immediately after the K-collection letters. This is then followed by a second Alcuin letter from the same section of Tib. (ep. no. 128, an earlier letter to the same addressee) and five of the tenthcentury letters; the quire is completed by three Alcuin letters and 246 For the two hands see Morrish Tunberg, Copenhagen Wulfstan Collection, p. 46. The omitted letter is ep. no. 31, to Hexham—deliberately, therefore? For the Alchfrith letter, see above, p. 88 at n. 220. 247 Inc. Qui legis hunc titulum domino da vota tonanti, S.-K. no. 13280; a more recent edition by N.R. Ker, ‘The handwriting of Archbishop Wulfstan’, in Ker, Books, Collectors and Libraries: Studies in the Medieval Heritage, ed. A.G. Watson (London, 1985), pp. 9–26, at pp. 20–1. The poem is excellently expounded, with an English translation, by Morrish Tunberg, The Copenhagen Wulfstan Collection, pp. 45–7, who also provides (ibid., Plate I) a facsimile of fol. 148v—which incidentally confirms the accuracy of Chase’s rendering (Two Letter-Books, p. 76) of the last two, verse, lines of ep. no. 17, against Dümmler’s (incorrect) apparatus. 248 Scribes ‘C’ (fols 149–153 line 6) and ‘G’ (fols 153 line 6–153v line 11), according to Morrish Tunberg, Copenhagen Wulfstan Collection, pp. 36, 41, with Plates II and III. The acta are ed. Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 579–85; for the proceedings and their context—the need to safeguard episcopal authority and property—see Brooks, Church of Canterbury, pp. 175–91 and Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, Ch. 7 (pp. 191–203).

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     .  

that from Pope Paul which, contrastingly, are in the earlier folios of Tib.249 The seventh quire (fols 164–171v) has the heading EPISTULE ALBINI—because this was the title on the cover of the exemplar? which would have extended far beyond Dümmler’s ep. no. 10. The first (identifiable?) Worcester scribe copies the first five letters in Tib.—four by Alcuin, one by Arn—omits one (no. 68, which would have been a perfectly good ‘formula-letter’),250 and continues with a copy of Alcuin’s earliest extant letter to Arn in, of course, its ‘register version’. The different(?) scribe of fols 168v (most)-171 has then jumped to the final Alcuin quire of Tib.’s exemplar and has crowded on to his leaves a sequence of no less than eight of its letters, including one or more not in fact by Alcuin, but omitting the last one there (that from Charles to Offa in 796), and finally a single one— to Dunstan from Abbot Wido of Blandinium—from the final section in Tib.251 A different hand, identifiable as Archbishop Wulfstan’s own, subsequently filled the blank space at the bottom of fol. 171v with a copy of a letter from Alcuin to Paulinus of Aquileia, almost certainly taken from the K‘3’ section of Tib.’s exemplar.252 Vesp.’s final quire ‘8’ (fols 172–179v), which it is unnecessary to regard as a later addition to the manuscript—it is on similar parchment to the preceding quire, and one of its three Worcester scribes (‘C’) wrote most of the conciliar addition to quire 5—is essentially a canonical collection, predominantly but not exclusively of southern English material extending over three centuries, with short digressions that appear to be extracts from longer works. Its penultimate item is a letter to an unnamed Pope on behalf of ‘all the bishops of Britain’, composed by Wulfstan using a letter of Alcuin’s which 249 Chase mistakenly asserts (Two Letter-Books, p. 9) that four of the letters ‘are not found in A1 at all’, and his ‘description’ of this quire (ibid., p. 12) is correspondingly very inaccurate. 250 The addressee, Adaula soror, is unidentified and could be either Continental or English: for the latter, compare the Edilu who is the one-hundred-and-eighty-fourth name in the ‘Lindisfarne’ Liber Vitae’s list of reginarum et abbatissarum (Gerchow, Gedenküberlieferung, p. 305). 251 The eight letters are (misleadingly) Dümmler’s epp. nos 45, 46, 256, 274, 235, 292, 293, 103, Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/7–14. The omitted letter is ep. no. 100, substantial extracts from which are in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum, i. 93 (ed. Mynors et al., p. 136). The Wido letter is ed. Stubbs, Memorials of St. Dunstan, pp. 380–1 (no. xvii), from Tib. fols 156v–7 and this manuscript. 252 Ep. no. 96, in Tib. at fol. 121v. There seems no reason other than its brevity why this letter should be selected for transcription. An instructive facsimile of Vesp. fol. 171v is in EEMF 17, appendix.

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     .  

101

is not in any of the main collections and which he may be assumed to have found at York or Worcester. The collection concludes with a letter of apology addressed to Wulfstan while he was still bishop of London, found only here.253 Wulfstan almost certainly kept Vesp. with him until his death in 1023; and although it has (I think) never been counted as a York cathedral library book there is a strong probability that it was there in the High Middle Ages. In the fourth and final part—a single quire—of the composite manuscript BL Cotton Faustina B. iv, a late-thirteenth or a fourteenth-century hand has copied the four Alcuin letters, Dümmler epp. nos 18, 16, 114 and 43. The opening ‘title’ is Epistola Albini seu Alcquini canonici ecclesiae Eboracense et magistri Karoli magni imperatoris; the heading of the fourth letter is Item epistola eiusdem Albini ad congregationem seu capitulum ecclesie Ebor[acensis]; the text of all four is that of Vesp., including Wulfstan’s autograph emendations. Before this it it may well have been joined at York by a copy of the ‘personal’ collection.254 The major, Tiberius, collection remained in the south, whether at Canterbury or elsewhere, until the Dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century.255

The Development of the Letter-Collections: the Evidence Summarised Whatever letters Alcuin may have written in the first two-thirds of his life, none have been preserved;256 even from the 780s only four or five survive. On his return to Northumbria from Francia in 790, however, he or an amanuensis began to keep copies, either in a ‘copy-book’ or in the form of loose sheets or libelli (the drafts?) but 253 Letter to the Pope (illi ): most recent edition in Whitelock et al., Councils and Synods, 1. i, pp. 441–7 (no. 61). Letter of apology: ed. Stubbs, Memorials of St. Dunstan, pp. 404–5; ed. D. Bethurum, The Homilies of Wulfstan (Oxford, 1957), pp. 376–7. 254 The long ‘pt. i’ of Faustina B. iv has a Holme Cultram ex libris, the short ‘pt. ii’ a Byland one. It cannot be assumed, however, that all four parts were combined somewhere in the north of England before the sixteenth century, or before Cotton acquired them: indeed, the final item, which is a Bury St. Edmunds addition, temp. Edward III, seems to exclude this. (The Alcuin letters are clearly not taken from the Bury copy of the T collection.) For BL H(arl.) 208 at York, see above, p. 75 and n. 178. 255 Above, p. 82 and n. 199. 256 For the possibility that a surviving letter of Archbishop Ælberht was composed by Alcuin, see below, Pt. II ch. 1.

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     .  

certainly with head-notes or endorsements, which in several instances preserve details of the addressee that cannot be deduced from the letter-text. Back in Francia, probably already while Alcuin was at the Aachen Court and certainly when he went to Tours, this practice was continued or revived but almost certainly in the looseleaf form and filed at least in part by recipients. Shortly after his arrival at St. Martin’s a modest-sized letter-formulary was created from some of the copies. Simultaneously, Alcuin was maintaining a more personal collection which included two letters written some five years earlier than any others that have been preserved; and copies of letters in this collection were sent to Paulinus of Aquileia c. 796/7. Not later than 799 Arn of Salzburg and St.-Amand was sent a selection of the letter-texts preserved in the main collection at Tours (in the case of three of them indeed, probably the actual archive copies) and had them transcribed, with letters of which he had been the addressee—‘recipient’s copies’—as part of a more comprehensive ‘school-book’. In late 799 a more extensive selection was made at Tours itself, either as a fuller but still handy formulary-book or as a ‘school-book’: this is represented by the K family of letter collections. Some two years later a more comprehensive collection was made, again at Tours, and for the most part directly from the archive (‘register’) copies, represented most fully by manuscripts of the T family. The head-notes of letters that are found in both K and T are often quite different, and it is likely that the new collection was from the start intended for wider dissemination. Some of its exclusions and omissions seem to reflect a conscious policy on the part of the compiler(s). About this time the church of York was sent a related but more limited collection of letters, which was subsequently combined with the collection already there to form the main component of the later A collection. At Salzburg c. 802/3, letters to its (arch)bishop that had not been included in the ‘basic Tours collection(s)’ formed a significant part—almost one-half of the total, and the only substantial ‘recipient’s collection’—of another assemblage of nearly seventy letters. A smaller southern-English ‘recipient’s collection’ may be incorporated in the later English collection(s). Ninth-, tenth- and eleventh-century copies of Alcuin’s correspondence depend overwhelmingly on one or more of the collections made in his lifetime or very soon after his death. The several stages in their formation and development are linked closely, as we shall see, with the unfolding of his career and reputation—or view of himself—as a whole.

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     .  

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Author, Notaries and Copyists Behind the existing collections of the letters (I have argued) lie both ‘copy-book’ or ‘register’ copies—at York and at Tours, possibly also for a time at the Court—and, in a limited number of cases, the letter as received and retained by the addressee and his/her community. Who was responsible for these lost versions? and what was the relationship between them? how far did Alcuin participate personally in the letter that was dispatched? The great Church Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries who were or aspired to be gentlemen as well as scholars regarded the physical act of writing, the preparation of the ‘publishable’ version of any text, as tasks to be performed only by humbler creatures, even in the most unlikely circumstances. Bede was familiar with the distinction, without being able to take advantage of it: addressing Bishop Acca of Hexham in one of his early prefaces, he explained that progress had been slow because he not only composed the work but in his community he was also perforce notarius and librarius, i.e. the person who wrote it down and the person who made the fair copy.257 Alcuin, who was no gentleman, was eventually in a position to take his cue from the more fortunate early Fathers. As a mere deacon in a cathedral community, at least until his ‘appointment’ as magister and possibly even later, he is more likely to have been called on to write for others than to have had someone write for him! The marginalia in insular script added to an eighthcentury Tours copy of conciliar acta are an appropriate reflection of those earlier years.258 Alcuin, like Bede and his predecessors, intermittently uses dictare in the wider sense of ‘to compose’: but even in pre-Tours letters the word commonly has the force of ‘composing aloud, dictating to a scribe’; and the earliest stratum of the English collection of his letters provides (I have argued) strong if not absolutely conclusive evidence of the involvement of one or more amanuenses

257 Bede, In Lucam Prol.: ed. Hurst, CCSL 120, p. 7. The distinction, and the use of librarius in this specific sense (otherwise very uncommon in the Fathers), is already clear in the writings of Jerome—Bede’s source therefore? On this, see E. Arns, Le Technique du Livre d’après Saint Jérome (Paris, 1953), pp. 52, 62–3: pointing out, however (p. 63), that the distinct functions may be performed by the same individual. 258 Compare Alcuin’s later reference to York clergy qui scribendi studio deputentur: ep. no. 114 (p. 169). For the marginalia in Paris BNF lat. 1572 as Alcuin’s own, see below Pt. II ch. 1.

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     .  

when Alcuin was again living in York in the early 790s. It is only at Tours, and indeed at the very end of the decade, that he refers specifically to ‘notarial’ intervention in the letters and other writings composed by him—beginning with the errors introduced notaria manus when answering the king’s queries on computistic or astronomical matters (798), and subsequently ‘summoning my secretary’ (accito notario: a phrase he may have come across in a recently-read work of Jerome’s) to pen a letter to Arn without further delay. But since at least one of the letters of which the extant copies have ‘standard’ words in Tironian notes was written while Alcuin was still at the Aachen Court, an earlier use of notaries is likely.259 The intervention of anonymous notaries who take down Alcuin’s oral compositions— treatises and letters—on wax tablets or parchment sheets and/or prepare the fair copy which goes to the dedicatee or recipient does not in itself exclude a strongly personal note in the preserved correspondence. Amanuenses, like other copyists, will make mistakes, have their own ways of spelling or even change what they hear because they think it wrong, as Alcuin hints had happened when addressing the king. The Tours notaries may well have introduced new lexicographic features and favoured syntactical forms with which Alcuin had not been familiar in his English days: a possible example is expressing the future by habere with an infinitive (dicere habent ‘they will say’, for example).260 Dümmler, in fact, persuaded himself that grammatical errors and ‘incorrect’ spellings in the texts of the letters were almost always attributable to the notaries—or to later copyists: for this he was magisterially rebuked by Bruno Krusch, when he edited Alcuin’s ‘Life of St. Vaast’. There are, indeed, powerful reasons for supposing that in small details of vocabulary and spelling, as well as in content, the letters and other ‘writings’ of Alcuin are generally a precise record of his dictated language.261 259 Epp. nos 149 (p. 245), 207 (p. 344), the latter of June 799; Jerome, Comm. in epist. ad Galatas, PL 36, col. 309A (quoted by Arns, Technique du Livre, p. 50, to support the rarity of Jerome’s writing in his own hand). For Alcuin’s interest in ‘Jerome on Galatians’ at about this time, see Vienna Nat. bibl. 795, fols 147–48v. 260 Pauline Taylor, ‘The construction habere-with-infinitive in Alcuin, as an expression of the future’, The Romanic Review 15 (1924), 123–127. Note, however, that this usage—a feature of, e.g., epp. nos 122, 156, 194, etc.—occurs in letters many centuries previously, and does not necessarily reflect the influence of the contemporary spoken language. 261 E. Dümmler, ‘Alchvinstudien’, Sitzungsber. Berliner Akad., 1891, pp. 495–523, at pp. 499–500; ‘Mea autem opinione epistolographus ea exceptione (notariorum incu-

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     .  

105

It is apparent, for example, that Alcuin took with him to the Continent the early Anglo-Latin confusion, purely phonetic in origin, of flagrantia(-tans, etc.) with fragrantia(-tans) ‘sweetness of God, sweet odour of Saints’ bodies’. The spelling in fl- is that of the most authoritative manuscripts of his De rhetorica, of the prose and verse Vita Willibrordi and of the last chapter of the De virtutibus et vitiis; and editors and commentators who ‘correct’ those texts to read fragrantia to eliminate possible confusions of sense are wrong to do so.262 Similarly, like other Insular writers Alcuin adopted the so-called ‘hyperurban’ spelling anthleta for athleta, ‘contestant for God’.263 Even more revealing is his treatment of the words adolescens and adolescentia. Few ‘secular’ terms occur more frequently in the letters than these, either because Alcuin was recalling that phase in his own life or because of his constant preoccupation with the educational and disciplinary needs of others at that stage. They have a precise meaning for him: from age fourteen to the late twenties, nominally twenty-seven or twenty-eight although by this time there were doubtless many who were unsure what age they were. (If this is an agedivision which does not seem very helpful or acceptable today, it becomes less objectionable if we translate it as ‘young manhood’.)264 riae menda imputare Alcuino libuisse) minime absolvitur, nam si omnia dictasset neque dictata relegisset, inauditae neglegentiae reus esset, id quod in tam celeberrimo praeceptore vix praesumendum est’: Krusch, MGH SRM III, p. 405 n. 4. For the origin and possibly pre-800 date of the oldest manuscript of the Vita, Merseburg Dombibl. 105 pt. ii (fols 85–105), cf. Bischoff, Lorsch2, p. 59. 262 See Aldhelm, De Virginitate ( pr.) c. 9 (ed. Ehwald, p. 237) suavi odoris flagrantia dulcius redoleant, c. 51 (id., p. 307) nardi pistici flagrantia (no reported manuscript variants for either place); Bede, HE III 8, V 12, and the other instances cited by C. Plummer, Bedae Opera Historica (Oxford, 1896), II, p. 151; and, possibly but not certainly, Æthelwulf, De Abbatibus, ed. A. Campbell (Oxford, 1967), line 702 namquae rosae rutilant per totum et lilia flagrant. C. Halm’s 1863 edition of Alcuin’s De rhetorica, from Munich clm. 6407—a Verona manuscript copied directly from a contemporary Tours exemplar:—and manuscripts dependent on it, correctly printed odores flagrantes and aeterna flagrantia (Rhetores Latini minores (Leipzig), p. 550 lines 12 ff.), which W.S. Howell’s 1941 edition (Rhetoric of Alcuin, pp. 152, 162) changed to frag-, because Halm’s text ‘does not accord with the context’(!). The verse Vita Willlibrordi has at tit. xxvi Et quod miri odoris flagrantia (Stuttgart and Alençon manuscripts: see in the text c. xxvi, line 1, miri flagrantia odoris (MGH Poet., I, pp. 208, 216); and similarly in the corresponding chapters of the prose Vita, ed. W. Levison, MGH SSRM VII, pp. 135, 136. 263 Ep. no. 139 (p. 221 l. 12), to and of Paulinus of Aquileia, where Dümmler wrongly relegates the testimony of manuscript T to the apparatus: compare B. Löfstedt, Der Hibernolateinische Grammatiker Malsachanus (Uppsala, 1965), p. 104 and M.W. Herren, Hisperica Famina, 2 (Toronto, 1987), p. 116. 264 A six-fold age-division had been ‘canonised’ by Augustine; it was subsequently

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106

     .  

According to Gottschalk, who through all his troubles and enmities maintained a high regard for Alcuin (perhaps because he had never met him), the spelling adulescens, insisted on by the late-Antique grammarian Caper was wrong: the correct spelling was always with -o-, although distinguishing between the participle adolesc- and the noun adolisc-; and Alcuin, as befitted a holy and learned man, always used the spelling adoliscens—and correspondingly adoliscentia etc.—in his Bible when the noun was intended.265 Manitius noticed this observation when Gottschalk’s authorship of the text in which it occurs was not known, but seems not to have stimulated any subsequent commentator or editor to pursue the matter; and even the best of modern editions of Alcuin’s writings do not suggest that he consistently favoured this spelling. In fact he clearly did. Both palaeographers and Vulgate scholars are now in general agreement that the oldest of the great Tours Bibles to survive complete, written within Alcuin’s lifetime, is the one at St. Gallen, where it has been since at least the mid-ninth century.266 A sample check of relevant passages in Genesis (4.23; 8.21) and in the Gospels (such as Mc 14.51; Lc 7.14, 15.12, 13) shows only the adolisc- spelling.267 This is likewise a common, although not absolutely consistent, feature of the Tours Gospel-book now London BL Harley 2790, which is usuadopted by Isidore in his Etymologiae and the earlier stages defined in units of seven ( fourteen) years, pueritia tendens usque ad quartumdecimum annum, followed by adolescentia quae porrigitur usque ad viginti octos annos: Etym. XI.2, 1–4, with the comments of J. Fontaine, Isidore de Séville, 1, p. 377 and nn. Isidore is presumably the—probably indirect—source of the ‘school’ fragment in the early-ninth century BL Cotton Vespasian B. vi, fol. 107, which reads Prima aetas infantia VII annis. secunda pueritia XIIII. tertia aduliscentia XXVII ann[is] etc. 265 D.C. Lambot, Oeuvres Théologiques et Grammaticales de Godescalc d’Orbais (Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, Études et Documents, fasc. 20; Louvain, 1945), pp. 388–9, cf. p. 385. The passage in Caper, De orthographia (ed. Keil, Grammatici Latini 7, col. 100) in fact simply distinguishes between adulescens nomen and adolescens participium. According to Sandra Bruni, in her edition of Alcuin’s De orthographia (Millennio Medievale 2; Florence, 1997), Caper is the source of two of its entries: narro et narratio per duo r scribatur at no. 253 (p. 22), and protenus per e adverbium locale. . . . protinus per i temporale est. . . . at n. 317 (p. 26). 266 St. Gallen, Stiftsbibl., cod. 75. The earliest known ‘Alcuin Bible’, according to Fischer, ‘Alkuin-Bibeln’ [1971], Lateinische Bibelhandschriften (1985), pp. 256–7, cf. [1965], idem, p. 125, is Paris BNF lat. 8847 (not in Rand’s list) of which only Prophets and NT survive (E in modern collations): I have unfortunately been unable to check its orthography. 267 The collation was made for me by P. Johannes Duft, one of the many kindnesses, through three decades, of that distinguished custodian of the St. Gallen Library.

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ally dated to the early years of Alcuin’s successor Fridugis. More remarkably, it is also that of the ‘Bamberg Bible’, written at Marmoutier in the years either side of 840; and of the three-column Bible, Rome Bibl. Vallicelliana B.6, which an older generation of editors believed offered the Alcuin-text in its most pure form, but which is now regarded as a probably Rheims book of c. 870: both evidently preserved the orthography, and indeed other ‘archaic’ features, of their exemplars.268 Long before then, however, some unknown ‘master of the scriptorium’ at Tours had introduced the standard spellings, which are therefore those of a majority of the surviving ‘Tours Bibles’. Nor is Alcuin’s preferred orthography limited to Bibles where his editorial intervention is evident. It is, for example, also adopted in the early (c. 800) Echternach copy of Alcuin’s Vita Willibrordi, which he had composed at Tours not long after his arrival there.269 In the light of this we need to look again at the letters, but taking account of Dümmler’s apparatus and the manuscripts, rather than the edited texts. Here we find that in the earliest datable examples, beginning with the address-clause and text of the letter ‘to the young of St. Martin’s’, written perhaps as early as 789 and certainly before 796 and re-issued as one of the texts in Alcuin’s Manualis libellus of 802, the orthography of the key manuscripts is indeed adolisc-. The spelling of the noun with o and i is similarly that of a letter of the mid-790s to Hexham, whether in the Tours-Troyes manuscript, the early Salzburg manuscript Vienna 808 or the St. Gallen copy of the ‘basic Tours collection’.270 Traces of the same orthography 268 BL Harl. 2790 has, for example, adoliscens in Lc 7.14 but aduliscentior in Lc 15.12, 13. Bamberg SB. Msc. Bibl. 1 (for the date and origin of which see above, n. 44) was generously made available to me at short notice in June 1993 by Dr. Bernhard Schemmel, ‘Leiter der Staatsbibliothek’, enabling me to examine the orthography and some other features of Gn, I Rg, I Sm, Ecl, Mc, Lc: the careful checking of the first scribes’ transcription against the exemplar is indicated by, e.g., the ‘correction’ on fol. 100a of (I Rg 14.6) Dixit autem Ionatha ad aduliscentem armigerum to adol-! 269 Stuttgart, Württemb. Landesbibl., HB XIV 1, with Levison’s edition, MGH SSRM VII, pp. 81–141, at 118 and 119 (cc. 3 and 4). Note, however, Levison’s view (p. 105) that the archetype of all extant copies of the Vita litteris Saxonicis exaratum erat—evidence that it was written at Echternach, therefore? 270 Ep. no. 131: three times in the opening seventeen (printed) lines in the three manuscripts Cologne Dombibl. 106 (which I would like to attribute to scribes gathered at the Aachen Court in the last years of Charlemagne’s reign, although there are difficulties: cf. Bischoff, Katalog, 1, no. 1919), Munich clm. 14447 (a stylish Salzburg ms. of the 820s, which Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 2, p. 140 claimed was

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     .  

are indeed not infrequent elsewhere, although the scribe of T commonly ‘corrects’ to adulescens. Historically, this early Tours scribe and Caper, not Alcuin and Gottschalk, were correct. Why then had Alcuin rejected ‘authority’, on which elsewhere he put such stress? The answer in the first place is, plausibly, that this was the spelling which he had encountered most often in his York days, and perhaps particularly in Biblical codices. It is, for example, the orthography of the unique—ninthcentury Continental—manuscript of a letter written by Abbess Ælfflæd of Whitby (ob. ca. 714); it is also the predominant spelling of the Old Testament Wisdom Books in an eighth-century Insular (possibly but not certainly Northumbrian) copy.271 Secondly, and perhaps more important: the difference in pronunciation betwen u and o had considerably weakened since the Classical period (compare, for example, the confusion between doctores and ductores in many copies of Alcuin’s writings), so that the differentiation of meaning could only be satisfactorily indicated by changing the vowel quality of another syllable, much as Fowler’s ‘ensure’ and ‘insure’. In other words, it had a practical value in lectio, exposition and dictation. The inclusion of a letter in one or other of the early collections does not presuppose a striving for literary effect—in vocabulary or structure—or concern with a theme or themes of more than immediate interest; that, indeed, is more likely to be true of some of the letters preserved outside the main collections. Two letters written two-and-a-half years apart and with distinct manuscript traditions illustrate this well. The earlier is one of late July 798 addressed to clearly ‘offenbar’ derived directly from the lost copy sent by Alcuin to Arn: in fact, this is by no means certain; and cf. Bischoff himself, idem, p. 75) and St. Gallen Stiftsbibl. 267 (St. Gallen, s. ix ex); and in the concluding section (MGH Epp. IV, p. 198) in the first two of these. It is also the preferred orthography of the later, i.e. tenth-century, Basel Univ.-Bibl. B.VI. 3 (not reported by Dümmler), where uniquely the letter accompanies Alcuin’s two Trinitarian treatises and may therefore represent a distinct tradition. It is not, however, a feature of the text of the letter in the ‘Fleury monastic florilegium’ in Vatican BAV Reg. lat. 140 (this part of c. 820), which almost certainly derives from the pre-manualis libellus tradition. For the date of the letter, see below, pt. II ch. 3. Hexham letter: ep. no. 31, apparatus. 271 MGH Epist. Selectae, 1, ed. Tangl, no. 8 (pp. 3–4); London BL Egerton 1046 (CLA 2, 194a, b), for which see below, Pt. II ch. 2. Among the spellings in the latter are Prv 5.18: laetare cum muliere adoliscentiae tuae, quoted in precisely this form in a letter of 796 (Ep. no. 119, from the later Rheims manuscript T *); a series of such spellings in Ecclesiastes; and marginalia to the latter part of Canticum Canticorum although others there have been ‘corrected’.

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     .  

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Arn: it is transcribed first among those in the final quire of the St.Amand book, Vienna 795, for which Bischoff ’s ‘scribe (1)’ is responsible; and it was copied subsequently in three successive Salzburg (or Salzburg-area) manuscripts representing over three-quarters of a century’s scriptorial activity. Yet it is simply to ask its recipient what is going on, without any comments, and advising him in quite specific terms where he (Alcuin) expected to be in August and September so that they might meet, while warning Arn of the possible difficulty of food-supplies: for this reason it is one of the very few extant letters to use the Frankish ‘administrative’ terminology for estates (villae, curtes). It does not include a single Biblical quotation, paraphrase or even echo, but does have a fair sprinkling of colloquial (syntactical) usages.272 The second letter, preserved only in the (personal?) H collection, is one addressed ‘by a father to his sons’ and sent to unnamed disciples who were with the king-Emperor in Italy in 800/801. It makes no direct allusion to the momentous events that were then unfolding or recently concluded there, on the course of which Alcuin reputedly exercised a decisive influence. It has been supposed to include two echoes of Classical texts—one, and perhaps both, mistakenly—but again no Biblical quotation. The opening sentences are, however, an elaborate metaphor on the Winds as conveyers of personal feelings and news; while the final clauses are a practical suggestion for transmitting a reply, via a returning AngloSaxon pilgrim who will pass through Troyes and the monastery of St. Lupus, from which it will be brought to Tours. In a passage which has no precise parallel elsewhere, Alcuin recalls the happy times, before all things were changed, ‘when in our household we played together litterali tessera’ (a phrase which the St.-Denis copyists found quite incomprehensible!), referring perhaps to a block or tablet inscribed with letters or syllables as a teaching aid, or to written tokens of affection as school exercises.273 272 Ep. no. 150. The successive ninth-century copies are: Vienna 808 (S1) at fols 107–8 (scribe ‘beta’), Munich clm. 14743 (S1*) at fols 8–8v (formulaic), Munich clm. 4650 (B) at fols 77v –78v (originally the final quire, where the Alcuin letters are full and not formulaic texts); for S1* see n. 123 above. According to Dümmler’s apparatus the distinctive sentence Manda vero per nostras curtes: quicquid ibi erit omnia tibi parata erunt is omitted from the copy in B: in fact it is present there but omitted (unsurprisingly) in S1*. 273 Ep. no. 215. Is the lemma Ad filios apud domnum imperatorem in palatio commorantibus <sic in both mss.> a slip by the ‘compiler’? or is palatium used here in the standard pre-Aachen sense of Court (irrespective of location)? Quando in laribus nostris

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The philologist of an earlier generation who believed she had identified ‘popular Romance (spoken)’ elements in the Latinity of Alcuin’s letters may have been unduly optimistic when she went on to claim that these are ‘practically conversations with his correspondents. The subject-matter is personal, the style fluent and spontaneous, the author emotionally stirred and evidently speaking from his heart when he admonishes or laments (and there is hardly a letter in which he is not doing either one or the other)’. But there are, I suggest, several different levels of evidence to justify the claim that Alcuin’s collected correspondence is at least a partial exception to the often-expressed doubts ‘whether there were any private letters in the modern sense of the word’ in the Middle Ages, unless on an excessively-narrow and post-Romantic definition of ‘private’.274

Amicitia and Sexual Orientation If this is conceded, we are invited to reconsider some of the more elaborate, less obviously documentary, letters and especially those in which the literary ‘high’ style is linked with expressions or notions of amicitia, ‘friendship’, with or without associated terms such as dulcedo.275 The former word is almost totally absent from both the Vulgate pariter lusimus litterali tessera: the copyist of H (BL Harl. 208) wrote litteraliter sera, and it was left to the nineteenth-century editors to restore the original wording; the copyist of Paris, BNF, n.a. lat. 1096 (H2), which was unknown to them, actually wrote (at fol. 30) litterali tessera but then erased the t! No comparable or even approximately similar term is to be found in the computer concordance of Patristic and medieval texts, CETEDOC CD-ROM. Dümmler cited Terence, Adelphi IV 7, 21: quasi quom ludas tesseris, but the context is not helpful to an understanding of Alcuin’s usage. More to the point seems to be Ps.-Maximus epist. 2, 7 (PL 57, col. 943 D; also printed as Ps.-Jerome, epist. 6, PL 30, col. 90), now regarded as a composition of the Aquitanian Eutropius, CPL3, 566a: nec in ludo aliquo litteratorio (‘grammatical’) inter puerulos oscitantes. 274 Taylor, ‘The construction habere-with-infinitive’, p. 127 n. 6; but for the continuity of ‘the ancient concept of the letter as substitute for conversation’ from lateAntiquity to the twelfth century, see C.D. Lanham, ‘Salutatio’ Formulas in Latin Letters to 1200: Syntax, Style and Theory, Münchener Beiträge zur Mediävistik u. RenaissanceForschung 22 (Munich, 1975), pp. 103–4. The second quotation is from G. Constable, Letters and Letter-Collections, Typologie des Sources du Moyen Âge Occidental, fasc. 17 (Turnhout, 1976), p. 11. 275 The best treatment of amicitia, amici, in Alcuin’s correspondence remains that of B.P. McGuire, Friendship and Community: the Monastic Experience 350–1250 (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1988), pp. 117–27. The remarkable pioneer study of Mother Adele Fiske, ‘Alcuin and mystical friendship’, Studi Medievali ser. 3, 2 (1961), 551–75 (a revised version in her Friends and Friendship in the Monastic Tradition, Cuernavaca (Mexico),

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New Testament and early-medieval liturgy; by contrast it is not uncommon, and with the sense of ‘an affective relationship between persons (or groups)’, in Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) and in Maccabees. It passed into the common vocabulary of Carolingian authors with a range of associations derived possibly from those Old Testament books, but more certainly from letters and treatises of the Latin Fathers, who in turn owed much to Cicero even when they parted from him; and it had acquired additional meanings along the way.276 In correspondence between monarchs, it is one half of pax et amicitia, which corresponds very closely to its present-day political equivalent, signifying just as much or as little as the parties to it wish it to signify, and easiest to maintain when they have no competing interests; it can signify a formal treaty, as in both Bede and Einhard; it is the condition established by the payment of compensation to terminate a vendetta; it is the natural relationship between bloodrelatives and in some regions between ‘kindred by the milk’, those who have shared a common fosterage. It comes to be used of the relationship between lord and vassal.277 Alcuin very occasionally uses the word in its public or political sense. But in the overwhelming majority of instances the amicitia to which he alludes is a close personal bond, without material or legal ‘consideration’—although it 1970), took a different line, which ultimately fails to convince me and (I believe) other students of Alcuin: in her view, when Alcuin speaks of amicitia as a divine gift, ‘he is directly in the platonistic tradition’, seeing in it ‘the only force capable of re-creating humanity: for friendship was the complete actualization of the caritas Christi ’ (ibid., pp. 574, 575). 276 Representative recent studies are P.A. Brunt, ‘Amicitia in the late Roman Republic’, Proc. Cambr. Phil. Soc. n.s. 2, 191 (1965), 1–20; McGuire, Friendship and Community, Intro. and chs. I–II; C. White, Christian Friendship in the Fourth Century (Cambridge, 1992), with the review by P. Rousseau in JournEcclHist, 45 (1994), 116–18. For the expression of friendship as the essential nature of letters, see especially K. Thraede, Einheit—Gegenwart—Gespräch. Zur Christianisierung antiker Brieftopoi, Diss. Bonn (1968); idem, Grundzüge griechisch-römischer Brieftopik = Zetemata, 48 (Munich, 1970). In Vg. NT amicitia is uniquely in Iac. 4.4, and there distinctively as amicitia mundi; in Io 15.14–15, however, Christ addresses his disciples as his amici. For masses pro amico (Gelasian and Gregorian sacramentaries), see Bullough, Friends, Neighbours and Fellow-drinkers: Aspects of Community and Conflict in the Early Medieval West, H.M. Chadwick Memorial Lectures, 1 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 5 n. 8. 277 See, most conveniently, the entries amicitia, amicus in Niermeyer’s Lexikon Minus and in MLWB. 1, cc. 560–62 (particularly clear and full), 563–66, with the additional examples in Bullough, ‘Early medieval social groupings: the terminology of kinship’, Past and Present, no. 45 (1969), 12 n. 21, 15 n. 26. For amicitia ‘treaty’, see HE I 1: vel amicitia vel ferro (ed. Plummer, p. 12; ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 18); but in HE IV 25 (Colgrave and Mynors, p. 426) it is an improper relationship between the sexes.

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     .  

may be confirmed by a free-will exchange of gifts—between himself and either the recipient(s) of the letter or a third party known to both. It is quite distinct from caritas, whether in the Pauline and Iohannine spiritual sense—with its alternative dilectio, put into Christ’s mouth in St. John’s Gospel (13.35 and 15.13)—or as the euphoric good feeling in one’s cups, permissible even in monasteries on special occasions (as a letter of 796 to the monks of Murbach acknowledges).278 To those to whom a spiritual or intellectual interpretation is the only permissible one, the bond of ‘friendship’ to which Alcuin so often appeals was one which united separate wills and intellects in a common purpose, the pursuit of virtue in this life and eternal salvation hereafter: which is why its natural corollary and extension is the bond of prayer. The roots of such a notion, although without the element of salvation, are to be found in pre-Christian writings. For Cicero, its most authoritative exponent, and those who followed him, that highest form of friendship was essentially moderate, rational and unemotional, yet incorporating elements of gentleness and sweetness that brought joy to intimacy.279 So it was still for Ambrose, who had actually read Cicero’s (Laelius) de amicitia and drew on it for the final chapters of his De officiis ministrorum; so it was also, with more reserve and coolness, for Cassian (who almost certainly knew the pagan author only at second hand) in the very different context of his ‘Conferences’ (Conlationes) for monks.280 Alcuin cannot be shown to have known Ambrose’s text; he was almost certainly familiar with the Conlationes, although not provably in his York days;281 and even 278 Dilectio is the earlier, caritas a later and eventually the preferred translation of the Greek. Compare Alcuin’s Illa caritas quae in pleno potatur calice in ep. no. 117, on which see B. Bischoff, ‘Caritas-Lieder’ (1950), MaSt, 2, pp. 56–77; he follows this with a brief definition, or rather characterization, of caritas in the monastic context. For a fuller treatment see his De virtutibus et vitiis c. 3, PL 101, cols 615C–616A (not certainly original to Alcuin). 279 Brunt, ‘Amicitia’; McGuire, Friendship and Community, pp. xxxii–xxxvi. 280 Ambrose: M. Testard, ‘Recherches sur quelques méthodes de travail de saint Ambroise dans le De officiis’, Recherches Augustiniennes 24 (1989), 65–112, with a conspectus of the modern literature on his concept of amicitia, ibid, n. 148; Saint Ambroise: Les Devoirs, ed. M. Testard, 2 vols., Collection des Universités de France (Paris, 1984, 1992). Cassian: Conlationes, ed. M. Petschenig (CSEL 13; Vienna, 1886), ch. xvi; McGuire, Friendship and Community, pp. 78–81. 281 Ep. no. 209 is very poor evidence for knowledge of the Conlationes—or no evidence at all: compare Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, p. 100 n. 24 and Wallace-Hadrill, Bede Historical Commentary, p. 96; and the naming of Cassian in ep. no. 203 is as the author of the much less common De incarnatione Domini,

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if, as seems very likely, Tours had a copy of Cicero’s work in Alcuin’s lifetime, there is nothing to suggest that he had read it.282 The tone of his letters is very different. Amicitia is here associated with a highly-coloured, emotional language, expressed in the vocabulary of physical contact and almost impossible not to describe as sensual or erotic. Witness the letter to his younger contemporary, Bishop Arn of Salzburg, written from England in the latter part of 790: ‘I treasure the memory of loving friendship, longing that some day the desired time will come when I may put my longing arms around your neck; if only I could fly like Habbakuk,283 how quickly I would rush to embrace you and how eagerly I would kiss not only your eyes, ears and mouth but also each finger and toe not once but many times’. There are many later letters in the same vein; the greater number, but by no means all, are among those addressed to Arn and preserved in the St.-Amand and Salzburg collections.284 But before a knowing, post-Boswell ( John) and post-Holroyd, generation draws the ‘obvious’ conclusion, it would be well to heed the wise words of critics and historians who have commented on similar phraseology in other Christian writers and on the actual displays of such emotion at various times in the past. C.S. Lewis, writing well before the recent plethora of scholarly works on medieval sexuality and homo-erotic language, observed that: ‘Kisses, tears and embraces are not in themselves evidence of homosexuality. The implications would be, if nothing else, too comic. Hrothgar embracing which had already been used for Alcuin’s Liber contra haeresim Felicis. A probably English but unlocalized (fragmentary) copy of the Conlationes of s. viii2 is now Kassel, Gesamthochschulbibl., Mss.-Anhang (now 2o Ms.theol. 267), CLA VIII, 1143 (with a wrong shelf-mark). Cassian’s name does not, however, figure in the ‘York booklist’; and although the Conlationes could have been a significant influence on the Insular development of protective and private prayer, no direct quotation has so far been identified in the ‘Book of Cerne’ or other early English prayer-books: SimsWilliams, Religion and Literature, pp. 277–9, 309–10). 282 The evidence for this is Berlin, Staatsbibl., lat. 4o 404 (P in editions of Laelius), which is not a ‘Kriegsverlust’, but at the time of writing still detained at Cracow. Its attribution to Tours is beyond doubt (cf. J.G.F. P[owell] in Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds p. 122—one of the least satisfactory sections of that work); and Bischoff ’s final dating for it (Katalog, 1, no. 384) is ‘IX Jh, Anfang’ (!), i.e. of roughly the same time as Troyes 1165. The first Carolingian author to quote Laelius seems to be Paschasius Radbertus: Ganz, Corbie, p. 83. 283 Dn (Vulg.) 14.32–8 (33–9): Habbakuk was transported by the angelus Dei from Judaea to Babylon and back again. 284 Ep. no. 10, on the manuscript transmission of which, see above, p. 54 and n. 123. For comparable language in letters to Paulinus of Aquileia see epp. nos 28, 86.

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     .  

Beowulf, Johnson embracing Boswell (a pretty flagrantly heterosexual couple) and all those hairy old toughs of centurions in Tacitus, clinging to one another and begging for last kisses when the legion was broken up . . . all pansies? If you can believe that, you can believe anything. On a broad historical view it is, of course, not the demonstrative gestures of Friendship among our ancestors but the absence of such gestures in our own society that calls for some special explanation. We, not they, are out of step’.285 Sir Richard Southern commented on comparable passages in St. Anselm’s correspondence that ‘they are not expressions of friendship as we understand it. But still less are they expressions of the passionate love which such words would now suggest. They could not have been written in the next century, when language of this kind had been appropriated by the poets of romantic love between men and women. We are still in the period when love was essentially an intellectual concept. No doubt [such] words were written under the impulse of a strong emotion. But the nature of the emotion may be judged from the concluding sentence of one letter directing that a companion of the recipient ‘was to regard everything in it as applying to him also’.286 Much of this is doubtless true.287 Even those who, reasonably, hold to a metaphorical or allegorical interpretation of Alcuin’s language of friendship have still to explain how he came to adopt it; and this is not less so if we say, with the author of a fine book on Friendship and Community, that in the letter to Arn and others like it: ‘Alcuin is telling his friend that he loves and needs him, not in a sexual sense and not in a political one (!), but in terms of a close personal bond’.288 In part, he had indeed been anticipated by earlier Anglo-Latin letter-writers. What surely distinguishes his letters from superficially similar ones composed by others is the intensity of their language, and the linking of the feelings expressed with other emotions that are 285 The Four Loves (London, 1960), ch. 4 ‘Friendship’, p. 75. For John Boswell’s very contentious views on medieval homosexuality, see below. 286 Southern, St. Anselm (1963 edition), p. 70. 287 But Jean Leclercq, for one, would hardly accept Southern’s quoted view of the change that took place between the late-eleventh and the (mid-)twelfth century: see his Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France: Psycho-historical Essays (Oxford, 1979). For a significantly different approach by Southern himself in his ‘revised’ Anselm biography, see St. Anselm (1990 edition), esp. pp. 138–53; on which see further, p. 117 and n. 294. 288 McGuire, Friendship and Community, p. 118. In spite of McGuire’s sub-title, the discussion of ‘friendship in Alcuin’s letters’ is one of several sections of the book which have nothing to do with monks or the monastic life.

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peculiar to Alcuin’s correspondence with a select group of individuals whom he had known from the 780s, and whose silences or (deliberate) absences he demonstrably resented. There are, moreover, three pieces of evidence which hint that Alcuin’s use of homoerotic language in the letters is not just an extravagantly-expressed plea for affective and supportive friendship. The first is the poem inc. Nudus eat hospes, placeat cui ludere mecum, for which the lost St.-Bertin manuscript is unfortunately the only source. Its opening lines are a variation on a riddle of Symphosius—inconveniently corrupt in the manuscript tradition—to which the answer is Balneum.289 In Alcuin’s version it has no riddling element and is ostensibly composed as a titulus for public display; half-way through, however, it changes direction entirely and becomes a plea for eyes to be averted from the male genitals so that no puer may be ashamed. Now I can imagine ( just!) that this is the kind of notice that might figure on the wall of an Aachen bath-house in the 790s where naked, male, bathing was the norm, in contradistinction to the practice of monastic communities and the public baptistery: but I find it just as easy to believe that the poem is one in which momentarily the author is baring his own deeper thoughts and tensions. The second piece of evidence is more dubiously relevant, although certainly puzzling. The Vita-author comments on Alcuin’s relationship with the younger cleric Sigwulf, who from their York days ‘was to be attached to him for all time ( perpetuo)’, that to see the mutual love of these two was like ‘observing Rebecca linked (copulatam) with Isaac and Anna with Tobias’. The first couple is the familiar subject of Genesis 25 and 26. The second is less familiar, but is taken from the ‘Book of Tobit’ in its Latin Vulgate version, where the eponymous central figure, who has a wife Anna, is called—like their son—Tobias. Since both couples were married according to the Law and blessed with progeny, it is not clear how they could be seen as a ‘type’ of Alcuin and Sigwulf; and the inference that Alcuin’s biographer was here referring obliquely to a known homosexual relationship is only possible on the further proposition (of which I am

289 Alcuin: MGH Poet. I, p. 318 (carm. no. xcii/1), S.-K. no. 10653. Symphosius: most recent ed. by D.R. Shackleton Bailey, Anthologia Latina I. 1, p. 230 (no. lxxxix); for a fuller apparatus, including two Lorsch manuscripts which may bring us nearest to the text-version known to Alcuin, see the edition by F. Glorie, Collectiones Aenigmatum, ii, CCSL 133A (Turnhout, 1968), pp. 611–723, at 711.

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     .  

sceptical) that in the early Carolingian period such relationships were tolerated, although not openly approved.290 The third piece of evidence, which is entirely deductive but to which none the less I would give the greatest weight, is the language of the unique letter addressed to Pope Hadrian I shortly before his death at the end of 795.291 Alcuin must have met him briefly in 780/1, but he makes no claim to personal acquaintance. Instead, it is the ‘excellent father’s’ reputation that has given him ‘some confidence in begging your mercy (clementia) to take me . . . into the embrace of your holy intercession’. But this is not the usual request for prayers and remembrance, a fact recognised by the Hincmar-period Rheims copyist who entered in the margin against the next section: Nota de confessione et accusatione Alchuini. According to Alcuin, although the Pope intercedes for the entire Christian people, he does ‘something more particular for those who commend themselves . . . with a firm yet humble request’; and because he has the ‘power of binding and loosing’ as the successor of St. Peter, he will be able to release the petitioner from the consequences of his most grievous sins and restore him to full spiritual health. What these sins were was to be communicated to him verbally by Alcuin’s friend and the king’s emissary, Angilbert. Alcuin’s position on the confession of sins is expounded in a series of letters, the earliest possibly of ca. 789: it should be made to a priest, who has the power of forgiveness and healing. The Frankish church in Charlemagne’s time had not been able to resolve the treatment of ‘capital’ sins, ones of exceptional seriousness that in earlier centuries had been remissable only through once-in-a-lifetime public penance, and by that fact were a bar to ordination.292 At the time when Alcuin wrote his letter to the Pope he may have been hoping, indeed expecting, to succeed Eanbald I as (arch)bishop of 290 Compare J. Boswell, Christianity, Homosexuality and Social Tolerance: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago and London, 1980), ch. 7 and esp. pp. 186–91; and the criticisms of his readings of texts by, among others and most elegantly, Southern, St. Anselm (1990 ed.), pp. 148–53. 291 Ep. no. 27; ms. T * fol. 73. For a fuller discussion of this letter, its dating and context, see below, Pt. II ch. 4, pp. 452–4. 292 M. Andrieu, Les Ordines Romani du Haut Moyen Age, 5 vols., Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense: Études et Documents, vol. 3 (Louvain, 1951), pp. 549–53, with quotations from the key texts; C. Vogel, Le Pécheur et la Pénitence au Moyen-Age (Paris, 1969), pp. 24–7; R. Kottje, ‘Busspraxis u. Bussritus’, Settimane di Studio (Spoleto), 33 (Spoleto, 1987), 369–95. For Alcuin on confession, see below, Pt. II, ch. 3.

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York. But in a letter of Hadrian’s brought to the Court by (Arch)bishop Beornred of Sens and Abbot Rado of St.-Vaast in 790/91—one of the latest to be copied and preserved in the Codex Carolinus—the Pope had drawn attention to the Roman church’s requirements for the ordination of a bishop-elect: specifically, an affirmation that his election did not involve a simonaic transaction, and that he had been declared free of impediments listed in other canonical capitula. What these were is made clear by a Roman ordo quomodo [episcopus] ordinatur, which was already circulating in Francia: namely, being guilty of the violation of a consecrated virgin, of bestiality, of ‘bigamous’ marriage (adultery) or of arsenoquita quod est masculo.293 It is surely only for the last of these that Alcuin was impelled to look to the Pope for an exercising of his power of loosing and forgiveness in God’s name; and the precise wording of his letter which ‘glosses’ Christ’s command to Peter in Matthew 16.19—cui etiam caelo terrisque aeternam ligandi ac solvendi potestatem delegavit—although apparently influenced by sermons of Pope Leo I, may indicate an awareness of the Pope’s letter of 790/91.294

The Possibility and Limitations of ‘Biography’ Even those who are prepared to accept the suggested interpretation of poem, Vita and letters may legitimately be unwilling or unable to regard it as a relevant factor in any exploration of Alcuin’s intellectual development and contributions to Carolingian learning: it is 293 MGH Epp. III, pp. 632–6 (no. 94), at 634; Ordo Romanus XXXIV, c. 16: ed. Andrieu, Ordines, 3, 607. Arsenoquita, spelt arsan- in a majority of the manuscripts of the ordo, is an excessively rare word both in its original Greek form (first recorded in NT I Cor 6.9) and in Latin contexts. The ‘ps.-Cyril’ Greek-Latin ‘dictionary’ (compiled in Byzantine Italy?) includes an entry masculorum concubitor (CGL ed. Goetz, 2, 246), and masculorum concubitores is already the standard VL (and Vulg.) rendering of the I Cor 6 passage. A ?unique later instance, perhaps derived from the ordo, is aut adulter aut arsenoquita (of clerics) in a letter of Rathier of Verona, MGH Die Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit, 1 (1949), ed. F. Weigle, no. 29 (p. 161). Because the language of Hadrian’s letter is in some ways closer to that of OR XXXVB, cc. 7–8, ed. Andrieu, Ordines, 4, 101, Andrieu most surprisingly argued (ibid. pp. 81–3) for its dependence on that ordo (or an earlier version of it): but since he showed convincingly that this is a late-tenth-century confection, in a single manuscript, the relationship must surely be the other way round, the Papal letter having influenced the adaptation of OR XXXIV to OR XXXVB. 294 Not, however, in direct quotation: the corresponding clause in Hadrian’s letter is quoniam quorumlibet sententiis ligata pontificum sedis beati Petri apostoli ius habet solvendi.

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     .  

certainly no basis for a ‘psycho-biography’ which would relate it to (for example) his seemingly obsessive attitude towards ‘the heresy of Adoptionism’ in the 790s. There is, however, a paradoxical element in much modern Alcuin-scholarship. It typically takes a few short phrases, not infrequently employing quite commonplace language and occurring incidentally in letters concerned predominantly with other topics, and proceeds to induce from them theories of polity and authority and the capacity to influence events in ways that literally changed nations; at the same time, it doubts whether statements about personal feelings and emotions are more than literary exercises. The paradox is the sharper that critics of and commentators on the poetry of Alcuin and his contemporaries, beginning with Prof. Dieter Schaller in his epoch-making article of 1970, have emphasised—surely rightly—the ‘realistic’ elements in some of this verse, and have favoured (selectively!) literal as well as ‘literary’ readings of autobiographical verse that can equally be an exercise in selfimportance.295 Given the literary heritage implicit in Alcuin’s letters, there is no simple way of distinguishing between, say, false or feigned humility and true humility, or between ‘topical’ friendship and true friendship. But a reading of the letters which takes account of overall structure and character, and relates the author’s choice of recurrent or formulaic phraseology to the named recipient and to the date and circumstances of composition, may find sufficient differences of expression and emphasis to allow legitimate biographical inferences. Correspondence limited to a few years of a man’s life is, even on the most generously-literal interpretation of its language and reminiscence, inevitably constraining; and the poems that are probably or certainly earlier in date than the extant letters do not greatly ease such constraints. Works that are already the product of the mature Alcuin, even if consciously drawing on, summing up or commenting on his experiences at York, are only pointers to his earlier decades. We need not necessarily despair, provided we do not claim too much, or measure the evidence and its sub-texts against that for Jerome (especially 295 D. Schaller, ‘Vortrags- u. Zirkulardichtung am Hof Karls des Grossen’, MLJb. 6 (1970), 14–36, repr. Schaller, Studien, pp. 87–109, with ‘Nachträge’ at pp. 412–14; Godman, Poets and Emperors, ch. 2 passim. I take this opportunity of recalling how, on a visit to the Bodleian Library from an institution where Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch was not available and indeed unknown, the late Richard Hunt eagerly drew my attention to Schaller’s then very recent publication and made clear its importance for an understanding of Early Medieval literature.

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if we favour a late date—ca. 347 contra ca. 331—for his birth), rather than, say, Gregory the Great, almost all of whose writings come from his fourteen years as Pope.296 Historians in their fifties or even sixties can, unlike mathematicians and physicists, hopefully look forward to the next decade as a period of creative academic activity: but we would readily acknowledge that for all but a select few the basic mental or intellectual outlook, the essential framework of thought and inquiry, are formed long before the age of fifty. Even where there is a conscious rejection of early allegiances and modes of thought, which manifestly didn’t happen to Alcuin, it is usually possible for the biographer or historian to establish a fuller continuity in a person’s thought than he or she would wish to admit, or else to recognise in the views expounded in the ‘post-conversion’ period the consequences of the earlier ones against which they were overtly a reaction: witness (for example) the studies in the 1950s and 1960s of the young Karl Marx and the significance of his concept of ‘alienation’.297 If, in the end, an interpretation of Alcuin through his letters first and his other writings secondarily stops well short of biography as it is now generally understood, this is not simply because of the problems of the genre in relation to an age that preferred the transcendental to the introspective. Nor is it because we have to rely very largely on what was written in the last ten or fifteen years of a sixtyfive-year earthly life; the element of subjectivity in biographical reconstruction, and in what passes for explanation, is not necessarily less when a man’s earlier years are comparatively well-documented. It is (I would argue) because almost all the evidence supplementing Alcuin’s view of himself and his career comes posthumously from admirers and believers. In his lifetime, the detractors and doubters make the 296 Jerome: J.N.D. Kelly, Jerome: his Life, Writings and Controversies (London, 1975), whose acceptance of the earlier birth-date is effectively challenged by A.D. Booth, ‘The date of Jerome’s birth’, Phoenix 33 (1979), 346–53, cf. art. ‘Hieronymus’ [H. Hagendahl, J.H. Waszink] in RAC. 15.113 (1989), col. 118. For two recent explorations of the foundations of Jerome’s scholarly and literary activity in the early 390s, see J.H.D. Scourfield, Consoling Heliodorus. A Commentary on Jerome Letter 60 (Oxford, 1993), esp. pp. 15–33, and A. Kamesar, Jerome, Greek Scholarship and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford, 1993); his earliest surviving work is Epist. 1 of 375, ed. Hilberg, 1, 1–9, ed. Labourt, 1 (1949), 2–9. Gregory: compare (e.g.) F.H. Dudden, Gregory the Great: his place in History and Thought, 2 vols. (London, 1905) with Carole Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection (Berkeley-London, 1988), whose remarkable interpretative work eschews biography; but for the chronology of the writings, see p. 7 n. 25, and for his reading, pp. 13–16. 297 See, most conveniently, D. McLellan, Karl Marx: his Life and Thought (London, 1974).

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     .  

briefest of appearances in Theodulf ’s satrical verse in 796, and in the correspondence between Abbot Alcuin and the Imperial Court in 801/2 over troubles at Tours supposedly provoked by the same Theodulf: although modern biographers have generally ignored, or glossed over, the earlier allusions in his correspondence to contemporaries who evidently did not share Alcuin’s opinion of himself.298 Digging in his works for evidence of the experiences that formed his opinions and intellect and for changes in his perception of himself during the closely-documented later years is therefore all the more necessary. As a distinguished modern critic and commentator has remarked about the ‘lives’ of a nineteenth-century black American who struggled to make himself heard through the written word: ‘The enterprise of biography, if it counts for anything, must be to restore humanity and complexity to someone so assiduously committed to the habit of self-invention and self-censorship’.299

ADDITIONAL NOTE I Rheims bib. mun. ms. 1395 Rheims 1395, a characteristic early-Hincmar manuscript, was long believed ‘lost’ since the young Mabillon’s transcription of texts from it and then, on a later visit, failing to find it in the Chapter library. It continued to be so reported after its identification by B. Krusch (Neues Archiv, 18 [1893], pp. 600–3) and subsequently, in ignorance of Krusch, by A. Luchaire (Bibl. de la Fac. des lettres de Paris, 8 [Paris, 1899], ‘Étude sur quelques manuscrits de Rome et de Paris’, pp. 27–9), and even after its cataloguing—not wholly satisfactorily—by Loriquet (Catal. gén. xxxix/1 [1904]), s. n (pp. 539–43). To make matters more confused, Luchaire (cit.) unfortunately referred to the manuscript under a provisional new catalogue number (‘1137’) which was subsequently abandoned, identified it with the old catalogue number of a quite different manuscript (= Loriquet 1402, a Rheims passionary of s. xi2, which includes the complete Hincmarian Remigius-dossier) and dated it to the tenth century. On the other hand, he provided (op. cit., pp. 93–7) the first complete edition of fols 32–37v: IIII. EX LIBELLO MIRACULORUM S. DIONYSII which Mabillon had only incompletely published and in two separate places (Luchaire unhappily reversing the correct references on his p. 94! while Krusch, art. cit. pp. 601–2, printed as unpublished the miracle-story on fol. 33v which he would have found if he had turned over another two pages of the De re Diplomatica). Levillain, to whom the cor298

See Pt. II ch. 3. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ‘A Dangerous Literacy: the Legacy of Frederick Douglass’, The New York Times Book Review, May 28 1995, p. 16. 299

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rectly-dated 1395 was or should have been of exceptional importance for his reconstruction of the early history of the Miracula s. Dionysii, uncharacteristically simply adopted Luchaire’s account of the manuscript complete with errors, and he had a very incomplete notion of its contents: see BÉC., 82 (1921), pp. 58 ff. and esp. p. 59 n. 1. Wallace-Hadrill, relying unquestioningly on Levillain, similarly did not realise (‘Archbishop Hincmar and the Lex Salica’, The Long-Haired Kings [1962], pp. 96–8) that this was the same manuscript as that containing, at fols 40v–45 as the third part of item V, the earliest copy of the pre-Hincmar Vita Remigii; and he introduced a further element of confusion (and weakened his own arguments at this point) by transferring to the Miracula Levison’s doubts about Hincmar’s al. Hilduin’s authorship of the Gesta Dagoberti (‘weder d. eine noch d. andere Annahme scheint mir wirklich begründet’: Wattenbach-Levison, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen, 1, p. 113 n. 254), which is not among the texts in Rheims 1395, although the earliest manuscript evidence may be of Rheims origin (but is certainly post-Hincmar). H. Barré, supposing the manuscript to be a tenthcentury one, failed to recognise the importance of its fols 2–32 as testimony to Hincmar’s Marian devotion: Prières Anciennes, pp. 80 f., cf. p. 82 n. 74. More recently, Devisse seems to have consulted neither the manuscript nor Loriquet’s catalogue, since in his table of vitae sanctorum and their manuscript-sources available to Hincmar (Hincmar, 3, p. 1510) he cites Rheims 1395 only for ‘miscellanea sur S. Rémi’ and adds in a footnote that it might be possible to add, e.g., a Life of S. Eufrosina on the evidence of clm. 6382 pt. 1, a probably French manuscript of s. ix2, one of the scribes of which shows Rheims influence (but does not ‘come from Rheims’, as Devisse asserts): in fact 1395 fols 120–30 is XV . . . VITA S[AN]C[T]AE EUFROSINAE (BHL. 2723), which is therefore one of the earliest copies of this ?eighth-century translation from the Greek, probably preceded only by the Metz (and only later Autun) passionary, Montpellier Bibl. Univ. cod. 55, of s. ix in. The description of the manuscript by J. Gijsel, Die unmittelbare Textüberlieferung des sog. Pseudo-Matthäus (Verh. van de Kon. Akad. voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, Kl. Lett., nr. 96; Brussels, 1981), pp. 38–9, has some additional codicological information but is inadequate on the texts, apart from the identification of the (pre-Paschasius Radbertus) ‘I. DE NATIVITATE SANCTAE MARIAE ’ on fols 2–17v. In the same section as the last-named text, on fols 26–32, is III. EX SERMONE CUIUSDAM SAPIENTIS DE ASSUMPTIONE SANCTAE MARIAE inc. Loquamur aliquid in laudibus sacratissimç virginis, a text attributed in some later manuscripts to Alcuin but recently convincingly claimed for Ambrosius Autpertus by R. Weber: Ambrosii Autperti Opera, (CCCM), 3, pp. 874–5, 885–9, edition pp. 1027–36. It is to be observed finally that Arndt, editing the Vita Alcuini for the MGH and relying on Mabillon for the readings of the ‘lost’ Rheims manuscript, mistakenly assumed that its text concluded with Alcuin’s verse epitaph and the prose record of Alcuin’s obit, which he accordingly printed as an integral part of his edition. The typography of Duchesne’s edition, which is the actual source, makes it clear that this earlier editor had introduced it from some quite different (and so far unidentified) manuscript.

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     .   ADDITIONAL NOTE II The early manuscript evidence for Alcuin’s epitaph (S.-K. no. 6688)

Perhaps the oldest text of all is that among the very early miscellaneous additions to Paris BNF lat. 4629, at fols 55v–56, a probably Bourges copy of a ?Court collection of laws and capitularies, with some ‘school’ material, written not long after 805: Mordek, BCRFM, pp. 502–6; Bullough, ‘Charlemagne’s Court-library re-visited’ (forthcoming). But almost as early must be the text in a Rheims book of the ?820s (possibly even a little earlier), BAV Vat. Reg. lat. 2078, ‘one of the most significant collections of Carolingian poetry’ in association with older verse, at fol. 122, where it follows the unique copy of King Pippin of Italy’s epitaph; a recent suggestion (Turcan-Verkerk in RHT. 29 [1999]) that the conjunction may be due to Angilbert seems unnecessary. Certainly not much later in date are the possibly-related copies in BNF lat. 2826 fol. 141v of s. ix 1–2/4 (although the epitaph appears to be a slightly later addition on the previously blank last page of a quire) and BNF lat. 2328 fol. 96v, of s. ix 2/4, both written at unidentified scriptoria south of the Loire (S. Burgundy? so Bischoff in 1975) and subsequently at St.Martial, Limoges; and BNF nouv. acq. lat. 1613 fol. 18v. The second and third of these are very miscellaneous manuscripts: ‘mit allerlei Unregelmässigkeiten, wie man sie besonders in jungen Abteien bzw. Scriptorien antrifft, wo man sich möglichst rasch die notwendigsten Bücher beschaffen musste’ says Bonifatius Fischer (‘Bibeltext u. Bibelreform’ [1965], Lat. Handschr., 120) of lat. 2328, which includes a complete text of Alcuin’s De virtutibus et vitiis; BNF lat. 2826 is, however, predominantly ‘theological’. So also, in its complete pre-Libri form as Tours Bib. Mun. 42 (‘perhaps Brittany’, s. ix2/3: Bischoff), was the fourth: see Delisle, Mss. Libri Barrois, 63–68, with 62 f. and 68 f., and my List. The text of the epitaph in BNF lat. 2832 (s. ix3/4), fol. 121–121v, is one of several Carolingian-period items in Florus of Lyons’s poetic florilegium. Later manuscripts seem to be predominantly collections of grammatica, in which Alcuin’s epitaph is evidently included as a model of its genre: so, e.g., Munich clm. 18628 fol. 93v (?Tegernsee, s. xi in), which has the title Epitaphium super sepulchrum and has a blank in place of Alchuine in the penultimate line and Vatican Reg. lat. 1578 pt. i, fol. 26–26v (S.Fr., nr. Pyrenees, s. xi1); but for an exception (and for the concluding prose lines) see n. 63. For the et lux extension of the prayer in manuscripts beginning with Paris, BNF lat. 2826, several additions can be made to those reported by Dümmler, including Cambridge, Trinity Coll. 1434 [O.9.22] fol. 56 [s. xii1, ?N. Fr.], where the reading of the last line of the epitaph proper, Pro quo funde preces hunc titulum pia mente legens, suggests a link with BNF lat. 5577.

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ADDITIONAL NOTE III The manuscript tradition of ep. no. 140 The oldest manuscript-text of this letter is that in Vienna 795 (S ). It is the last of three letters, the others being epp. nos 113 and 161, copied from S into the Baldo of Salzburg book of ca. 836–50—mostly a theological miscellany plus the Gesta Hrodberti—now Graz, Univ.-Bibl. 790 (Bischoff, Schreibschulen, 2, 157 [no. 163]; siglum G) at fols 64–72v. But possibly slightly earlier than the Baldo copy, and certainly independent of S (cf. the apparatus to Dümmler’s edition), is the copy in the western-French (south of the Loire) Paris BNF lat. 2826 (siglum Li ), fols 139–139v, with which the eleventh-century English manuscript London BL Royal 6.B viii (R), here fols 28–28v, is in some way related. Slightly later is a version included in the Formulae Salisburgenses, Munich clm. 4650 (B ) fols 63–63v (‘nach der Mitte des IX. Jhs. geschrieben’, ‘Entstehung im Raum Salzburg wahrscheinlich’: Bischoff, Schreibschulen, 2, 201–2, where also the correct ordering of the misbound quires is indicated; the text ed. Zeumer, MGH Formulae, p. 439) with the substitution of sanctae catholicae et orthodoxae ecclesiae vernula episcopus scilicet sive abbas aut comis for Alcuin’s name in the address-clause and the omission of a clause naming Alcuin in the body of the text. Ep. no. 140 occurs finally as an integral part of the collection in BL Cotton Tiberius A. xv (A1; below), at fol. 59v (not fol. 9, as Dümmler). Surprisingly, B as well as A1 share readings with Li and R against S(G )—descending presumably from the pre-Vienna-795 Tours text of ep. no. 140. The Tiberius A. xv text simply has the heading Ep[istol]a Albini magistri: the other words printed by Dümmler seem to be due entirely to Thomas Gale in his transcript in Cambridge, Trinity Coll., O.10.16. BNF lat. 2826 has the heading Commendaticia ad amicos (not noted in BN Cat.), reflecting the Classical rather than the typical-medieval use of the word and providing an interesting link with the language of the Legatine report of 786 (c. 6), MGH Epp. IV, p. 22: absque causa rationabili et literis commendaticiis and the probably genuinely Alcuinian, and certainly Turonian, Litterae commendaticiae (al. comendacias) ad amicos as the heading of ep. no. 12, for the presbyter Fordrad, in manuscripts of both the K and T collections. (Compare MLWB 2, 942–3, where none of these examples is cited). B has the heading tractura (for tractoria), here obviously in the secondary sense of ‘credential-letter enjoining public officials to render assistance to the bearer’ (cf. Niermeyer, Lexikon, 1035). It is to be noted that Alcuin’s own formulaic language is very much closer to that of the second of two tractoriae in the Papal Liber Diurnus, ed. von Sickel nr. 50, ed. Foerster, pp. 107–8 (wrongly cited by Niermeyer under the primary meaning of ‘diploma issued on behalf of persons travelling at the expense of the State etc.’), than to the one extant Charlemagne-period royal tractoria, MGH, DK I, nr. 88 of 774/5, for St.-Denis. In contrast, one other commendatory letter for circulation, ep. no. 299, is preserved in a single manuscript, the eleventh-century English Tib. (at fol. 63). Jaffé and Dümmler assumed, as had the compiler or a copyist of

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     .  

that collection, that it was an epistola Albini magistre as abbot of Tours. But neither the form and language of the address-clause (Familia autem N. iam vobis etc.) nor the farewell-clause, nor indeed some of the language of the short text is Alcuinian. Indeed, the opening Rogant omnes unanimiter fratres nostri cum consilio episcopi sui makes it pretty clear that this is from the clerical community of a cathedral church (Lindisfarne? York itself?).

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PART TWO

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CHAPTER ONE

NORTHUMBRIAN ALCUIN: PATRIA, PUERITIA AND ADOLISCENTIA

Probably in the late summer or early autumn of 794, before the Frankish Court took up residence at the new Aachen palace, Alcuin wrote a letter to ‘the brethren of the church of York’. Its inclusion, unusually, in both ‘the basic Tours collection’ and in what I believe to be Alcuin’s ‘personal’ collection ensured its widespread dissemination in Francia and England during the next two-and-a-half centuries, although it had no overt didactic or political content. Successively, its author recalled his early life among the brethren, assured them that they come first in his prayers wherever he might be in the iter instabilitatis which was currently taking him to various ‘holy places of the martyrs and confessors of Christ’, and asked for their prayers in return. I will be yours whether in life or death. Perhaps God will pity me, so that he whom you raised in childhood you will bury in old age. And if another place is assigned to my body yet—wherever that is to be— I believe that my soul will through your prayers be granted rest (requies donabitur) together with you.1

These were no mere literary clichés. The last sentence in the quotation is one of several in the letter which adopts the language of contemporary funerary liturgy; prayer in any of its forms was seen as a more powerful bond than letter-writing, since it linked men and women not only with one another on earth but with those now and in the future sharing the joys of the Heavenly Kingdom.2 1 Ep. no. 42 (p. 86); transl. S. Allott, Alcuin of York: his Life and Letters (York, 1974), no. 1. For the dating proposed in the text, rather than ‘ca. 795’ (Dümmler) or ‘autumn/winter, 795–6’ (Bullough, ‘Burial, Community and Belief ’ [next note], p. 177), see ch. 4. 2 Bullough, ‘Burial, community and belief in the early medieval West’ in: P. Wormald et al. (ed.), Ideal and Reality, pp. 177–201, at pp. 177–8 and esp. n. 2; other refs. below. For requies ‘rest, place of rest’, i.e. usually of the soul but also of the body, in other liturgical prayers and in the Fathers, see conveniently J. Ntedika, L’Évocation de l’au-delà par la Prière pour les Morts (Louvain-Paris, 1971), pp. 200–13, with additional bibliography. Alcuin seems not to use the common Patristic refrigerium (ibid.,

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In other letters addressed to York clergy in the autumn of 794 (or, less probably, the autumn of 795), Alcuin insists on his desire and intention to be again among them, as soon as the king returns from Saxony and gives his approval—and he himself recovers from illness. Two years later, congratulating his former pupil Eanbald on his election to the archbishopric he speaks of ‘all my sons, brothers and friends: both those who are with me in peregrinatione and those who have gone back to you in the homeland’.3 Only the love and longing for that Eternal Kingdom which he was yet to enter surpassed his devotion to the provintia Northanhumbrorum4 from which he had been absent for varying periods since 779/80. This was his patria except when, momentarily, he saw it more narrowly as York itself, as in the letter-poem addressed ‘to the hallowed youth of York’, ‘Now has the cuckoo sung in the lofty branches . . .’.5 There is no claim in the letters that Alcuin had a prophetic destiny to fulfil in the Carolingian realm; but he feels obliged to conclude the longest of them with the first shrill rebuttal of the accusation that Francia’s attraction for him was material gain (auri avaritia) and an insistence that, on the contrary, he was there for the sake of the church and the strengthening of the catholic faith.6 At least in one of his recurrent moods, peregrinatio was to Alcuin not, as it had been for the Irish since Columba and Columbanus, a voluntary and permanent abandonment of kindred and country in the search for God: rather it was exile in a foreign land, for whatever good reasons, from which return to the land of one’s birth might always be hoped for.7 pp. 193–200), although the term persisted in liturgical prayers, including the Vatican (‘Old’) Gelasian sacramentary, ed. Wilson, pp. 297, 298, 310, 311, ed. Mohlberg nos 1617, 1621, 1681, 1684, etc., and occurs occasionally in prayers in the English prayer-books, as e.g. Kuypers, Book of Cerne, p. 215 (from BL Royal 2. A. xx fol. 34), transl. Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, p. 254. 3 Epp. nos 43, 44, 114. For the dating and context of the first two letters (together with ep. no. 42), see below, ch. 4. 4 Previously in Bede, HE Praef. and passim (but Nordanhymborum regiones in HE III 16, etc.); compare the Frankish King Pippin’s Capitulare Aquitanicum of 768 (ed. Boretius, MGH Capit. I, no. 18): si de alia provincia advenerit, secundum legem ipsius patriae vivat. 5 Carm. lix, MGH Poet. I, p. 273, S.-K. no. 10727, discussed below, ch. 3. 6 Ep. no. 43 (p. 89). 7 Peregrinatio as exile from Northumbria: epp. nos 7 (p. 31), 101 (p. 147), 114 (p. 169), etc.; as exile ‘in the world’ (from the Heavenly home), epp. nos 216 (p. 360), 303 (p. 462) and Alcuin’s Expositio in psalmos graduales ad Ps. cxix, PL 100, col. 620D (for the latter and for the Psalter quotation in ep. no. 216, see below). But in epp. nos 8 (p. 34) and 13 (p. 39) peregrinatio evidently means—despite Dümmler—‘absence in England, severance from friends’.

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This emotional tie, which he found so difficult to loosen, was not the least of Alcuin’s debts to his Northumbrian origins and his many years at York.

The Eighth-century Regnum Northanhumbrorum When he wrote those letters, Alcuin was a man in his mid-fifties. The Northumbrian kingdom into which he had been born ca. 740 was, measured against the contemporary regna of the Franks and the Lombards, modest in size and limited in resources. Yet it was for a time the largest of the English kingdoms, although less densely settled than its comparable-sized southern neighbour Mercia.8 Politically, it had originated a century-and-a-half earlier in the union of two separate kingdoms, a northern one (Bernicia) which had expanded from the lower Tyne valley and from Bamburgh and a southern one (Deira) whose nucleus was on the road- and river-routes north from the Humber: to which previously British lands to the south-west, west and north were subsequently annexed by conquest or cession. In the middle decades of the eighth century its southern frontier was the ‘historic’ one of the river Humber, with perhaps a toe-hold on its right bank in Lindsey, and westwards along the rivers Don and Sheaf; thence, from the vicinity of Dore, along an only approximately definable land-boundary through the Peak; and finally to the Irish Sea, at this period probably along the line of the river Mersey rather than the more northerly Ribble.9 Northwards, the kingdom 8 Several accounts of Northumbria’s ‘political’ history in the eighth century have been published in recent years. The interpretation of the annalistic sources and relevant Alcuin letters in D.P. Kirby, The Earliest English Kings (London, 1991), ch. V (pp. 142–62) is probably closest to my own (for the death of Oswulf and succession of Æthelwald). A substantial and skilful synthesis of archaeology and texts, unfortunately only for the region north of Morecambe Bay and River Tees to the Solway and the Tweed (Bernicia without south-east Scotland, plus Cumbria), is N. Higham, The Northern Counties to A.D. 1000 (London, 1986), pp. 256–307; for Cumbria additionally D. O’Sullivan, ‘Cumbria before the Vikings’, The Scandinavians in Cumbria, ed. J.R. Baldwin and I.D. Whyte (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 17–35. A comparable treatment of Deira (Yorkshire) is lacking but—for the south-west only—see M.L. Faull in West Yorkshire: an Archaeological Survey to A.D. 1500, ed. M.L. Faull and S.A. Moorhouse (3 vols. + Map-vol.; Wakefield, 1981), esp. 1, 156–63, 171–86. 9 For Lindsey, see n. 11. For the boundary on the Sheaf and Don see Faull, West Yorkshire, pp. 171, 179 and Map 11; for possible frontier-defences ‘shadowing the Don’, and others further west between the Mersey and Medlock rivers, see N.J.

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still extended apparently to the lower Forth in the east, where the Bass Rock, inhabited only by sea-birds and an anchorite famed in York—Balthere, ‘Baldred of the Bass’—provided a saintly guard-post. The land-frontier that ran thence south-south-west, the presumptive western boundary of the diocese of Lindisfarne, is defined speculatively by watersheds and other natural features; and its south-western end, taking in the Whithorn peninsula and the river-basins which feed the Solway estuary and for a time after 750 former British lands further north also, is hardly better documented.10 Before 679 Lindsey, south of the Humber, had been subject to Northumbria; and in 767, perhaps as a consequence of recent political upheavals in the region, its Bishop Ceolwulf was consecrated in the northern kingdom. By the last quarter of the century, however, ‘kingdom’ and diocese, with a see-church at the unlocated and unexplained civitas Syddensis, were unquestionably in the Mercian sphere of influence.11 Not later than the early part of the ninth century Higham, The Kingdom of Northumbria 350–1000 (London, 1993), pp. 142–3 (very speculative, with no real evidence for an early date). P. Hunter Blair, ‘The Northumbrians and their southern frontier’, Archaeologia Aeliana, ser. 4, 26 (1948), 98–126 (repr. idem, Anglo-Saxon Northumbria, Variorum Reprints, 1984) summarises the evidence for the frontier from Dore to the Irish Sea; cf. Higham, cit. 10 Balthere: Alcuin’s ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1319–82 and the ‘Northumbrian (?York) Annals’ in HR ed. Arnold, 2, 41; with my comments in ‘Hagiography as Patriotism: Alcuin’s “York Poem” and the early Northumbrian vitae sanctorum, Hagiographie, Cultures et Sociétés: IV e–XII e Siècles, Études Augustiniennes (Paris, 1981), pp. 349 and 352–4. For the frontier through the later ‘Scottish Borders’, see G.W.S. Barrow, ‘The Anglo-Scottish border’, Northern History, 1 (1966), esp. 24, 30–1 and the map on 22; for speculations about Northumbrian occupation of the region west of the river Annan, see latterly D. Maclean, ‘The date of the Ruthwell Cross’, The Ruthwell Cross, ed. B. Cassidy (Princeton, 1992), pp. 54–70, and P. Meyvaert, ‘A new perspective on the Ruthwell Cross: Ecclesia and Vita Monastica’, ibid., pp. 147–64. Cont. Bedae, s.a. 750 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 574) records that King Eadberht campum Cyil (Kyle) cum aliis regionibus suo regno addidit, cf. ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, line 1275. But only six years later, while returning home after a British ‘submission’ at Dumbarton, his army was almost totally destroyed: so the ‘Annals’, in HR ed. Arnold, 2, 41 (the reported eclipse of the moon being on the preceding 23 November), the episode is not recorded in Cont. Bedae (compare, however, s.a. 761, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 576) and ignored by Alcuin. 11 HR ed. Arnold, 2, 43; the witness-lists of the charters Sawyer nos 109 (probably to be re-dated to 777), 114, 116, 123 etc. and of the councils MGH Epp. IV, p. 28 (an. 786) and Birch, CS. no. 312 (an. 803); more ambiguously by Offa’s generosity to Bardney monastery as recorded by Alcuin in his ‘York poem’. For the interpretation of these texts, compare Kirby, Earliest English Kings, p. 163 (also p. 126); S. Bassett, ‘Lincoln and the Anglo-Saxon see of Lindsey’, ASE 18 (1989), 1–32; P. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1998), pp. 49, 78–80, 87–8 (rejecting a location at Lincoln-Wigford). The recently re-discovered titulus ‘in absida basilice’ of its Bishop Cyneberht (ob. 731), composed by Bede (!) (ed. D. Schaller in

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Northumbria seemingly abandoned its recent conquests in the far north-west (Kyle and Carrick), while retaining control of the north shore of the Solway; and the region between the Lammermuir Hills and Tyninghame and the River Tweed, in which the ‘community of St. Cuthbert’ had and was able to retain extensive land-holdings, remained Northumbrian for many years more, despite mounting pressure from the Scoto-Pictish kingdom.12 These fluctuating boundaries embraced widely different physical environments and opportunities for economic exploitation, which except in parts of south Yorkshire were almost universally less favourable than those of the southern English kingdoms. The contrast within the province was at its sharpest between the readily cultivatable lands near the Humber estuary or in the Vale of York and the inhospitable high Pennines and Lammermuirs. Particularly north of the Tyne and in the west, the establishment of new settlements— farmsteads or hamlets rather then the villages that already predominated in midland and southern England—and the provision of facilities for worship during the late seventh and eighth centuries were laborious and painful tasks in which both lay individuals and religious communities played a part.13 Even in geologically and climatically more-favoured areas, pastoralism (stock-raising) seems to have figured prominently in the local economy, although not to the

Mittellat. Jahrb. 12 (1977), 19–20 (= Schaller, Studien zur Lateinischen Dichtung, pp. 194–5) and M. Lapidge, Bede the Poet, Jarrow Lecture 1993, p. 2) unhelpfully says only that the bishop Hac et in urbe sibi seseque sequentibus almam/Fecit presulibus sedem. The supposed presence of King Aldfrith of Lindsey among the witnesses to a Mercian charter of 772 × 787? (or later?), Sawyer no. 1183, is almost certainly mistaken: Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire, p. 49; S. Keynes (forthcoming). Note that the Mercian charters Sawyer nos 110 and 111, which would provide earlier evidence for Bishop Ceolwulf, must be regarded as tenth-century falsifications—although the witness-lists could be genuine—following Wormald, ‘Bede, Bretwaldas . . .’, Ideal and Reality, pp. 110–11 (where also comments on the variant texts of S 109). 12 When the Papal legates reached ?York in 786, King Ælfwald longe in borealibus commorabatur (MGH Epp. IV, p. 20), although defending the frontier is only one of several possible reasons for this. For ‘St. Cuthbert’s lands’ see especially C. Morris, ‘Northumbria and the Viking settlement: the evidence for landholding’, Archaeologia Aeliana 5th ser., 5 (1977), 81–104; also Higham, Northern Counties, p. 311 and the map on p. 288. 13 H. Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England ed. 3 (London, 1991), pp. 244–7, 254; S. Foot, ‘Parochial ministry in early Anglo-Saxon England: the role of monastic communities’, SCH 26 (1989), 43–54; J. Blair and R. Sharpe (ed.), Pastoral Care before the Parish, Studies in the Early History of Britain (Leicester, 1992), esp. the contributions by A.T. Thacker and C. Cubitt, at pp. 137–70, 191–211.

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exclusion of arable agriculture. A miracle of Cuthbert’s youth is associated with spring and summer sheep-pastures on the bank of the river Wear close to Chester-le-Street, and the ‘enormous number of sheep-skins’ required for the Codex Amiatinus and its companion ‘great Bibles’ has become a commonplace; Stephanus’s Life of Wilfrid locates the contentious council of ?703 in campo qui dicitur Oustraefelda (Austerfield, W. Yorks), a place-name the first element of which is OE eowestre ‘sheep-fold’, and more specifically Aet Suinapaeth[a]e (‘swine-path’); while (h)ara: cubile porcorum ‘pig-sty’ is among the items in Alcuin’s De orthographia which was not simply taken over from Bede. But livestock were clearly not the only occupants or products of the extensive ‘family lands’ with which St. Peter’s monastery at Wearmouth was endowed and which presumably supported York’s cathedral.14 The apparent continuities between pre-English territorial divisions and the dimly-perceivable administrative structures of the kingdom in the seventh and eighth centuries were surely as much a reflection of persistent environmental and economic patterns as the result of deliberate ‘planning’ by a new dominant class; and if ‘central places’ were inevitably fewer in the kingdom’s sparsely-populated regions, they were not necessarily less important for local economic exchange or as places of assembly.15 Even the organisational arrangements of the Northumbrian church, which are often seen as making for unity, not least by Alcuin himself, served in some ways to perpetuate the old major divide while strengthening the predominance of southern Deira. The whole area from the Forth to (probably) the Tyne with, for a time, an extension south of the Solway into present-day Cumbria (ostensibly definable from surviving ‘Anglian’ sculptured stones) constituted the diocese of Lindisfarne, universally associated with St. Cuthbert (ob. 687) rather than with its founder Aidan. Its bishop for the forty years 740–80 was Cynewulf, whose family connections and background are unknown; yet in 750 King Eadberht ‘took him prisoner at Bamburgh’ and besieged the monastic church, apparently because of the bishop’s 14 See the anonymous Lindisfarne Vita S. Cuthb. I 6 (ed. Colgrave, p. 70) and Bede, Vita S. Cuthb.( pr.). c. 5 (ed. Colgrave, p. 170), the latter identifying the former’s habitacula vernalia et aestualia as pastorum tuguria quae aestate infirmiter posita tunc iam deserta patebant; The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. and transl. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1927), c. 46 (p. 92). (H)ara etc. is De orthographia, ed. Keil, Gloss. Lat. 7, 297, ed. Bruni, p. 6 no. 30: the textual source is Cassiodorus, De orthographia, ed. Keil, Gloss. Lat. 7, 209. For the cathedral’s estates, compare below, p. 150 and n. 70. 15 Below, pp. 149–50.

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support, or believed support, for an attempt to re-establish a different and ‘older’ royal line, that of Oswiu; and he resigned his see four years before his death.16 Shortly before the completion of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica (c. 731), however, a bishopric north of the Solway had been (re-)established at ‘Candida Casa’, angl. Whithorn, and survived until the middle of the next century. South from the boundary with Lindisfarne to the river Tees was the diocese of Hexham, based on the church of St. Andrew, founded as a monastery by Wilfrid while he was still bishop of York; the language of Alcuin’s one extant letter (?795/6) to Bishop Æthelberht and ‘the congregation in the church of St. Andrew’ suggests that he was uncertain whether the community was or was not still a monastic one. Like Whithorn, the diocese was doomed to disappear in the course of the ninth century.17 The rest of the kingdom, from the North Sea to the Irish Sea and covering more than one-and-three-quarter million hectares, came within the diocese of York. Of the four northern sees, only the last-named was in a one-time Roman ‘city’. In 735 it became, as had been intended from the time of the first Roman mission, the undisputed metropolitan see of the Northumbrian church.18 A striking section of Alcuin’s 16 Some scholars would put the south-eastern diocesan boundary further north, to leave Rothbury etc. in the diocese of Hexham: see, e.g., the excellent map in J. Campbell (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons (London, 1982, repr. 1991), fig. 72 (p. 71). For Bishop Cynewulf, see the ‘Northumbrian Annals’ in HR ed. Arnold, 2, 32, 39, 47 and 50. The Annalist’s summary account of Eadberht’s attack (the annalistic ‘Continuation of Bede’ has nothing on this) links it with the surrender there of Offa filius Aldfridi, the latter being identified with the Northumbrian king who died 704 or 705 (Kirby, Earliest English Kings, pp. 143–6, 150), although there are obvious chronological difficulties. 17 Whithorn: Bede, HE III 4 and V 23; and note that when Alcuin wrote to the ‘brethren serving Candida Casa’, ep. no. 273, he took it for granted (following Bede?) that the church housed ‘the body of [their] holy father Nyniga’, cf. Meyvaert ‘A new perspective’ (n. 10). P. Hill, Whithorn and St Ninian: the Excavation of a Monastic Town, 1984–91 (Stroud, 1997), pp. 40–8, 134–82 describes—not without a substantial element of speculation—the structural history of the (wood-construction) cathedral-church and its associated structures c. 730–845, as revealed by excavation. Hexham: Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, pp. 156–9, 140–1; for its boundaries see last note. For the ambiguity of ep. no. 31, see my remarks in ASE 22 (1993), p. 99 n. 21; but if pseudo-Symeon’s corpus vero eximii regis (sc. Ælfwoldi ) ad Hehstealdesige cum magnis monachorum cuneis et clericorum cantilenis perlatum est for burial in St. Andrew’s in 788 (HR ed. Arnold, 2, 52) preserves the language of the contemporary ‘Northumbrian Annals’, the cathedral was either served by monks or else (like contemporary Salzburg) by both a monastic and a clerical ‘congregation’. The last known bishop of Hexham was Tidfeth, 813–21. 18 ‘Northumbrian Annals’, HR, ed. Arnold, 2, 31; Cont. Bedae, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 572, where it is also recorded that the new archbishop ordained bishops of Hexham and Whithorn.

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‘York poem’ (below) asserts that when Egberht was bishop and archbishop (732–66) and his brother Eadberht king (737–58)—both ‘raised in wordly magnificence’—they ‘were happy times for our people’. Then ‘king and bishop ruled in full concord’, ‘the bishop with authority over the church, the king responsible for the affairs of the kingdom (negotia regni )’; ‘the one was pious, the other strong; the king was energetic, the bishop kindly, each of them in turn working for a true peace, two brothers happy to help one another’.19 There is something here of the universal nostalgia for a supposedly more stable world in the recent past, in the days of one’s childhood or just before. But even if it was in truth no ‘Golden Age’ (Bede’s or anyone else’s) at least it was a Silver Age compared with what followed, when kings were ousted, exiled, replaced, restored, murdered. The persistence and violent expression of conflicting dynastic claims to the throne ensured that regional polarisation would continue to be a major factor in the politics of the larger kingdom, even beyond Alcuin’s lifetime. The ‘Northumbrian province’ constituted a political entity, a united regnum, only to the extent that an individual king or dynasty could make it so. As the contemporary reges and maiores of Francia were discovering, or had long been aware, the exercise of superior authority depended not so much on administrative structures (with or without a ‘capital’) or even, at this time, on some theoretical notion of imperium articulated by churchmen. It rested rather on the possession or control of lands and men, particularly those who constituted the highest social stratum (‘order’), the kingdom’s principes or optimates,20 and on an ability to restrain the members of this tiny but potentially powerful élite from winning too much con19 ‘York Poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1273–87. For Alcuin’s possible debt here to the Irish De XII abusivis <saeculi>, see below, ch. 2. Prof. Godman translates Cuius [sc. Ecgbercti ] frater item Tyrio nutritus in ostro (l.1273) as ‘his brother, likewise born in the purple’, i.e. the familiar metaphor for ‘of royal birth’ or, more strictly, ‘born to a monarch’. But nutritus is not natus, and Tyrio ostro has no connotations of royalty either when Alcuin uses the same phrase, of worldly garments, in his own epitaph (carm. xciii, ed. Dümmler, MGH Poet. I, p. 343; ed. Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, pp. 256–7, line 13; also carm. ix, line 103, ed. Dümmler, 1, 231 [after Aen. I, 700]) or in the epitaph of Wilfrid of York and Hexham as recorded by Bede (HE V 19: line 5) of the decoration of a church, nor indeed in Virgil, Georg. iii. 17, which is the ultimate source. Germanae in l. 1283 is an attribute of pacis, and the translation ‘both lived in peace together as kinsmen should’ is hardly what Alcuin is trying to say. 20 See the texts cited in nn. 36, 37; and compare BCS. no. 430, Sawyer no. 192, for the Merciorum optimates who in the king’s presence gave judgement in favour of the bishop of Worcester in 840.

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trol over lesser landowners, monasteries and churches. The almost total disappearance of both royal and private charter evidence, other than in quotation in literary sources,21 and the lack of an early lawcode, make attempts to reconstruct the political shifts and the family and territorial nexuses that underlay them in eighth-century Northumbria a questionable, perhaps ultimately fruitless, undertaking. Sections of Archbishop Egberht of York’s Succinctus dialogus ecclesiasticae institutionis, surprisingly neglected by historians of the kingdom, and penitential texts of northern English origin partly compensate, however, for the absence of secular laws.22 Like the ‘Dialogue’, Northumbrian hagiographic texts of the early part of the century and Alcuin’s letters in the 790s provide at least useful pointers to and an acceptable terminology for the basic social structure; and they help to make sense of some of the other evidence.

Northumbrian Society Even with the glimpses provided by the Lives and by Bede’s Ecclesiastical History we know little about the majority of the population—the rustici, free and unfree, subject to a lord or lordless, who cultivated the arable or raised livestock from scattered farmsteads and modest 21 The only independently-preserved early Northumbrian ‘charter’ is King Ecgfrith’s supposed grant to Cuthbert in 685 (Sawyer no. 66) which is at best a factitious later document incorporating some elements of genuine tradition; for the interpretation of the indirect evidence, see below. 22 Dialogus: ed. Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 403–13, from the only complete text in London, BL Cotton Vitellius A. xii (s. xi/xii; Salisbury); for its content, see the all-too-brief remarks of D. Whitelock, EHD.2, p. 367 (noting that it uses ‘the same Latin terms for hide as do [non-Northumbrian] Latin charters’) and MayrHarting, Coming of Christianity, pp. 251–2, 259–60, with my comments, below. Penitentials: the ‘Northumbrian Disciple’s’ (Discipulus Umbrensium) version of Archbishop Theodore’s reported penitential practices or decisions, ed. P.W. Finsterwalder, Die Canones Theodori Cantuariensis und ihre Überlieferungsformen (Weimar, 1929), pp. 287–311 ( prefatio and Liber Primus only), on which see now T. Charles-Edwards, ‘The Penitential of Theodore and the “Iudicia Theodori”’, in: M. Lapidge ed., Archbishop Theodore (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 141–74; and its associated canon-law Liber Secundus (ed. Finsterwalder, pp. 311–33). But how much of the Paenitentialis Liber ad remedium animarum Ecgberhti archiepiscopus Eburacae civitatis, most conveniently available in Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, pp. 416–31 (a composite text, according to modern commentators, although based substantially on Vienna, Nat.bibl. cod. lat. 2223 [Main region, s. ix in or viii/ix], fols 77–87v), is genuinely Egbert’s or even English is very debatable. The penitential or penitentials attributed to Bede must certainly be regarded as later, Continental, compilations.

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‘villages’.23 Archaeology has uncovered a few of their settlement-sites, including ones that flourished in Bede’s and Alcuin’s lifetimes and were later abandoned after a period of occupation that could extend over many centuries or only a few decades; while their pre-700 burial-places, notably more numerous in the southern, Deiran, region than in Bernicia, figure in every account and index of ‘Anglo-Saxon cemeteries’.24 By the early decades of the eighth century an alternative final resting-place for some country-dwellers was provided by the proliferating monasteria (at that time the Church’s main pastoral centres in England), only gradually superseded by village churchyards.25 The 23 For the use and significance of rusticus in early-medieval texts, see Wort und Begriff “Bauer”, ed. R. Wenskus, H. Jankuhn, K. Grinda (Abhandl. Akad. Wissensch. Göttingen, Phil.-Hist. Kl.3 89; 1975), esp. pp. 231–40 (Köbler). H. Schabram’s assertion (ibid. p. 80) that the word is ‘selten belegt’ in pre-1066 English texts is simply because his closely-argued examination of the terms gebur and ceorl depends almost entirely on glossarial evidence. For the legally ‘unfree’, servi, on ecclesiastical and other estates, cf. below. 24 Rosemary Cramp, ‘Northumbria: the archaeological evidence’, in: S.T. Driscoll, M.R. Nieke ed., Power and Politics in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 69–78, neatly summarises the cemeterial and excavated settlement evidence to c. 1987, with two good maps: but for a fuller treatment of some aspects, see Higham, Northern Counties cit.; and for a more detailed and excellent map of the south-east (East Yorkshire with North Humberside), see Susan M. Hirst, An AngloSaxon Inhumation Cemetery at Sewerby, East Yorkshire (York Univ. Archaeological Publications 4; 1985), p. 2. Settlements identified and explored, either by excavation or fieldwalking, include: Wharram Percy, comprehensively reviewed by M.W. Beresford and J. Hurst, Wharram Percy: Deserted Medieval Village (London, 1990), for an eighthcentury ‘zone’ esp. pp. 73 (map; fig. 54), 82–4, with the suggestion that it may then have been a ‘small family monastic site’; the site on the S. Yorkshire Wolds in the parish of Cottam and Cowlam (‘the exact location being witheld as a contribution to its protection’!) occupied from the ?early eighth century to the later ninth and remarkable for the number of strap-ends and knife-blades found (evidence of stockraising?), reported by D.N. Haldensby in YAJ. 62 [1990]), 51–63, 64 (1992), 25–39; D. O’Sullivan and R. Young, ‘The early medieval settlement at Green Shiel, Northumberland’, Archeologia Aeliana 5th ser., 19 (1991), 55–69 (coastal; ninth-century, some coins found). Also R. Daniels, ‘The Anglo-Saxon monastery at Church Close, Hartlepool, Cleveland’, Archaeological Journal, 145 (1988), 158–210, a site which ‘petered out’ by s. viii ex: the evidence of substantial animal remains (ibid. pp. 197–9) and the assertion (ibid. p. 208) that ‘flocks of sheep and herds of cattle were driven into the settlement from outlying estates and there butchered’ are not easily reconcilable with the excavator’s ‘monastic’ interpretation. 25 Refs. as n. 13, with S. Foot, ‘Anglo-Saxon minsters: a review of terminology’, Pastoral Care before the Parish, pp. 212–25 (but for a cautionary note, see ASE 22 (1993), 101 and n. 28; also Cubitt, Pastoral Care, pp. 204–10); Bullough, ‘Burial, community and belief ’, Ideal and Reality esp. pp. 192–4, 196–9. For a lay-persons’ burial ground at Wearmouth (two phases—the first of them pre-monastic?), see R.J. Cramp, ‘Monastic sites’, The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. D.M. Wilson (London, 1976), pp. 201–52, here pp. 230–1; for Jarrow (more doubtful), ibid. p. 236.

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earlier burials with so-called ‘grave-goods’ tell us disappointingly little about the dead person’s former life in the world and nothing directly about their relations with superiors or inferiors. The presence of a weapon, even the simple spear, is arguably an indication of ‘freedom’: Theodore of Canterbury, in his rulings on penance, had had to recognise that a layman who had killed odii meditatione might refuse to surrender his weapons.26 Beyond that, archaeologists and historians are unable to agree how far and in what ways these graves reflect the distinctions of rank and personal wealth for which there is early, if not necessarily contemporary, textual evidence.27 The Prologue of the Penitential circulating under the name of Egberht of York insists that account should be taken of whether a sinner is rich or poor, and of his or her condition in life, beginning with ‘free, slave, infant, child’ and ending with ‘infirm, healthy’; and the second, canon-law, book of the ‘Northumbrian Disciple’s’ version of Theodore’s Penitential shows an awareness both of the problems of the slave class and the needs of the poor.28 The reality and constraints of rural poverty were familiar even to those ‘out of the world’. One implication of Bede’s story of Imma, a iuvenis and minister regis trying to conceal his true status, is that a young ‘rustic’ could be both pauper (landless?) and married. Writing to a probably Mercian optimas at the beginning of the ninth century, Alcuin both commends his virtuous qualities and exhorts him to show concern for ‘the poor who are usually standing at the door of your banqueting-hall’. Extreme indigence is reflected in other eighth/ninth century Northumbrian texts, including Æthelwulf ’s poem De Abbatibus; and although the direct evidence for families selling themselves or their children into slavery is later, Theodore had already tried to establish an ‘age of 26 ‘Northumbrian Disciple’s’ version, I. iv 4, ed. Finsterwalder, p. 294. Unsurprisingly, the spear is also a function of age if a cemetery in which it was deposited ‘only [with] children over twelve’ (Holywell Row, cited Hirst, Cemetery at Sewerby, p. 97) is typical. 27 Representative examples are L. Alcock, ‘Quantity or quality: the Anglian graves of Bernicia’ in: Angles, Saxons and Jutes, ed. V.I. Evison (Oxford, 1981), pp. 168–86, re-pr. with Postscript in Alcock, Economy, Society and Warfare among the Britons and Saxons (Cardiff, 1987), pp. 255–66; R. Miket, ‘A re-statement of evidence for Bernician Anglo-Saxon burials’, Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries, 1979, ed. P. Rahtz, T. Dickinson, L. Watts (BAR BS 82; Oxford, 1980), pp. 289–305; E. Pader, ‘Material symbolism and social relations in mortuary studies’, idem, pp. 143–59; and the very judicious and clear account of Hirst, Cemetery at Sewerby, pp. 96–102. 28 ‘Egbert’, Paenitentiale, prol., ed. Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 416–7; Canones Theodori ed. Finsterwalder, pp. 331–2 (II. xiii, xiv). For the problems of authorship and date of the first of these, see below.

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consent’.29 Whatever their incidental qualities as transmitters of ‘folkwisdom’ and secular song,30 the ordinary inhabitants of the countryside and their behaviour exemplify roughness, illiteracy, ignorance and superstition: they jeer at monks in trouble on the river Tyne, who (they say accusingly) ‘despise the common human laws’ and have destroyed old ways of worship without putting anything certain in their place; if penitentials are to be believed, the sin of bestiality is among their occupational hazards; admitted none the less to a religious community, they may be unable to overcome the fear of being alone at night.31 The mature Alcuin in his Biblical exegesis was to display a superior attitude towards those whose mind variis fuerit exagitata terroribus sive incitata promissis while they were sleeping; he was equally graphic and contemptuous in his letters about rustici mores in general.32 Egberht’s Dialogus reiterates the centuries-old law of the Church that personal unfreedom or ‘servile status’, which could be imposed as a secular punishment as well as inherited, constitutes (like unemended homicide) an absolute bar to ordination.33 Alcuin in his De orthographia follows Bede (whose source is uncertain) in asserting that Servitium multitudo est servorum, servitus condicio serviendi, with the added 29 Bede, HE IV, 22: for Imma’s insistence that he was married, see below; id. V,4 (a S. Yorkshire ‘gesith’ vovit . . . elimosynas pauperibus daturum); ep. no. 302 (in the two manuscripts of the ‘personal’ collection); Æthelwulf, De Abbatibus, ed. Campbell, lines 476–81 (p. 39); Canones Theodori, ed. Finsterwalder, p. 331 (II. xiii 1 and 2). See also, for ‘urban’ poverty, HE III, 6, where Bede records that King Oswald even had a minister cui suscipiendorum inopum erat cura deligata; and the inopes in Alcuin’s ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, lines 294 (= Bede, cit.), 1256, 1402. 30 Isidore, Etym. I xxxvii, 28 (aiunt enim rustici . . .); HE IV 24, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 415–7 (the beginning of the Cædmon story: cf. ASE 22 (1993), 106 and n. 44). 31 Bede, Vita ( pr.) Cuthberti, c. 3, ed. Colgrave, pp. 162–4; for bestiality, see e.g. Canones Theodori ed. Finsterwalder, p. 290, and my comment in JEH. 46 (1995), 318. ‘Night fears’ are illustrated by the anecdote, which must have originated with Alcuin himself, in Vita Alcuini, c. 2, ed. Arndt, p. 185; and by Lupus of Ferrières’s reference to novicius cursor noster who propter timores nocturnos solus cubare non potest (a quotation from Jerome’s epist. no. 50) in his epist. no. 70, Correspondance, ed. L. Levillain, 2 (Paris, 1935), p. 6. 32 Commenting on Ecl 5.6 Ubi multa sunt somnia etc. (largely following Jerome), PL 101, col. 689B; for the letters see below. 33 Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 409–10, resp. xiv (respondeat . . . conditionis servilis sese non esse obnoxium nec homicidium palam perpetrasse inemendatum neque res alieni iuris sub se habere dicat), resp. xv (si servilis aut ex origine non est conditionis obnoxius). Compare the noteworthy decree of the 816 Council of Chelsea that among the measures to be taken when a bishop dies is omnem hominem Angliscum liberare qui in diebus suis sit servitute subvictus, ut per illud sui proprie laboris fructum retributionis percipere mereatur: Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 583.

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comment that sed veteres indifferenter servitium pro serviendo posuerunt; in his exegesis he accepts without censure—of course at second hand— the condition of slavery, and provides an historical ‘explanation’ and an etymology, derived in this case from Augustine.34 As abbot of St. Martin’s at Tours he was to take full advantage of agricultural tenantdependence. Alcuin never refers specifically to that condition in his native Northumbrian society; but in a brief and possibly private letter exhorting the restored king of Northumbria, Æthelred, to a more virtuous life and stressing the natural qualities of ‘nobility’, he exploits rhetorically the triad nobilis-liber-servus.35 Alcuin, as one might expect, reveals a much greater awareness of those who possess wealth and influence. A more elaborate letter, written in the aftermath of the attack on Lindisfarne by ‘pagan folk’, is addressed to the Northumbrian king et omnibus optimatibus; gifts of land by optimates in the south of the kingdom are referred to in the opening chapter of his ‘Life of Willibrord’ (written c. 796/7). Elsewhere in his correspondence he seems to have avoided using the term. Like other writers of the period on both sides of the Channel (although not the contemporary ‘Frankish Royal Annalist’), Alcuin very occasionally 34 Alcuin, De orth.: ed. Keil, p. 310, ed. Bruni, p. 30 (no. 361); Bede, De orthographia (with pro servitute for pro serviendo): ed. Jones, CCSL 123A, p. 51, who supposed that Charisius was his source; but this is questioned by A.C. Dionisotti, ‘On Bede, grammars and Greek’, RevBén 92 (1982), 111–41, at 117–21. Alcuin, Expos. in epist. ad Titum II, 9–10, PL 100, cols 1021A–B, which is largely dependent on Jerome, Comm. in iv epistulas Paulinas, PL 26, col. 584; Interr. et resp. in Gen. 273, PL 100, cols 557A–B, from Augustine, Quaest. in Heptateuchum: Gen. 153, CCSL 33 (ed. J. Fraipont; Turnhout, 1958), p. 59, rather than from De Civitate Dei XIX, 15, CCSL 48 (ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb; Turnhout, 1955), p. 682: Alcuin’s concluding words inde et ‘mancipia’ quia [sunt] ‘manu capta’ are not in the latter. That Jerome’s overall view of slavery was much closer to the critical attitude of the fourth-century Greek Fathers than to Ambrose and, above all, Augustine, has been pointed out by H. Bellen, Studien zur Sklavenflucht im römischen Kaiserreich (Forsch. zur antiken Sklaverei, 4; Wiesbaden, 1971), pp. 82 ff., 150–1 and R. Klein, Die Sklaverei in der Sicht der Bischöfe Ambrosius und Augustinus (Forsch. etc., 20; Wiesbaden, 1988), pp. 196 (where the commentary In ep. ad Tit. is cited), 200, 217–25. The ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, lines 43 and 45, contrasts the servitii pondus of the Britons under the Picts with their previous libertatem paternam: the editor offers as a parallel to the first of these Iuvencus, Evangelia (ed. Huemer; 1891), iii.480. See also the 816 conciliar text cited last note. 35 Non est liber vel nobilis qui peccatis serviet, dicente Domino ‘Omnis qui facit peccatum servus est peccati’ (Io 8.34; the next sentence is a condemnation of rusticis moribus): ep. no. 30, Chase, Two Letter-Books, II/5; for its date, see below, ch. 3. A recent account of early English agricultural ‘slavery’ is R. Faith, The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship (Leicester U.P.; London, 1997), pp. 59–70, with references to other literature. I find no anticipation in Alcuin’s writings of the later ‘three orders’ of oratores, bellatores, laboratores.

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uses principes and potentes in a similar sense, and once—in 796—seniores populi. Senatores (terrae) is peculiar to the legatine report of the 786 councils in Northumbria and Mercia.36 Among these Northumbrian ‘leading men’, and almost the only ones in the second half of the century who are named in the sources, are the patricii and duces. Another of the letters prompted by the pagan attack in 793 is addressed jointly to the Northumbrian king and ‘the dearest friends Osbald patricius and Osberht dux’. Osberht is unrecorded elsewhere, unless he is the Osberct who is eighty-third in the list of ‘Kings and Dukes’ in the ‘Lindisfarne’ Liber Vitae. Osbald is comparatively well-documented—first as dux and a murderer of King Ælfwald’s patricius Bearn in December ?779; then, on the evidence of a later Alcuin letter, for a time a cleric or monk, who subsequently (presumably pre-793) reverted to the secular life; raised to the kingship in mid-796, only to be quickly forced into exile; finally, allowed back (as abbot: of a family monastery?) and buried, on his death in 799, in York cathedral.37 It remains uncertain what vernacular terms were current in eighth-century Northumbria for the two dignities. Most scholars assume that dux represents the OE ealdorman, probably rightly: for although the ‘D’ and ‘E’ versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refer to three men slain in 778 (by royal command) and the two assassins of Beorn ealdorman in 779/780 as (Norþymbra) heahgerefan, where the corresponding entries in the Latin Annals

36 Optimates: Alcuin’s ep. no. 16 which immediately precedes no. 30 in both Vesp. and Tib.; V. Willibrordi c. 1 (ed. Levison, 116; ed. Reischmann, p. 46). He refers to Frankish optimates (temp. King Dagobert) in his re-writing of the V. Richarii, c. 1 (ed. Krusch, MGH SSRM IV, p. 390). Earlier in the century, Popes Gregory III and Zacharias had both used the term in letters to Boniface, and the former also in a letter to the inhabitants of Thuringia and Hesse: Epist. Selectae, 1, ed. Tangl, nos 45 (p. 72), 80 (p. 176), 43 (p. 68); Hadrian similarly uses it of the leaders of the Saxons in MGH Epp. III, Cod. Carol. no. 76 (p. 608). Principes etc.: in Alcuin’s epp. nos 9 (quibusdam potentibus), 18 (omnes dilectae gentis principes et diversarum dignitatum [only in mss. A, S1] nomina (p. 51), cf. principibus populoque . . . gentis in the head-note (lemma) in manuscripts T and K2 [p. 49]) and 101; MGH Epp. IV, pp. 20–21, 23. For nomen ‘title implying power’, compare Charles’s Admonitio generalis of 789, MGH Capit. I, p. 53; for potentes in contemporary Continental usage see, e.g., the letter of c. 772, MGH Epp. IV, p. 496, addressed to Duke Tassilo and all the bishops ac nobilibus potentibusque Baiuvariorum. Senatores: MGH Epp. IV, p. 27 (Northumbria), 28 (Mercia). 37 Osberht: ep. no. 18 (cf. last note); Gerchow, Gedenküberlieferung, p. 304 (no. 83). Osbald: HR, ed. Arnold, 2, 47, 57 (Kirby, Earliest English Kings, p. 155, is surely unnecessarily cautious); ep. no. 109, written after his exile; HR ed. Arnold, 2, 62; perhaps also Liber Vitae, ‘nomina abbatum’ [87]Osbald, ed. Gerchow, Gedenküberlieferung, p. 307.

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(pseudo-Symeon, etc.) speak of patricius and duces, that seems to be the tenth-century terminology. A suggestion that patricius might correspond to the OE æthling has no linguistic or contextual support.38 Although Mercian writers may have adopted the term very much earlier, the first documented Northumbrian patricius is (Æthelwald) Moll—a future king—in the late 750s.39 Subsequent patricii are Bearn (Beorn); Sicga, who is the first lay signatory to the 786 legatine synodal acta, led a conspiracy to murder King Ælfwald in 788 and was himself murdered in April 793;40 and finally Osbald. If it is accepted that Alcuin was very quickly aware of Osbald’s succession to the office in 793 or that the title of dux given to Sicga at the time of his death indicates his previous demotion, the implication of those texts is that there was a single patricius —a man who was indeed ‘second to the king’, but whose continuing loyalty could never be assumed, and the loyalty of whose own followers could not be assumed either! In contrast, there were clearly as many as three (or more) duces simultaneously in the century’s last decades: the otherwise undocumented victims of the 778 slaying; Ælheard associated with Osbald in 780; two other men subscribing with that title to the synodal acta of 786, and subsequently Eardwulf (the later king), the subject of a bungled execution in 791;41 three different ones again, involved in conspiracies against the monarch and a subsequent revenge-killing, in the later 790s.42 It is a reasonable guess—by analogy with other regions—that their office-holding (dignitas) was linked with responsibility for the enforcement of services and dues to the monarch and churches in an extensive portion of the kingdom, centering on one 38 ASC ‘D’, ‘E’ (= ‘F’) s.a. 778, 779; HR, ed. Arnold, 2, 46 (an. 778), 47 (an. 780); H.M. Chadwick, Studies on Anglo-Saxon Institutions (Cambridge, 1905), pp. 184–5, 231–2; Thacker, ‘Terms for Noblemen’, p. 207. The epithet (venerandus) patricius given to a Wessex Baldred in a possibly genuine letter from Aldhelm to Abbot Baldred (Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, pp. 502–3) is translated ‘atheling’ by M. Herren, Aldhelm: the Prose Works (1979), p. 170. 39 In the Papal letter discussed below. A possible predecesssor (as Professor N.P. Brooks suggested to me) is Berthfrithus, secundus a rege [Osredo] princeps in 705/6 (<Eddius> Stephanus, V. Wilfridi, c. 60: ed. Colgrave, 130), Beorthfriä ealdorman in ASC ‘E’ s.a. 710 (but Berctfrid praefectus in HE V 24: there is no corresponding annal in the ‘Northumbrian Annals’ incorporated in HR, ed. Arnold, 2). 40 MGH Epp. IV, p. 28; HR, ed. Arnold, 2, 52; ASC ‘D’, ‘E’ s.a. 789; HR, ed. Arnold, 2, 54, where it is also recorded that he was taken to Lindisfarne for burial two months before the Northmen’s attack. 41 Below, ch. 3. 42 Below (where also the possible evidence for yet another Northumbrian dux in 798 is considered).

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or more royal villae or vici; and at the same time for justice and dispute-settlement in that area, hopefully with proper regard for the circumstances of causa and litigants, and respecting what Alcuin was to refer to in a letter to another part of England as ‘the decisions of forefathers’.43 It is unlikely, however, that their putative territories were any more stable than those of their Continental counterparts; and the authority given to them and its associated material rewards were matched by the high risks they ran as royal lines rose and fell. Between 778 and 800 at least two current or former patricii and four duces were murdered, one ex-dux, ex-patricius was exiled and tonsured, two other duces had become clerici (surely forcibly) before their deaths in the mid-nineties, and one fled.44 Egberht’s answer to a question about the penalties due when a layman kills a cleric or monk specifies monetary payments ( precium, wergeld) to the Church, ranging from 400 to 800 sicli (or argentei ), the latter for a priest; if a bishop is the victim, he declares—taking up but adapting a ‘ruling’ of Theodore’s—the compensation should be determined by consultation in an assembly (secundum [iudicium?] universalis consilii ). But he adds that if any of these would, by reason of his parentage, have been entitled to a higher level of compensation as a layman, that ‘price’ was to be paid; while anyone who lacked the means of payment was to be turned over to the king for punishment.45 The natural implication of this unique text is that the siclus (argenteus) was the ‘shilling’ of four or five silver pennies, and that in Northumbria as in other parts of England ceorlas had a manprice of 200 shillings and gesithas (probably) of 1200 shillings. The assessment of a bishop’s wergeld only after discussion, however, at

43 The ideal conduct of iudices secularium causarum is offered as a comparison with that of soul-doctors by the author of the Prologue of ‘Egberht’s’ Penitential, Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 416; among Alcuin’s exhortations to the Kentings in 797, ep. no. 129, is that the nobiles qui sunt in populo . . . populo per iustitiam praesint, amantes paterna statuta in iudiciis magis quam pecuniam. For the terminology villae regis etc., see below. Were the places at which the three ‘high reeves’ were murdered in 778, namely Coniscliffe and an unidentified Helathirnum, administrative centres of that kind? 44 All recorded in the ‘Northumbrian Annals’ in HR, ed. Arnold, 2, 46–59, 62–3. 45 Ed. Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 408–9, int./resp. xii. Is aut dignitas natalium vel nobilitas generis making a distinction between parents (habuisse iure parentum) whose status and wergeld were the result of ‘promotion’ to high office in the kingdom, and those whose ‘nobility’ went back to an earlier generation or generations? Royal punishment of those unable to pay would probably typically be ‘penal slavery’, cf. the decree of the 816 Council of Chelsea, cited above, n. 33.

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least raises the possibility that laymen who held office under the king as patricius or dux, as well as members of his family, were similarly privileged; but what payments (if any) were actually made in these decades is nowhere reported.46 Northumbrian gesithcundmen or gesithas, from both Deira and Bernicia, figure under the Latin title comes in the earliest Saints’ Lives and in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. Typically, they are named individuals who are lords of entire vici (one or several) with dependent ministri and servi and who have the resources and commitment to found a church for the inhabitants: men such as Hemma and Sibba who benefitted from Cuthbert of Lindisfarne’s interventions, or Puch whose wife was healed and Addi whose servant was healed by Bishop John of York (resigned ?718) in his native south-east Yorkshire.47 As young men, they may well have feasted and fought—at times, perhaps even from horseback—in the company of the king or of one of his sons; and as their title of rank suggests, the bond with their lord and king was not dissolved when, typically in their mid-twenties, they took a wife and departed from the comitatus.48 46 In reply to a query from me in 1989, Prof. N.P. Brooks said that the only documentary reference known to him of a payment for property in sicli, which he also interprets as ‘shillings of account’ (cf. Church of Canterbury, p. 160 and note) is the authentic Kentish charter of 805, BCS. no. 321, Sawyer no. 161. Wergeld payments are surely one of the reasons for coining money; they could also be part of the explanation of the discovery of (relatively) large numbers of coins at, e.g., ‘Sancton’, i.e., more correctly, South Newbald. 47 Anon. V. Cuth., IV 3, IV 7, ed. Colgrave, pp. 114, 120; HE V 4, 5; H.R. Loyn, ‘Gesiths and Thegns in Anglo-Saxon England’, EHR 70 (1955), 529–49, here esp. 530–35. For servi, ‘agricultural “slaves”’, cf. above, n. 35. 48 King Ecgfrith’s brother Ælfwine, apparently sub-king of Deira, was iuvenis circiter X et VIII annorum when he was killed at the battle of the Trent in 679: HE IV 21; the Mercian royally-connected Guthlac, led his own comitatus from the age of about fifteen to twenty-four: Felix’s Life of Guthlac, ed. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1956), p. 80 (cc. 16–18). In 679 a iuvenis de militia regis Imma escaped death by pretending to be a rusticus and married (HE IV 22): the second claim was not a sentimental one that this had happened ‘recently’ (so Alcock, p. 263) but because as a member of the king’s warrior-band who was iuvenis ( geogud) he would necessarily be unmarried. For Bernician ‘cavalry’ see Eddius’s Life of Wilfrid, ed. Colgrave, pp. 40–2 (c. 19, where however it is further defined as parva manu), with Alcock’s comment, Economy, Society and Warfare p. 265. But there is nothing comparable in the next century, even though young men of this class were customarily ‘horsed’ and eager to display their abilities as horsemen: see Bede’s account of the accident to Bishop John’s young cleric Heribald when coeperunt iuvenes qui cum ipso erant, maxime laici, postulare episcopum ut cursu maiore equos suos invicem probare liceret, HE V 6; and the lateeighth-century formulary letter, ep. no. 46, in which the writer—most probably the future Archbishop Eanbald (II) of York—refers to the four horses he has previously entrusted to a south-English (arch)bishop. Horseshoes and a spur of probably eighth/ninth century date have latterly been found in a village on the Wolds: see above.

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Theodore, or the ‘Northumbrian Disciple’ who organized his penitential rulings in the early-eighth century, assumes that such men will be unwilling to give up their weapons, even when compelled to do penance for killing another man ‘nursing hatred’.49 In the previous century, they might take with them to their graves the swords and other weapons they had used when alive; and after that burialpractice was abandoned, there is limited visual evidence of their superior armament and other equipment.50 A privileged few among them were, at an early stage in the development of ecclesiastical burial-places, accorded stone grave-monuments with a commemorative inscription in Latin or English; a remarkable Northumbrian example of the ?early-ninth century is the Falstone (co. Northumberland) house-shaped monument on which a Hroethberht is commemorated (by a nephew) in Old English, rendered in Insular majuscules and a second time in runes. Some years previously Alcuin had criticized the current pre-occupation of the well-born with the construction and decoration of their future tombs.51 During his lifetime the members of a monarch’s or magnate’s ‘following’, whom Alcuin characterised (ca. 789?) as ‘young men ready to go to war and not yet married’, came to be distinguished from the landed comites as milites or ministri (here evidently translating OldEnglish äegn(as)).52 No miles or comes in England is individually the 49 Bk. I, c. iv. 5, in: Canones Theodori, ed. Finsterwalder, p. 294. Odii meditatione is taken from Cummian’s Penitential, ed. Bieler p. 118; but Cummian’s relictis armis usque ad mortem is replaced by si non vult arma relinquere. 50 The right-hand figure, with sword, on the cross-shaft fragment from York, St. Mary Bishophill Junior, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, 3, ed. J. Lang (Oxford, 1991), ill. 216 and pp. 83–4 (where it is dated ‘mid ninth century’); perhaps the helmeted figures on the Pictish Aberlemno (Angus) churchyard stone (Alcock, Economy, Warfare and Society, p. 246; idem, ‘Image and icon in Pictish sculpture’, in: R.M. Spearman and J. Higgitt (ed.), The Age of Migrating Ideas (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 230–6, here esp. pp. 233–4; D. Tweddle, The Anglian Helmet from Coppergate = The Archaeology of York, 17/8 (1992), 851–1201, at 1099–1100. To which must be added the Coppergate helmet itself, magnificently published by Tweddle, cit., unless the unidentifiable Oshere of its inscription is regarded as a ‘princely personage’. 51 Falstone: E. Okasha, Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runic Inscriptions (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 71–2 (no. 39); R. Cramp, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, 1 (Oxford, 1984), 172–3 with ill. 166. Most of the other—not very numerous—early inscriptions recording lay persons are from urban contexts. Alcuin’s criticism is at the end of a letter to the widowed Northumbrian queen, now abbess, Æthelthryth: ep. no. 79 (pp. 121–2). 52 The ‘Northumbrian Annals’ invariably use familia of the royal household or following, although an exiled king (Osred) returned with and was deserted by his milites: HR, 2, ed. Arnold, pp. 41, 45, 57 and 54; for the archbishop of York’s noble

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recipient of an extant letter; at least one of Alcuin’s ‘ducal’ acquaintances may, however, have previously been a Mercian royal comes; and the Mercian Ceolmund who figures in two letters is described both as ‘formerly a minister of King Offa’ and ‘our friend’.53 Elsewhere he shows himself fully aware of their pattern of life which they will be reluctant to abandon when admitted to a monastic or cathedral community, even continuing with their hare-coursing or fox-hunting!54 while a personal acquaintance with Northumbrians in that social group and a continuing acceptance of their code of values, shared with other churchmen in England, is revealed by his praise of King Æthelred’s faithful follower and ‘my friend’ Torctmund who had recently ‘revenged his lord in blood’ by killing his slayer.55

and non-noble milites, see ep. no. 233 (p. 378); for a minister sent by the Mercian king to recently-annexed Kent, see the charter Sawyer 128 of 788. For the semantic evolution of the corresponding OE terms, see Loyn, ‘Gesiths and thegns’, pp. 535 ff. Iuvenes ad bellum promptos et qui non fuerunt uxorati is the (historically incorrect) explanation of the expeditos vernaculos suos of Vg. Gn 14.14 in the Interrogationes in Genesim, int. 162 (PL 100, col. 536), and cf. his supporting quotation of Gn 14.24, exceptis his quae comederunt iuvenes (which is a fairly free rendering of the Hebrew). In ep. no. 119 to King Pippin of Italy, Alcuin says Utere consilio senum et servitio iuvenum. 53 On the Ardbertus vir inluster to whom Alcuin addressed his ep. no. 302, see my comments in ASE 22, 117 n. 91; for the addressee of ep. no. 40, which has textual links with ep. no. 302, see below, ch. 3. Ceolmund (surely the correct spelling) figures in epp. nos 231 and 232, of 801. 54 Ep. no. 19 (p. 55); non per campos discurrentes vulpes agitando declament, ep. no. 114 (p. 168). 55 Epp. nos 231 and 232, with the ‘Northumbrian Annals’ for 799, HR ed. Arnold, 2, 62, which shows that Torctmund had previously been made a dux. Alcuin’s fortiter sanguinem domini sui vindicavit (cf. Dial. Egb. int./resp. xii, ed. Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, p. 409: Haec vero vindicta, ‘compensation’) in ep. no. 231 is the counterpart of the Annals’ a Thorhtmundo duce in ultionem domini sui . . . interfectus est; and similarly in HR ed. Arnold, 2, 51, of the revenge-slaying of the Wessex king Cynewulf ’s assassin. Earlier, in his account of King Oswald’s miracle-doing relics in the ‘York poem’, Alcuin described Oswiu (line 304) as germani sanguis ultor, which has no equivalent in HE and should not have been italicized in Godman’s edition. It has been claimed (P.A. Clarke, The English Nobility under Edward the Confessor (Oxford, 1994), p. 72) that the discipulus Umbrensium’s version of Theodore’s penitential rulings imposed seven years’ penance on a man who killed to avenge a kinsman, but only forty days if the killing was to avenge the death of his lord: in fact I. iv: De occisione hominum (Canones Theodori, ed. Finstwerwalder, p. 294) refers only to revenge killings by kinsfolk, with a reduction in the period of penance if compensation is paid; while ‘One who at his lord’s command slays a man shall keep away from the church for forty days; and one who slays a man in public war shall do penance for forty days’.

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When, not long before 800, Alcuin or someone taught by him, rewrote and re-cast a probably much older collection of mathematical (arithmetical) puzzles, the examples taken from rural life, its households and familiae, agricultural produce and livestock are all associated with a paterfamilias.56 Almost a century previously, the anonymous author of the Lindisfarne Vita Cuthberti referred to the beneficee of a posthumous miracle as a paterfamilias: the man is unnamed, and his social standing is implicitly contrasted with that of named (noble) comites with more extensive resources in land and dependents. Bede associates a miraculous healing on the battlefield where King Oswald had been killed in 642 or 643 with the grand-daughter of a similarlyunnamed paterfamilias. A later chapter of the Historia Ecclesiastica describes the vision of Hell and Heaven vouchsafed to a northern Northumbrian paterfamilias, whose name (Drycthelm) is only revealed because of his austerities as a Melrose monk.57 In the far south of the kingdom an oratory dedicated to St. Andrew near the Humber mouth had been founded (as we learn from Alcuin) by Wilgils, father of the missionary-bishop Willibrord, whose secular status was likewise that of paterfamilias; and one of Alcuin’s earliest extant letters seemingly refers to one known to him, who may however be Frankish.58 56 M. Folkerts, Die älteste mathematische Aufgabensammlung in lateinischer Sprache: Die Alkuin zugeschriebenen “Propositiones ad acuendos iuvenes” . . . = Denkschr. der österreichischen Akad. d. Wissensch., math.-naturwiss. Kl. 116, 6. Abh. (1978), 15–78 (discussed below, ch. 5), here esp. nos xii, xxxii–xxxv, xli, lii, liii. 57 Anon. V. Cuth. IV 15: ed. Colgrave, pp. 132–4; HE III 9; id., V 12. Alcuin’s version of the battlefield miracle in his ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, lines 324–35, is of some interest. He has previously referred to the place as scamma duelli (not to be found in the corresponding passage, or anywhere else, in HE), from the Greek word for ‘wrestling-ground’, which he had presumably learnt from Aldhelm or from a glossary: for the former see e.g. De virginitate ( pr.), cc. 2, 34, 36, ed. Ehwald, pp. 230, 276, 284; for the latter Corpus Glossary ed. Hessels, S 114 Scammatum. locus ubi anthletae luctantur. But for the girl’s illness Alcuin ‘lifts’ a line from Venantius Fortunatus’s Vita S. Martini; and since paterfamilias will not fit into a hexameter, Bede’s neptem patris familias and et cum familiares domus illius . . . quererentur become Cumque domus neptim patris . . . gemebat, for which Godman has the unhappy translation (p. 31) ‘her father’s (!) household was lamenting his niece’. (The OE Bede here has ‘æs higna ealdres’ for paterfamilias and ‘a higna’ for familiares.) Similarly in ‘the York poem’, ed. Godman, line 883, the visionary, who is never named, is communi in plebe maritus. 58 Alcuin, V. Willibrordi, I 1, ed. Levison, p. 116; ep. no. 7, Chase, Two LetterBooks, I/4, de elemosina patrisfamilie Areide [sic in ms.]. Two later chapters of the Vita refer to unnamed patresfamilias in Continental contexts, I 19 (an amicus of the bishop who could only provide refreshment for him and his companions after a miracle)

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The source of this term of social description in early Northumbria (and contemporary Mercia)59 is no Roman legal text: it is the ‘Vulgate’ New Testament. The owner of a vineyard who employed workers at one denarius for the day’s work and the other owner of a vineyard who sent his servants to collect his share of the produce from those to whom he had rented it, in the parables reported by Matthew, were patresfamilias.60 The term is an obvious counterpart to OE ceorl, understood as ‘head of a household’—the later husbandman—61 with the means to support it and enjoying a two-hundred-shilling man-price and oath-value. Were the men so referred to in the texts representative of Northumbria’s ‘warrior-peasants’, who for several generations were buried with spear and knife rather than with swords? Possibly, although serving in adolescence in the comitatus of a prince or ealdorman might have brought them enhanced status and greater wealth.62 For a select few, withdrawal from the world in later life produced comparable rewards, as when Willibrord’s father Wilgils ‘was held in such honour by the Northumbrian king and his magnates that they gave him in perpetuity pieces of land’ near his oratory to enable him to build a church and establish a small community there.63

and I 22 (a household suffering from a demonic presence which priests had failed to expel but water blessed by the Saint did, cf. Anon. V. Cuthb. IV 15, as last note): ed. Levison, 130, 133. 59 Erat namque quidam vir paterfamilias in provincia Wissa: Vita s. Guthlaci auct. Felice, c. 53, ed. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1956), p. 168. A highly unusual (?unique) usage is among the epithets of Christ in a prayer in the Worcester-region ‘Royal prayerbook’ (below, p. 178 and n. 143), ed. Kuypers, Book of Cerne, p. 212, which SimsWilliams, Religion and Literature, pp. 315–6 thought might show ‘Gallican liturgical influence’: . . . arbiter saeculi, PATERFAMILIAS caeli, vita credentium . . . 60 Mt 20.1–16, idem 21.33–41. In the Roman Lectionary and almost certainly in the version in widest use in eighth-century England, the first of these is the Gospel for Septuagesima Sunday; and Mt 21.33–46 is the Gospel for Friday in Quadragesima II. 61 The early-eighth-century Whitby Vita et Virtutes Gregorii papae actually uses the word maritus, in what is evidently the same sense: B. Colgrave, The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great by an Anonymous Monk of Whitby (Lawrence, Kansas, 1968; Cambridge, 1985), pp. 102, 104. Compare the language of the OE Bede, and Alcuin’s description of Drycthelm in his ‘York poem’, quoted above, n. 57 ex.; and see also Faith, English Peasantry, pp. 48–9, 127–9. 62 Compare also Alcuin’s disapproving reference to the gregarios, id est ignobiles milites who accompany the (noble) milites in the archbishop of York’s comitatus: ep. no. 233. 63 . . . Illius gentis regi et optimatibus honorabilis effectus est, in tantum ut ei aliquas terrarum possessiunculas . . . dono perpetuo contulerunt: V. Willibrordi, I 1 (ed. Levison, p. 116). For the interpretation of Alcuin’s dono perpetuo etc., see the reference to Patrick Wormald’s Jarrow Lecture of 1984 in next note.

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Alcuin, unlike some modern scholars (although a diminishing number of them), saw no objection to speaking of the ownership of both land and churches. As he put it when arguing by analogy in ?799 and deploying language that had established itself in England in the previous half-century, ‘we are accustomed to call our own possessions the lands that come to us by hereditary right (terrarum quoque possessiones proprias dicere solemus, quae nobis hereditario proveniunt iure)’, even if others live on them. Religious communities and, in certain circumstances, individuals such as Wilgils acquired their ‘possessions’ by gift from a third party, typically but not necessarily the king.64 Whatever the range and scale of land-holding and wealth among Northumbrian patresfamilias may have been, laymen of higher standing, including of course the king, and monasteries and major churches were typically ‘lords’ (domini, hlafordas) of what have been called, for the last four decades, ‘multiple estates’. On the usual view, these were discrete and sometimes widely-dispersed properties from which the cultivators and others, both servile and legally free,65 brought renders in kind 64

Alcuin in ep. no. 204 (p. 338), where the words following iure are quae tamen longe a nobis alterius sunt substantiae; also his Vita Will., praef. and c. 1 (ed. Levison, pp. 114, 116), referring to the cellula ‘which I legitima successione praesedeo al. per successiones legitimas suscepi gubernandum’. York cathedral’s lands are referred to as possessiones terrrarum in ep. no. 233 (p. 378) of 801; a noteworthy metaphorical usage is Adversus Elipandum Libri IV, III, 1 (PL 101, col. 271A), eamus per pulcherrimas sanctorum Patrum possessiones flores colligere. For propria monasteria earlier, and the issue of their division among heirs, see Dial. Egberti, int. xi, Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 408. The classic remarks of E. Levy, West Roman Vulgar Law. The law of property, M.A.P.S. 29 (Philadelphia, 1951), esp. pp. 72 ff., 87 ff., on possessio in Late Latin and ‘Vulgar Roman law’, seem now of limited relevance to an understanding of early-English land-law. For ius hereditarium/hereditas in eighth-century English texts, beginning with Bede (but without, I think, any reference to Alcuin) and for ius perpetuum, see especially the seminal writings of Patrick Wormald, most conveniently Bede and the Conversion of England: the Charter Evidence ( Jarrow Lecture, 1984) at pp. 20–23 and ‘On þa Wæpnedhealfe’, in: Edward the Elder 899–924, ed. N.J. Higham and D.H. Hill (London and New York), 2001, pp. 264–79, at pp. 264–5. 65 For lordship over free-born men, Anon. v. Cuth. I 5 (p. 68) (the lord of the young Cuthbert, who was looking after his flocks) should be considered in conjunction with Bede’s V. Cuth. pr. c. 6 (p. 172) (handing his horse and spear to a servant before entering Melrose) and Anon. v. Cuth. IV 7 (p. 120) (a royal gesith who was dominus of a future Lindisfarne priest). With the first of these compare Alcuin’s, admittedly metaphorical, encouragement to the former Queen Æthelthryth to be a faithful steward (dispensator) of the flock entrusted to her by her Lord ( pecuniam domini sui ), ep. no. 79 (p. 121). For servi see, in addition to Vitae sanctorum passages previously quoted, the ‘Northumbrian Disciple’s’ version of Theodore’s rulings, Canones Theodori ed. Finsterwalder, p. 331. None of these places is cited in DMLBS s. v. dominus.

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and a variety of services to an estate centre, which eighth-century sources commonly refer to as a villa or vicus and where archaeologists are looking for and sometimes finding substantial ‘halls’.66 Certain royal, or one-time royal, ‘estate-centres’ had an additional function: they were the administrative foci of associated regiones (a term already found in early-eighth-century texts) which, if evidence from later centuries has been rightly interpreted, might extend over 100 square miles or more and were at least in part of pre-English origin. An early ‘region’ associated with York itself may underlie the thirteen-vill, 84-carucate territory in geldo civitatis in the eleventh century, although if so it will hardly have persisted unchanged over several hundred years.67 Early Northumbrian royal villae figure only incidentally in contemporary or near-contemporary sources, typically as places where kings, bishops and others stay on their travels, hold assemblies, are married or are murdered, and awkward subjects are imprisoned: the strategically-located Catterick (N. Yorks) is one of the better-documented examples; the East Yorkshire Driffield, where King Aldfrith died and in the vicinity of which there are, exceptionally, early-eighth-century cemetery burials, is probably another; Dunbar in East Lothian certainly a third.68 Otherwise most of the 66 For the significance of villa and vicus in Bede’s historical works and in some other texts, see especially J. Campbell, ‘Bede’s words for places’, in: Names, Words and Graves, ed. P.H. Sawyer (Leeds, 1979), pp. 34–54, at pp. 44–8. Northumbrian halls after Yeavering and Doon Hill, Dunbar (where Bishop Wilfrid was for a time imprisoned: below, n. 71) are still very much an unknown quantity, despite the efforts of Professor Leslie Alcock and others; the evidence from the contemporary Mercian kingdom is (marginally) better. Similarly, Alcuin never uses the word aula (Court or palace) in a Northumbrian context. 67 J.E.A. Joliffe, ‘Northumbrian Institutions’, EHR, 41 (1926), 1–42; G.W.S. Barrow, The Kingdom of the Scots (London, 1975), pp. 7–68 (surprisingly ignored by Higham, Northern Counties), here esp. pp. 19–22, 24–36, 66–7; J. Campbell, ‘Bede’s words for places’, pp. 34–54 passim. A map of the York territory is in The Domesday Geography of Northern England, ed. H.C. Darby and I.S. Maxwell (Cambridge, 1962), p. 157; an early origin seems to be hinted at in S.R. Rees Jones’s unpublished York D.Phil. thesis (1987) as quoted by D.M. Palliser, Domesday York (University of York Borthwick Paper, no. 78; 1990), p. 17 (and would not be incompatible with the different interpretation proposed by A.G. Dickens in 1961, quoted ibid.). For the regio associated with Hexham (the ‘Hexhamshire’ of much later date?) when it was given to Bishop Wilfrid in the third quarter of the seventh century, see below, n. 69; for a wider use of the term, see the ninth decree of the Council of Cloveshoe (746/7), ed. Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 365–6, Ut presbyteri per loca et regiones laicorum quae sibi ab episcopis provinciae insinuata et iniuncta sunt. 68 Catterick: the ‘Northumbrian Annals’, HR, ed. Arnold, 2, 42, 44, 54, and, for the previous century, Bede, HE II 14 (vicus Cataracta), II 20; for ‘early Anglian’ archaeological evidence—predominantly from the sixth century and none of it later

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evidence for them belongs to the moment of alienation to churchmen and ecclesiastics and, in the absence of charters, provides the minimum of detail. Thus Bede’s Life of St. Cuthbert records how King Alhfrith gave Eata ‘a certain place in his kingdom which is called Ripon in which to build a monastery’, while Stephen of Ripon reports that Hexham and its territory had been gifted to Bishop Wilfrid by Queen Æthelthryth: in the early sources, that is all. A later (mid-tenth/early-eleventh-century) text, but in this respect a possibly trustworthy one, records the gifts made to Lindisfarne by Kings Ecgfrid and Ceolwulf, beginning with that of Crayke (Yorks) and ending with that of Warkworth (Northumberland) ‘with its appendages’, on the occasion of Ceolfwulf ’s abdication and tonsuring in 737. All the places named are identifiable with estate-centres that in several instances later rulers made efforts to recover.69 Royal gifts of land, its cultivators and income to the cathedral church of York, which with similar non-royal donations must have been the pre-condition of its eighth-century prosperity, are nowhere recorded. In his ‘York poem’, Alcuin includes rura among Eanbald (I)’s inheritances from Archbishop Ælberht; but even the indirect evidence for identifiable dependent estates or churches, none of it in the letters, is very scanty.70 than the seventh—see P.R. Wilson, P. Cardwell, R.J. Cramp et al., ‘Early Anglian Catterick and Catraeth’, Medieval Archaeology 40 (1996), 1–61. Driffield: ASC ‘D’, ‘E’ an. 705, December 14 (for the year, cf. Wallace-Hadrill, Bede Commentary, p. 189); Vierck in W. Davies, H. Vierck, ‘The contexts of the Tribal Hidage . . .’, FmSt 8 (1974), fig. 5 and App. II; and the map in Hirst, Cemetery at Sewerby, p. 2. Dunbar: <Eddius> Stephanus, Vita Wilfridi, ed. Colgrave, c. 38 (p. 76); L. Alcock, Bede, Eddius and the Forts of the North Britons ( Jarrow Lecture, 1988), pp. 4–5, 28. A fourth is probably the unfortunately unlocated Medilwong, where Cuthbert healed a child dying from ‘the plague’ (Anon V. Cuth. IV 6, ed. Colgrave, p. 118) and near which King Oswulf was murdered by his familia in 759 (HR ed. Arnold, 2, 41, where the form of the name is Methilwongtune). See also the suggestive remarks of Campbell, ‘Bede’s words for places’, p. 48, on the possible royal associations of place-names like Hruringaham, the southern-English Barking etc., with the concluding comment: ‘What sounds like a tribe may have been only an administrative district’. 69 Ripon: Vita S.Cuth. pr., c. 7: ed. Colgrave, p. 174. Hexham: In Haegustaldesi (al.ae, with other variants) adepta regione a regina etc., Life of Wilfrid, ed. Colgrave, c. 22 (p. 44), the translation ‘having obtained an estate’ being clearly inappropriate; for the interpretation of the toponym and of the Vita passage, see Bullough, ‘The placename Hexham’ (above, Pt. I, n. 227), p. 426. Grants to Lindisfarne: Historia de sancto Cuthberto, in Symeonis Opera, RS., ed. Arnold, 1, 200–2; H.H.E. Craster, ‘The patrimony of St. Cuthbert’, EHR 69 (1954), 177–99, esp. 185–6; C. Morris, ‘Northumbria and the Viking settlement: the evidence for land-holding’, Archaeologia Aeliana ser. 5, 5 (1977), 81–103. 70 Addingham (Yorkshire Wharfedale), where Archbishop Wulfhere took refuge from the Vikings at the end of 866 (Symeonis Opera, RS., ed. Arnold, 1, 225) and

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Giving away lands and their cultivators ‘in perpetuity’ weakened royal authority in two, perhaps three, ways: by diminishing the material resources that provided immediate and exclusive support for the king and his entourage, linked with a loss of administrative centres whose reeves ( praepositi or praefecti ) had hitherto been directly responsible to him; and by permanently reducing the resources available for the ‘buying’ of laymen’s loyalty, at a time when the rewards of aggressive military campaigns had all but disappeared.71 If Alcuin was ever openly critical of this process, and there is no good reason why he should have been, it found no place among his criticisms of and admonitions to kings in the 790s, even though in his last years he was very conscious of the improper granting by bishops of lands and ecclesiastical office to their ‘hoard of relatives’. Boniface’s main preoccupations in his admonitory letters of the 740s, with which the sequence begins, were likewise quite other ones.72 ‘Noble’ office-holders and landowners, deprived of actual or potential rewards, had their own answers: the familiar one (because of Bede and modern scholarship) of founding ‘false monasteries’ which attracted donations of land from others and at a second stage might where excavation has uncovered part of a probably extensive cemetery, apparently in use from the eighth to the tenth centuries, the burials in which ‘seem to represent a “normal” rural population’: see M. Adams, ‘Excavation of a pre-Conquest cemetery at Addingham, West Yorkshire’, Medieval Archaeology, 40 (1996), 151–91; Otley, on the evidence of a tenth-century text, ninth-century sculptures including figural ornament and possibly a passage in Stephanus’s V. Wilfridi: compare I.N. Wood, ‘Anglo-Saxon Otley: an archiepiscopal estate and its crosses in a Northumbrian context’, Northern History 23 (1987), 20–38, esp. 36–8; perhaps Lastingham if sculptural fragments here are rightly identified as remains of a ‘seat of dignity’ of eighth/ninth century date: Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, 3, 172–3 (nos 10, 11), with ills. 614–21, 623–6. The ‘York poem’s allusion is ed. Godman, line 1532. 71 So already, and more fully, P. Wormald in The Anglo-Saxons ed. Campbell, pp. 97–98, and in his Jarrow Lecture for 1984, Bede and the Conversion of England (above, n. 64), esp. pp. 19–21; this last has an extensive bibliography. For reeves ( praefecti ) in urbes regis and their responsibilities see, e.g., the accounts of Wilfrid’s imprisonment at Broninis (?corr. Bromis) and Dunbar in the Life of Wilfrid, ed. Colgrave, cc. 36, 38 (pp. 72, 76); for the possible localization of the first of these and for Dunbar as ‘almost certainly a shire-centre in the eleventh and twelfth centuries’, see Barrow, Kingdom of the Scots pp. 66–7. 72 Ep. no. 114 of 796 (p. 168), non te numerus propinquorum avarum faciat, quasi illis in hereditatem congregare debeas; id. no. 209 of 801 (p. 348), ammone illum . . . ne propter propinquorum turbam suum cupiditatibus terrarum vel divitiarum invovlvat animum; Alcuin Comm. in ep. Tit. I v. 5, PL 100, col. 1012C, when appointing presbyters, ‘there are bishops who do not weigh the merits of individuals but are corrupted by those who attend on them (?: officio deliniti ) or are their kinsfolk (sanguine iuncti )’, a sentence not found in Jerome’s commentary, which is Alcuin’s principal source. Boniface’s letters are Epist. Select. 1, ed. Tangl, nos 73–5.

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gain exemption from the obligations to the monarch which otherwise lay on the estates in question; and the less familiar one of the acquisition of the possessions of ‘genuine’ monasteries. The concept of a non-episcopal church or monastery subject only to the spiritual power was not a widely-accepted one at this period: Bede records that the founder of Wearmouth and Jarrow was very much aware of this as he lay dying; and a century later Alcuin, as we have seen, had inherited rights in an oratory, or anchorite’s cell, and church near the Humber. It is in this context—and, more speculatively, in the context of an already-powerful layman seeking to extend his power-base in the southern half of the Northumbrian kingdom—that the letter from Pope Paul I to (Archbishop Egberht and) King Eadberht, written in ?757/8 and preserved as one of the extraneous group of four in the northern-English (York?) collection of Alcuin’s letters, makes most sense.73 An otherwise unknown Abbot Forthred had travelled to Rome and recounted to the Pope how three monasteria, named as (probably) the north Yorkshire Stonegrave, Coxwold and a lost Donaemutha, had been given to him by a certain abbess, only to have them forcibly taken from him and bestowed by Eadberht on the patricius Moll, frater eius (sc. of Forthred, less plausibly of the abbess); the Pope ordered the king to restore them to the abbot, undiminished by anything taken away from them, and to prevent any further lay invasions of church property. Moll is identifiable with the Æthelwald Moll who became king in 759 and was ousted in 765. There is nothing to show whether Eadberht heeded the Pope’s letter, and indeed he may already have abdicated before it reached Northumbria; per-

73 JL. 2337. In spite of the damage to Tib., its text of this letter is substantially legible, and doubtful readings can generally be clarified from Gale’s transcript (above, Pt. I p. 81 and n. 199) and, in the latter part, from the ?16th-century addition to Vesp.’s defective text. Tib.’s text is clearly in general the better one, especially before the ‘corrections’ of a 16th/17th cent. hand: it has the obviously correct place-name form Cucha Yalda, corresponding to Domesday’s Cucualt and later spellings, and excludes the etymology and explanation of the change from the supposed ‘earliest form’ in Birch’s erroneous text-edition (BCS. no. 184) proposed by A.H. Smith, The Place-Names of the North Riding of Yorkshire, English Place-Name Society 5 (Cambridge, 1928), p. 192. The texts of the letter in Cambridge Univ. Libr. Kk. IV.6 (2021) (s. xii in; Worcester), fol. 276va and BL Harl. 633 (s. xii), fols 44v–45v (see Levison, Neues Archv 35 [1910], pp. 402–3), are William of Malmesbury’s copy of Tib., inserted in a shortened Vita Pauli in his edition of the Liber pontificalis: Thomson, William of Malmesbury, ch. 6, esp. pp. 119–26.

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haps the eventual beneficee was the church of York.74 Without making too much of a characteristically Alcuinian trope, his claim in a letter of ca. 790 to the abbot of ?Jarrow that secular life grows at the expense of the monastic, whilst—‘what is worse’—‘those who put up now in many places pull down, the builders become destroyers’, suggests familiarity with similar episodes having a less happy outcome.75

York, a City Emerging Coinciding closely with Alcuin’s childhood and early adolescence was the period in which a physically-expanding Euborica civitas finally achieved the pre-eminence in the Northern English kingdom(s) from which many other economic and cultural benefits were to flow. For Bede the Northumbrian regia civitas or urbs regia was always Bernician Bamburgh, despite the fact that York had been the seat of the first missionary-bishop to the north, that Wilfrid had magnificently restored the see-church of St. Peter there and that it was the normal place of burial of Northumbrian kings.76 The usage is specific: in Bede’s Chronica maiora, following the Liber Pontificalis, Constantinople is regia urbs, and similarly in the Historia Ecclesiastica; the only other regia civitas in the latter is Canterbury, which in a previous chapter was imperii [Æthelberti] totius metropolis. As in contemporary Continental texts and as for Alcuin later, the ‘royal town’ is where a monarch

74

Fragments of several crosses and at least one sculptured grave-cover have been discovered at various times at Stonegrave Holy Trinity, the presumed site of the earlier monastery, but, with the exception of one datable to the ninth century, arthistorical scholarship attributes them to the tenth century: Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, 3, ed. J. Lang, pp. 215–20. 75 Ep. no. 67; for the date, cf. Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, ASE 22, p. 98 n. 19, and below, Pt. II ch. 3. 76 Bamburgh: HE III 6, III 12, III 16; in the first passage, referring to Oswald’s corporeal relics, Bede says hactenus. York and St. Peter’s: HE II 14, II 20; Stephanus, Vita Wilfridi c. 16 (ed. Colgrave, p. 35). The Bede passages are the source of Alcuin’s ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, lines 194 ff., 216 ff. Alcuin, however, does not record the dedication here or elsewhere in the poem (although the dedication of the churches at Bamburgh and at Ripon to Peter is noted in lines 307 and 644: Godman’s index entry ‘Peter, St.’, at p. 198, is seriously misleading); while lines 203–4, cuius abhinc culmen sublimius extulit ille,/ metropolimque statuit consistere regni, are not dependent on HE (but compare next note, on Bede’s references to Canterbury). Ep. no. 16 (p. 43) is the only occasion on which Alcuin reports the cathedral’s patronal dedication in his letters.

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most commonly holds his court, is sought out by visitors and where he typically has his grandest residence—his ‘capital’ in fact, providing we avoid some of the later connotations of that term.77 The abdication of King Ceolwulf to become a monk and posthumously a miracle-worker at Lindisfarne (of which he was reputedly the last great benefactor) and his succession by Eadberht in 737 served finally to establish the pre-eminence in the kingdom of its most southerly urbs, and at the same time sharpened further the ancient north-south divide as the city grew and prospered. Its cosmopolitanism and wealth in King Eadberht’s later years and the following decade are only patchily documented, but they are unmistakeable—increasingly so in the material evidence recovered by three decades of sustained archaeological exploration and recording, which has prompted some bold and indeed fanciful interpretations, but not negligibly in the currently-unfashionable written sources.78 Alcuin’s ‘York poem’ is, in one of its several aspects, a testimony to and an affirmation of that process. After a fairly standard opening (extending over 15½ lines), Alcuin unprecedently declares that 77 Constantinople: Chron. maiora ed. Mommsen, MGH AA XIII, p. 314; HE II 1. Canterbury: HE I 25, I 33, and compare with the former Adomnan’s quae proculdubio Romani est metropolis imperii (De Locis Sanctis, III.1: ed. Meehan, p. 106). Pavia, the ‘capital’ of Lombard and Carolingian Italy, is regalis civitas in Alcuin’s ep. no. 172 (799). The word-order and syntax of Euboraca civitate in ecclesia beati Petri principis apostolorum que caput est totius regni in his ep. no. 43 would allow the caput regni to be either the civitas or the ecclesia; but the former is the more likely. Attempting to avoid the inappropriate associations of the modern ‘capital’, model-making archaeologists working in the early-medieval field favour terms like ‘hierarchical centralplace’; but this has the disadvantage of being used of places with very varied political and religious functions. 78 The results of the York Archaeological Trust’s remarkable excavations since 1972 are published at irregular intervals and non-sequentially in fascicules numbered as parts of The Archaeology of York, vols.1–20, under the general editorship of the Director, P.V. Addyman. For a recent interpretation by an archaeologist ‘with an explicitly theoretical agenda’, see S. Roskams, ‘Urban transition in early medieval Britain: the case of York’, in: N. Christie and S.T. Loseby (ed.), Towns in Transition. Urban Evolution in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 262–88, esp. pp. 277–8, 284; and note that the statements in the last place have been characterized by a well-qualified reviewer (Elizabeth Fentress, in Journal of Roman Archaeology 10 (1997), 597) as an ‘historical novella about the faunal remains’! The written sources are assembled and commented on in D.W. Rollason (with D. Gore and G. Fellows-Jensen), Sources for York History to AD 1100, The Archaeology of York, Vol. 1 (York, 1998). Alternative interpretations of some of those relating to the preViking period, based on a precise analysis of the city’s topography, are proposed by C. Norton, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Cathedral at York and the Topography of the Anglian City’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 151 (1998), 1–42; see further below.

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his theme will be praise of his homeland ( patriae laudes) and of the city of York: and this is followed by nineteen lines in which the poet combines a description of its setting with an account of its Roman construction with British help. Hence the passing reference to the ‘high walls and lofty towers’, which with some post-Roman modifications still enclosed the area in which the first episcopal church had been established.79 Hence, too, the reference to the ‘fish-rich river Ouse’, an attribute of the city to which Alcuin returned in a poem of his Tours years and which clearly had a more than casual interest for him80—literary allusions, moreover, which have latterly been substantiated by archaeological evidence for the importance of local river-fish in the diet of eighth- and early-ninth-century York.81 Topography and buildings apparently do not interest Alcuin very much, certainly far less than several of his contemporaries. The many churches and their associated saints which are a feature of eighthcentury laudes of Italian cities and the churches and other buildings of Pavia which figure so largely in Paul the Deacon’s Historia Langobardorum are largely absent from Alcuin’s extended verse-history of his city. There is a brief, and challengeable, reference to Edwin’s building-works at St. Peter’s and a very questionable, even briefer, one to Bishop Bosa’s contribution to fabric or fittings. There are relatively full accounts of Wilfrid II’s adornment of the cathedral and ‘other churches’, and of Ælberht’s establishment of new altars there (dedicated to St. Paul and to ‘Martyrs and the Cross’) and gifting of precious altar-furniture; and a description of the ‘marvellous new basilica’ dedicated to alma Sophia, in the construction of which Alcuin was personally involved.82 Omitted from his ‘narrative’ is any reference 79 ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, lines 19–20. See also the allusion to the moenibus Euboricae within which the young men of the cathedral live, in Alcuin’s carm. lix, MGH Poet. I, p. 273. 80 Writing ep. no. 146 to Arn in 798 in the hope of their meeting soon, Alcuin contrasts the ways in which they might catch fish in the Meuse (‘like cormorants from the bank’) and in the Loire (‘salmon, by swimming’). In his carm. xxiii (MGH Poet. I, pp. 243–4), O mea cella, composed earlier than the letter, Alcuin characterises York (rather than Aachen) as a place where Flumina te cingunt florentibus undique ripis,/Retia piscator qua sua tendit ovans: but here certainly there is an element of ‘the ideal (urban) landscape’. 81 T.P. O’Connor, Bones from 46–54 Fishergate = The Archaeology of York: the Animal Bones, 15/4 (York, 1991), 263–7, noting that North Sea fish only become important in later centuries. 82 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 219–21 (only very loosely related to Bede’s account in HE II 14), ?857 (where cultum decoravit, translated by Godman as ‘endowed its fabric’, surely has the normal sense of ‘(forms of, order of ) worship’, as cultura

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to the fire which in April 741, according to the ‘Northumbrian Annals’, destroyed the (a?) monasterium at York. The latter is traditionally, although probably wrongly, identified with St. Peter’s cathedral; if it was in fact connected with the city’s ecclesia principalis, and not a separate monastic or clerical establishment, it is far more likely to have been the group of buildings which, perhaps since Bishop Bosa’s reorganisation, provided accomodation for the cathedral clerics.83 Conversely, the one monastic community (and church) apparently in the city to which Alcuin alludes in his letters, the cella sancti Stephani, neither figures in the ‘York poem’ nor in any other text except—it seems—in a Continental calendar that includes entries made at York in the late-eighth century. That it was located somewhere in the general area of the cathedral, as part of a complex of churches and other structures, is possible but unproven. Even the siting of St. Peter’s itself in the seventh to ninth centuries is unknown, although a good case has recently been made, on the basis of surviving or recoverable topographical evidence, that it was to the north-west of the present Minster and its romanesque predecessor, with a northeasterly orientation which remains a feature of other York churches.84 It could have been expected that the York Archaeological Trust’s excavations, which have so remarkably revealed the topography and Alltagsleben of the Viking and post-Viking town, would also have thrown substantial light on its configuration and history in Alcuin’s lifetime. In fact, until comparatively recently, they have failed to do so, tempting some archaeologists to ask whether the apparent evidence for material prosperity in the ‘York poem’ and elsewhere was not in lines 158 and 1054), 1222–29, 1490–1506, 1507–14, 1520: below, n. 112). For the account of the altars etc. and of the church of alma Sophia, see below, ch. 2 ad fin. 83 HR, ed. Arnold, 2, 38: monasterium in Eboraca civitate succensum est ix kal. Maii feria i (i.e. Sunday 23 April), which in ASC ‘D’ version becomes simply Her forbarn Eoforwic. Elsewhere in the eighth-century sections of the Annals, the cathedral at York is referred to (once, s.a. 791) as ecclesia principalis and (several times) by its dedication to St. Peter; while monasterium is used either of places whose coenobitic monastic status is independently documented or (in the case of Corbridge) of an ecclesiastical establishment which may have been staffed either by monachi or clerici: HR, ed. Arnold, 2, p. 51. For Bosa’s re-organisation see ‘York poem’ lines 857–9; for the possible siting of the clerical residence(s), see Norton, ‘Anglo-Saxon Cathedral at York’ (n. 78, above), esp. pp. 11–14 and figs. 2 and 3. 84 St. Stephen: ep. no. 209 (pp. 347, 349); Berlin Deutsche Staatsbibl. Phillips 1869 (Rose 131) fol. 9v, Titulus sancti Stephani protomartyr, against the date 26 October, discussed below, ch. 2, ad fin. Siting of St. Peter’s: Norton, ‘Anglo-Saxon Cathedral’, pp. 5–24 and figs.

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literary exaggeration. Explorations in the area of the Minster revealed no convincing evidence of early structures or re-building, although the discovery of grave-stelae of a distinctive type and in fine condition could indicate the existence of an early covered porticus. Nor has anything been reported which might be associated with a royal residence ( palatium), to which there are debatable allusions in the Whitby Life of Gregory the Great (as aula) and in one of Alcuin’s poems.85 The eighth-century history (if any) of the churches in the area west of the Ouse later known as ‘Bishophill’ and the nature of the clerical communities which served them is undocumented, and will remain so without significant new archaeological discoveries; but one of the most stylish and literary of eighth/ninth-century York inscriptions, referring to an unnamed presbyter, may belong there.86 The availability for excavation in 1985/6, however, of a site lying slightly away from the centres of the Roman and the medieval towns directly to the east of the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Foss, on the west side of Fishergate, significantly changed the picture of the pre-800 city. What was found there seems fully to satisfy the criteria of archaeologist ‘model-makers’ for a mercantile vicus or emporium 85 Stelae: J. Lang, Corpus of Sculpture, 3, 60–7 (nos 11–24), ills. 44–102, and p. 17; for no. 22’s inscription (ill. 91), see below, Ch. 2 ad fin. ‘Palace’: Norton, ‘AngloSaxon Cathedral’, p. 26; Earliest Life, ed. Colgrave, pp. 96–8; O Corydon. . . ./Quicquid tu volitas per magna palatia regum, carm. xxxii (MGH Poet. I, pp. 249–50), addressed to a one-time York pupil (scolasticus olim) now befuddled by drink, apparently shortly after Alcuin’s return to Northumbria in 790; but palatia regum could equally mean ‘the courts of successive kings’. For fragments of high-quality glass vessels (eighth/ninthcentury) found on the Minster site, see L. Webster and J. Backhouse, ed., The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture AD 600–900 (British Museum, 1991), nos 108 (a–d). 86 Lang, Corpus, 3, 85–7 (St. Mary Bishophill Junior no. 5) and ills 232–6, Rollason et al., Sources, p. 157: the text in the cross-head roundel reads Salve pro meritis pr(e)s(byter) alme tuis (a pentameter). Bold claims for ‘an ecclesiastical centre of some importance’ in this area have been made by, e.g., R.K. Morris, ‘Alcuin, York and the alma sophia’ in L.A.S. Butler and R.K. Morris, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Church. Papers . . . in Honour of Dr. H.M. Taylor (C.B.A. Research Report 60; London, 1986), pp. 80–9: on which Lang, Corpus 3, 8, comments that ‘At the time of writing [1991], neither archaeological nor sculptural evidence exists to support this proposition’; similarly, Norton, ‘Anglo-Saxon Cathedral’, p. 14. The further claim of a similarity between the inscription and the vocabulary of Alcuin’s verse (Morris, cit.; Higgitt in Lang, Corpus 3, 86) is acceptable only with qualifications: pro meritis, although occurring in ‘the York poem’ (line 634), is not characteristic of his tituli; and despite his using the epithet almus very frequently, I do not think that the line-ending alme tuis will be found anywhere. Compare, rather, two epitaphs by Paul the Deacon, ed. Neff, no. xxxv: Quod te pro meritis nunc paradysus habet, and ed. Neff, no. xxvi: Participem fieri hanc pater alme tuis; the deceased is not the subject of the verse in either instance.

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outside the old walls, of which the excavated 2500 m2 were evidently only a part. Occupation of the Fishergate site lasted one-and-a-half centuries, from ca. 700 to ca. 850, with a break in the late-eighth century. What has been revealed suggests that ‘the settlement was orderly and did not grow organically, but was laid out according to a plan of some kind’; the separate properties, containing structures, pit groups and middens, were delineated by ditches and palisades. Identified structures ‘are of the proportions and general character of other broadly contemporary buildings’ in England from both urban and rural sites. Deposits throughout the area produced a quantity of personal artefacts, particularly dress pins and some brooches, and querns for (?domestic) corn-grinding. Additionally, they provided evidence for craft activities: antler and bone comb manufacture; some spinning and weaving and fur preparation; and iron and other metal working.87 The most precious single object from Alcuin’s York, and not improbably one made there or in the vicinity, is the splendid Coppergate helmet, which may have been a royal gift to a favoured follower. Other metalwork of high quality and varying function, much of it long lost and unlikely to be re-discovered, may have originated in the same region. In the ‘York poem’, Bishop Wilfrid II is recorded as providing his church with ‘furnishings with handsome inscriptions’ (titulis ornamenta venustis), precious altar-vessels and silver-gilt laminated altars and crosses; Egberht’s gifts included silk awnings of foreign pattern; and Ælberht provided the cathedral with a nine-tiered chandelier and a great cross ‘weighing many pounds in pure silver’ for a new altar dedicated to St. Paul, as well as a great flask of pure gold for the Eucharistic wine.88 The claim has been made, partly on stylistic grounds but particularly because of the thin square capitals 87 A.J. Mainman, Pottery from 46–54 Fishergate = Archaeology of York, 16/6 (1993); N.S.H. Rogers, Anglian and other Finds from 46–54 Fishergate = Archaeology of York, 17/9 (1993); R.L. Kemp, Anglian Settlement at 46–54 Fishergate = Archaeology of York, 7/2 (1996), the quotations in the text at pp. 67, 69. 88 Helmet: Tweddle, Coppergate Helmet (above, n. 50), dating it ‘c. 750–775’ (at pp. 1082, 1165, etc.); cf. Beowulf lines 2868–9. Episcopal gifts: ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1222–26, 1266–68, 1490–1506. Notable surviving artefacts with claims to southern Northumbrian origin are the Ormside bowl, the Bischofshofen (Austria, dioc. Salzburg) cross, and York and Witham pins: Webster and Backhouse, The Making of England, nos 134, 133, 183, 184; but note that the Bischofshofen cross is of copper-alloy, not silver. For a cabochon imitation jewel probably from a cross or book-cover, see ibid., no. 108 (e); for embroidered silks and other fabrics from or possibly connected with eighth-century Northumbria, see ibid., nos 100, 142, 143 (entries by H. Granger-Taylor).

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with some uncial forms used for their inscriptions, that a pair of figurative ivory book-covers from the church at Genoels-Elderen (Belgium) and some related carved ivories were products of lateeighth-century Northumbria and perhaps specifically York—because of the ‘courtly’ associations of the material: art-historians and palaeographers are generally sceptical.89 Northumbria’s first regular coinage90 began in the late 730s or 740s, with the striking of fine silver ‘pennies’ bearing king Eadberht’s name; York was clearly the main and perhaps the only mintingplace. The pattern of recorded find-spots of coins struck before ca. 790 is unmistakeable: these are predominantly in the southerly parts of the kingdom, east of the river Ouse, with only a very few coins— two of them from Jarrow—from north of the Tees; and the largest number (all major varieties) is at present from South Newbald, a few miles inland from the Humber. Both the purpose and scale of this coinage are open to debate, but a narrowly ‘commercial’ explanation is certainly difficult to accept. A striking feature is the existence of coins, of more than one variety, which have on the reverse Archbishop Egberht’s name, with a stick-like figure holding a cross and crozier or two crosses; and after a possible interruption, the archbishop’s name is again on the reverse of the only known coin of Æthelwald ‘Moll’ and on some of the coins of King Alchred, who came to the throne only a year before Egberht’s death (below).91 89 An English origin for the Genoels-Elderen book-covers was apparently first suggested, tentatively, by W. Koehler, Belgische Kunstdenkmäler 1 (Munich, 1923), 3–4, but only became widely current after B. Bischoff claimed that letter-forms in their inscriptions are distinctively Northumbrian: MaSt 2, 296–7. For an excellent presentation of the arguments, see the entries by L. Webster, M.P. Brown and J. LafontaineDosogne in Webster and Backhouse, The Making of England no. 141 (pp. 180–3). 90 The evidence for a short-lived gold coinage three-quarters of a century previously has been reviewed by E.J.E. Pirie and by D. Tweddle and J. Moulden in Yorkshire Numismatist, 2 (1992), 11–15, 17–20; Mark Blackburn, ‘A variant of the seventhcentury “York” group of shillings found in Lincolnshire’, The Numismatic Chronicle, 154 (1994), 204–8, considers the implications of a new discovery. For silver ‘sceattas’ issued by King Aldfrith (685–705), see J. Booth, ‘Northumbrian coinage and the productive site at South Newbald’ [ false Sancton], in: The Yorkshire Numismatist, 3 (1997), 15–38, at 16; and in: Early Deira: Archaeological Studies of the East Riding . . ., ed. H. Geake and J. Kenny (Oxford and Oakville CT, 2000), pp. 83–97, at pp. 83–4. 91 J. Booth, ‘Sceattas in Northumbria’ in: Sceattas in England and on the Continent: the Seventh Oxford Symposium on Coinage and Monetary History, ed. D. Hill and D.M. Metcalf (BAR British Ser. 128; Oxford, 1984), pp. 71–112, for the Egberht coins esp. pp. 90–1, 95; E.J.E. Pirie, ‘Finds of “sceattas” and “stycas” of Northumbria’, in: Anglo-Saxon Monetary History: Essays in Memory of Michael Dolley, ed. M.A.S. Blackburn (Leicester, 1986), pp. 67–90; M.M. Archibald and M.R. Cowell, ‘The fineness of

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The young Egberht, as we know from Bede, had made the journey to Rome and was reputedly ordained deacon there; and several of his clergy took the same road subsequently.92 The much later but generally trustworthy ‘History of the Church of Durham’ records the forging of a link of amicitia with the Frankish King Pippin and the sending of ‘many and various royal gifts’.93 Alcuin’s Life of Willibrord has no suggestion of regular contact between the Saint and his native Northumbria in his last years; and the evidence of supposedly Echternach manuscripts is at best ambiguous.94 But York’s later links with Utrecht argue against a complete break; and there is other evidence, culminating in Alcuin’s earliest poem of any length, for sailings between the Humber and its tributaries and the Rhine delta, ‘full of fish’. In the 740s/early 750s, the missionary-Archbishop Boniface was corresponding with Archbishop Egberht and the abbot of Wearmouth, from (probably) middle-Rhineland Mainz, without too much difficulty; and a decade or so later his successor Lul was successfully requesting books from Wearmouth-Jarrow.95 Artefacts uncovered at the Fishergate and other sites have confirmed that, for several decades, York was the northern terminal of an active North Sea Northumbrian Sceattas’, in: W.A. Oddy, ed., Metallurgy in Numismatics, 2 (London, 1988), 55–64; Booth, ‘Northumbrian Coinage at . . . South Newbald’, 1997, pp. 17–19, 27–30; 2000, pp. 84–7, 93–4. South Newbald is the correct location of the coin-finds previously reported as ‘Sancton’. 92 Bede’s Epistola ad Ecgbertum episcopum, c. 15, ed. Plummer, Bedae Opera Historica, 1, 419, recalls Egberht’s visit. My mistaken denial of this in ‘Roman Books’, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 5–6, 24–5 (pointed out by Cubitt, Church Councils, p. 143 n. 85) in connection with the assertion of Dial. Egberti resp. xvi, ed. Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 412 that non solum nostra testantur antiphonaria sed et ipsa quae cum missalibus suis CONSPEXIMUS apud apostolorum Petri et Pauli limina as evidence for the ‘ember-days of the fourth month’, does not remove the problems raised by it: indeed, it may well increase them; it leaves unresolved who ‘we’ are. The Roman journey of Ælberht and Alcuin is considered below, pp. 342–7. For abbot Forthred’s visit in the late 750s, see above, p. 152 and n. 74. 93 Symeonis Opera, ed. Arnold, 1, 48. Compare King Alchred’s letter of 773 to Bishop Lul, asking him to support his messengers’ approach to Charles ut pax et amicitia . . . facias stabiliter inter nos confirmari: MGH Epist. select., 1, ed. Tangl, no. 121 (258). 94 N. Netzer, ‘The early scriptorium at Echternach’, in: Willibrord . . . Gedenkgabe zum 1250. Todestag, ed. G. Kiesel, J. Schroeder (Luxembourg, 1989), pp. 127–34, at pp. 132–3; idem, Cultural Interplay in the Eighth Century. The ‘Trier Gospels’ and the Making of a Scriptorium at Echternach, Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology, 3 (Cambridge, 1994); and my review in JEH. 48 (1997), 742–4. 95 Alcuin, carm. iv, MGH Poet. I, pp. 220–3; Epist. select. 1, ed. Tangl, nos 75, 76, 91, 116 (of 764).

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trade route. The evidence for what was imported, notably quality textiles, Rhineland querns and pottery, with or without contents (which may intermittently have included wine and oil for Northumbria’s churches) is inevitably better than that for exports—generally assumed to be timber and raw wool, as well as made-up woollens, and perhaps even slaves. Luxury items and precious materials were probably more often gifts than objects of trade, although necessarily carried on the same ships.96 Evidence for the relative importance of Northumbrian-origin and Continental-origin ships and traders in this exchangeprocess is almost entirely lacking. But it certainly appears that in mid-century, contrary to a widely-held interpretation of the successive series of ‘sceatta’ coins and their distribution, men from Frisia were still a major and perhaps even the dominant element. Their colony at York, which shared the obligations of other citizens, with the additional risks of ‘foreigners’, did not forsake the city until the early 770s, in circumstances described in the Life of Alcuin’s Frisian pupil Liudger; and some of them may later have returned there.97 Within Britain, annalistic texts report conflicts between Northumbria and its neighbours. Æthelbald ‘treacherously devastated part of North96 See L.B. Jørgensen, ‘The textiles of the Saxons, Anglo-Saxons and Franks’, Studien zur Sachsenforschung 7 (1991) 11–23, esp. 13–15 and the map on 16 (fig. 4) for the Humber-region examples of a distinctive type of twill, previously identified by the same scholar (Stud. z. Sachsenforsch. 6 [1987], 112–3) as the pallium fresonicum of Continental texts; Mainman, Pottery from 46–54 Fishergate, pp. 561, 569–76 and passim; Rogers, Anglian and Other Finds from 46–54 Fishergate, pp. 1321–9 and passim. For problems of olive-oil supply, see below, ch. 2, p. 310. In 773, King Alchred sent to Lul duodecim sagos cum anulo aureo maiori (Epist. Select. 1, ed. Tangl, no. 121): sagi (al. saga) can be cloaks, blankets or even (following Vulg. Ex 26.7) tent-coverings, but generally of inferior fabric. 97 The assertion of R. Hodges, The Achievement of the Anglo-Saxons (London, 1989) p. 103, that ‘in Eadberht’s age’ ‘the Northumbrians may have been able to find only a small share in the international trading system, largely because the freelancing Frisians were occupied principally with the competing elites of Kent, Mercia and East Anglia’ seems to me unwarranted by his archaeological evidence for East Coast/North Sea trade in this period. But for the Frisians at York in the years either side of 770, see Altfridi, Vita sancti Liudgeri c. 12, ed. W. Diekamp, pp. 15–17, and my discussion in ‘Albuinus deliciosus Karoli regis’, pp. 78, 80–82. Archaeologists’ misrepresentation and mis-dating of this text (so, for example, Hodges, Achievement, p. 102) has latterly denied them the possibility of considering whether there may be a link between the ending of the Frisian ‘colony’ and the first abandonment of the Fishergate site—which is not to suggest that this was what later Continental texts will call a vicus Fresonum. In the late 780s or early 790s, Alcuin invited ‘the young within the walls of York’ carminibusque sacris naves implere Fresonum/ talia namque placent vestro quia munera patri: carm. lix, MGH Poet. I, p. 273. For the arguments from the distribution of ‘Frisian’ sceattas, see the contributions by W. Op den Velde et al. and G.W. De Wit in Sceattas in England and on the Continent, pp. 117–50.

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umbria while king Eadberht was engaged in fighting the Picts’ in 740, and relations with his successor Offa were apparently tense for long periods of his reign: the ‘Northumbrian Annals’ record changes in the Mercian episcopacy in 737, 750, 764 and 765, but not thereafter for a quarter-of-a-century.98 There is possibly a connection here with the defensive works latterly, if very debatably, recognised along the two kingdoms’ common frontier. The same Annals provide no direct evidence for more peaceful exchanges, whether diplomatic, cultural or spiritual; these can none the less be inferred from other sources, exemplified by a letter of the Mercian Bishop Torthelm which perhaps shows very early familiarity with Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, and later by the Mercian-written ‘Book of Cerne’.99 Northumbrian Whithorn’s first bishop, Pe(c)htelm, had been brought from western Wessex to be consecrated in that rank (by Wilfrid II?) shortly before 731; Boniface, with whom he had apparently been acquainted years before in their native country and who was aware of his elevation, sought his opinion on whether it was really illicit for a man to marry a widow whose child he had previously taken from the font as his ‘adoptive son’. The origins of his two successors, both consecrated by Archbishop Egberht (although in Petwine’s case at Elvet by Durham, not at York), are unknown; so is that of Bishop Æthelberht (777–89), with whom Alcuin corresponded after his translation to Hexham.100 In the last third of the eighth century, and possibly already some decades previously, the church of York’s metropolitan authority extended well beyond the limits of the kingdom to embrace the bishopric of Mayo (‘Mayo of the Saxons’) in western Ireland. It had been founded as a monastery by Colman c. 670, for the English monks who had accompanied him from Lindisfarne and could not live harmoniously with their Irish brethren in the original settlement on Inishboffin. Its community, which Bede described as ‘a distin-

98 Cont. Bedae, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 572–4; HR ed. Arnold, 2, 42, 43; then not until ?792, idem, 53 (s.a. 791). 99 Epist. Select. 1, ed. Tangl, no. 47. For the ‘Book of Cerne’, see below, pp. 178–9 and nn. 144 and 45 100 References in D. Watt, Series Episcoporum: Candidaa Casa (Whithorn or Galloway) (Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 22–3. Alcuin’s ep. no. 31 of ?795 is not one of his ‘letters of friendship’ (Watt, p. 22) but a request for a renewal of a pactum antiquae familiaritatis with his community. For the canon-law issue, see most recently B. Jussen, Patenschaft und Adoption im Frühen Mittelalter (Göttingen, 1991).

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guished swarm’ and properly organized and Alcuin praised as a great source of knowledge (magnum lumen scientiae) throughout Northumbria and the future ‘brightest star in the western sky’, continued to be recruited from ‘peregrinating’ Englishmen. Perhaps even before Bede completed his History the office of bishop had been introduced into the community in the person of a mysterious Garalt (OE Garuuald?). Alcuin corresponded with Bishop Leutfred who had succeeded Haduuin in 773 and died in 786, and later recalled frequent meetings with Mayo brethren who visited the Northumbrian ‘capital’.101 The death of the self-exiled ninety year-old Egberht of Rathmelsigi (Clonmelsh, co. Carlow) and Iona on Easter-Day (April 24) 729 was widely commemorated in Northumbria at an early date: the common source is likely to have been Bede, although other places besides Wearmouth-Jarrow will have learnt of it directly from the Iona community.102 Contacts between York and Dalriadic Iona or the Columban churches in mainland Ireland might have played a part in Northumbrian pressure on the Strathclyde Britons in mid-century; but on this the sources are silent.

101 Annals of Ulster an. 667 = 668, ed. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, p. 138; Bede HE IV 4, supposedly (so, e.g., Wallace-Hadrill, Historical Commentary, pp. 141–2) using an Irish written source. Bede’s characterisation of the Mayo community nunc includes no reference to or hint of a bishop; but AU. under 731 = 732, ed. cit. p. 184, has the puzzling entry Pontifex Maighe Heu Saxonum Garaalt obiit; and an early Irish ‘litany’ (ed. C. Plummer, Irish Litanies (London, 1925), pp. 54–75) names Garald epscop in Mag Eo na Saxan (at p. 56). Kathleen Hughes, ‘Evidence for contacts between the churches of the Irish and the English from the Synod of Whitby to the Viking Age’, England before the Conquest: Studies . . . presented to Dorothy Whitelock (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 49–67, at pp. 51–2 is still the soundest review of the evidence. The first reference to a bishop of Mayo in the ‘Northumbrian Annals’ is in 768 when Hadwine ordinatus est episcopus ad Machui; his death in 773 (also in AU., ed. cit. p. 226, as Aedan episcopus Maighe hEu) and succession by Leutfriht are similarly recorded: HR, ed. Arnold, 2, 44–5. The first specific mention of consecration by the archbishop of York and his suffragans is Aldulf ’s in 786: idem, p. 51. Alcuin’s ep. no. 2 is addressed to Leutfred; ep. no. 287, written from the Continent and probably but not certainly from Tours, is addressed to the Mayo fathers who patriam relinquentes peregrinari volu[erunt]. 102 HE III 27 (the year but not the day), V 22 (both). The earlier chapter includes the revealing remark that Egberht, having recovered when apparently at the point of death, later acceptum saceerdotii gradum (i.e. episcopal orders: only in Iona? but compare Æthelwulf, De Abbatibus, ed. Campbell, lines 114–42). A supposed link between Egberht and Mayo was effectively disposed of by Hughes, ‘Evidence for contacts’, p. 53; it has none the less been proposed several times since then, without any new evidence or arguments.

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Unless his birth-place was in the new vicus rather than somewhere in York’s rural hinterland, the infant Alcuin joined the city’s expanding and prosperous community when, in the early or mid-740s, his parents (it is assumed) entrusted him to its cathedral church. No text, no tradition provides direct evidence for his family background or place of origin. Little help is given by his baptismal name, although its dithematic form (OE Alhwine ‘temple-friend’) seems to rule out a humble origin; and one of the very few other examples of the name is (probably) the Aluuini who follows Torctmund in the ‘Lindisfarne’ Liber Vitae’s list of duces.103 The autobiographical passages in Alcuin’s ‘York poem’ begin only with an account of his association with the church’s aristocratic rector clarissimus atque egregius doctor, Archbishop Egberht. Writing to the York cathedral community in the mid-790s, he movingly recalls how it ‘warmed the frail years of my infancy with maternal affection’, ‘upheld me in the wanton years of boyhood’ and provided the ‘paternal discipline’ which brought him to full manhood; while the concluding verses of the ‘York poem’ include an equally moving tribute to an unnamed young man ‘simple of spirit but passionate in deed’ who ‘guided my boyhood years with his counsel’ before his premature death. His one apparent reference to siblings (brothers and sisters in the flesh) may be merely rhetorical.104 The Ferrières ‘Life’ begins its account with the statement that Alcuin ‘came from noble English stock’. This hagiographic commonplace (as the following appositive clause, nobilior Christi Iesu regeneratus etc., confirms) has usually been taken literally, although if so the next sentence should mean that he was handed over to the church immediately after weaning, i.e. at the age of two or three, which is not impossible but unlikely.105 There is, in fact, better if 103 Gerchow, Gedenküberlieferung, p. 304 (n. 75). But Gerchow, p. 371, supposes that this, and two other examples of the name-form respectively among the abbots and the priests, represents the relatively-common Alb-wine. 104 Ep. no. 42; ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1603–5, cf. 1635 ff.; ep. no. 9 of 790, to Adalhard of Corbie (Nec me . . . tantum fratris vel sororis carnalis affectus taeduit quantum tua spiritalis fraternitas etc.). For an identification between the poem’s quidam iuvenis and the puer noster Seneca of ep. no. 42 (p. 86), see Godman, comm. ad lin. 1600 seq. (p. 130): but the chronological inferences in idem, comm. p. 133 are mistaken. 105 Ep. no. 42, cf. no. 131; Vita Alcuini, c. 1, ed. Arndt, p. 185: qui cum matris ablactaretur carnalibus, ecclesiae traditur misticis imbuendus uberibus. Alcuin uses a similar

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indirect evidence of his social standing, provided by Alcuin himself. In his Vita Willibrordi, written probably in 796 or 797, he refers on several occasions to the Saint’s father Wilgils and to the oratory and church built by him on a spit of land at the mouth of the Humber, which he now had ‘by legitimate inheritance’: Wilgils’s social standing, however, was that of a paterfamilias, in contrast with optimates who helped to endow his church; and a similar contrast is to be found in some of the chapters describing his son’s career in Francia. Alcuin, I conclude, came from a modest landowning family, although much of his later life was to be spent associating with the nobleborn: as he expressed it in a letter of the mid-790s, to an anonymous disciple who had attained high rank (in Northumbria?), ‘let us be mindful that the Lord has raised us from the dung and put us among the leaders of his people’.106 Both the location of Wilgils’s oratory and Alcuin’s admission to the York community suggest, moreover, that he came from southern Deira; and the evidence for his later dynastic loyalties may be an indication of his kinsfolk’s ‘lordly’ connections in that region.107

York Cathedral Community The cathedral community that Alcuin joined as a child is not easily defined or described. Modern writers, consciously or unconsciously influenced by Mabillon who wanted to number Alcuin among the glories of the Benedictine Order or else eager to defend him against the charge that in his last years he was abbot without ever having professed as a monk, have generally implied (if not asserted) that it was monastic.108 Yet the eighth-and-early-ninth-century evidence, most breast metaphor of one of his pupils in carm. xxxii. Later medieval evidence for weaning at 1½–2 years is summarised by Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London, 1990) (an admirable treatment of its subject, which deliberately excludes most pre-1100 evidence), here pp. 23 with n. 9, 79–83. In his V. Willibrordi, Alcuin says of the future saint sacro baptismatis fonte regenerato imposuit ei pater nomen Willibrord et statim ablactatum infantulum tradidit eum pater Hry-pensis ecclesiae fratribus relegiosis (c. 3: ed. Levison, pp. 117–18), which has not prevented commentators from supposing that the latter happened at the age of five or six. 106 V. Willibrordi, Praef., I 1, I 31: ed. Levison, pp. 114, 116, 137–8; ep. no. 40, memores simus quod nos [Dominus] de stercore erexit et posuit inter principes populi sui (which is of course an adaptation of Ps 112.7,8). 107 See below. 108 The late Dorothy Whitelock was among the few exceptions: see EHD.2, 799

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but certainly not all of which comes from Alcuin’s own writings or from the Ferrières Vita, is overwhelmingly unfavourable to this view. We can discount, if we wish, the claim of the Vita author that Alcuin was the model for canons as his friend Benedict of Aniane was the model for monks, since he was writing in the full glow of the reforms of 816/17. It is less easy to explain away his apostrophising of Alcuin as ‘true monk without the monk’s vow’ (which found an echo in more recent times in the epitaph of Edmund Bishop); his insistence that when Alcuin was refused permission to abandon St. Martin’s and his other houses in order to end his days under the Benedictine Rule at St. Boniface’s (Fulda), he then ‘lived a life in no way inferior to the monastic one’; or his account of the vision of Alcuin’s reception into Heaven, clothed not in a monastic habit but in a dalmatic (the proper vestment of a deacon).109 Writing to the brethren at Murbach, probably in the early 790s, Alcuin recalled how, on a visit some thirty years previously, he had been attracted by their ‘way of life (conversatio)’ and wished to be as one of them; and he now exhorted them to display the monastic virtues and live the vita regularis in its fulness, so that their prayers would be truly effective. The tone of the letter, like those addressed to the abbots and brethren of Wearmouth-Jarrow from ca. 789/90 onwards, in which exhortations to the monastic life are reinforced by an insistence on exposition in the vernacular of ‘the Rule of St. Benedict’, is hardly that of someone raised under monastic discipline or with any intention of subjecting himself to it.110 Here and elsewhere, Alcuin’s knowledge of the Latin text of the Regula is apparent in unascribed quotations and echoes; yet they are rarely in a form or context, or of frequent occurrence, that would demonstrate the intimate familiarity of someone who has for many years lived in subjection to its precepts.111 n. 4, commenting on cum . . . in monasterio tuo demorarer in Bede’s letter of 734 to Bishop Egberht of York, Plummer, Opera Historica Bedae, 1, 405–23, at 405. Remarkably, A History of York Minster, ed. G.E. Aylmer and R. Cant (Oxford, 1977), at pp. 10–12, considers the pre-Viking cathedral community without once using Alcuin’s letters on the subject and confuses the new church of Alma Sophia with a rebuilding of the cathedral church! 109 Vita, Prol., cc. 5, 11, 27: ed. Arndt, pp. 185, 187, 191, 196. 110 Murbach: ep. no. 271. Wearmouth-Jarrow: ep. no. 67, Chase, Two Letter-Books I/3 (pp. 22–4), which is perhaps the earliest, see below, ch. 3, p. 396 at n. 203, ep. no. 19, Chase, Two Letter-Books, II/2 (pp. 44–50); epp. nos 282, 284, 286. 111 In ep. no. 286 (p. 445), pater qui praeest se sciat rationem redditurum de ovibus quas recipit regendas is based on Reg. Ben. c. 2, Abbas qui praeesse. . . . cogitet quia animas sus-

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The three successive monk-bishops at York, Bosa (678/9–?687, ?691–706) John and Wilfrid II, were all products of Whitby. Alcuin’s account of the first-named is much fuller than anything in the Historia Ecclesiastica (although like Bede he has nothing to say about Bosa’s temporary ousting in favour of a restored Wilfrid I); and his assertion that the bishop separated the church and its clergy from secular ways (moribus a plebis), ensuring that they served God together at all the Hours, with all possessions held in common, indicates that nearly a century later Bosa was remembered as someone who had established something not very different from the later ‘canonical’ life. This is entirely in line with Bede’s own statement that Acca, future bishop of Hexham, was brought up (nutritus atque eruditus) from childhood in clero Bosa Eboracensis episcopi—using the collective noun which on both sides of the Channel in this period is proper to a body of secular clergy.112 When, in a later section of the poem Alcuin asserted that Wilfrid II prius Euboricae fuerat vicedomnus et abbas (which again he had not taken from Bede), this may simply be his way of saying that in Bishop John’s lifetime Wilfrid both administered the diocese and headed the cathedral clergy, in an age in which the later familar term decanus ‘dean’ for such a person was still unknown.113 There is no problem in regarding the monasterium at which Bede visited Egberht in 733, the monasterium in which, according to Alcuin, the young Ælberht was educated and (not improbably) the monasterium cepit regendas de quibus et rationem redditurus est . . . sciatque quia qui suscipit animas regendas paret se ad rationem reddendam. Reg. Ben. c. 3 has observatione regulae; but Alcuin’s regularis vitae observatio in, e.g., epp. nos 19 (p. 54), 21 (p. 59), etc. uses a term that is nowhere in Reg. Ben.; and likewise habete . . . oboedientiam sine murmuratione et humilitatem sine simulatione (quae sunt maxime monachicae vitae virtutes) in ep. no. 271. 112 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 847–75, esp. lines 857–9 (Godman’s translation of which is hardly acceptable), 869–70 (a versification of Pope Gregory’s Responsio I ad Augustinum, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 80!); HE V 20, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 532. Bosa’s ousting is known only from Stephen of Ripon’s Vita Wilfridi, chs. 44, 45, ed. Colgrave, pp. 90, 92. 113 ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, line 1218. The earliest example of a cathedral decanus cited in DMLBS is, surprisingly, a questionable Worcester charter of 1051/53, S 1475; but the succession of deans at Canterbury begins before 1020: Brooks, Early History, pp. 256, 260. These, however, are both monastic cathedrals. In Chrodegang’s Rule, original version cc. 4, 25, 28 (ed. W. Schmitz, S. Chrodegangi Metensis Episcopi (742–766) Regula Canonicorum, aus dem Leidener Codex Vossianus Latinus [ F ] 94 . . . (Hanover, 1889); ed. J.-B. Pelt, Études sur la cathédrale de Metz 1 (Metz, 1937), pp. 7–28, at pp. 11–12, 20–2), the leadership and disciplining of the clerici canonici are attributed to an archidiaconus vel primicerius: it seems likely that this arrangement was widely adopted for cathedrals in Francia and Italy in the next century or so, but it did not spread to England.

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at York which was burnt in 741 as the residential building or buildings associated with the cathedral church, without any connotation that the community was one of ‘professed monks’; and the letter that Bede wrote to the bishop a year after his visit, although largely concerned with Northumbria’s need for more episcopal sees and with the way of life in its monasteries, nowhere suggests that Egberht is ruling over a community of monks.114 Finally, in Alcuin’s own letters, as well as in the Vita, his one-time York contemporaries and earliest friends are invariably priests or deacons, as is his pupil Eanbald who became archbishop in 796.115 The Ferrières ‘biographer’s’ account of Alcuin’s boyhood and youth, written (it must be remembered) two full generations later, throws no clear light on the degree of communal living to which the York clergy were subject in those decades: he probably had less information on the subject than we have. Alcuin’s expressed concern in 796 for good behaviour, and a due precedence ‘of age and rank’ at meals, and his recommendations on how the instruction of the (younger) clergy or of ‘the boys’ should be organized are poor evidence for the cathedral community’s way of life thirty, let alone fifty, years previously.116 It would be equally unwise to generalise from the Vita’s anecdote of the boy Alcuin’s being temporarily removed from the scola puerorum so that a nervous ‘simple and tonsured rustic’ might have company in his cell, to such good effect that the cleric slept through the custos’s sounding the bell for the night office ‘at about cock-crow’ and missed its beginning.117 A readiness to learn from Chrodegang’s reforms at Metz cathedral in the 750s, embodied in 114 Bede, Epistola ad Ecgberthum, c. 1, ed. Plummer, Bedae Opera Historica, 1, 405: in monasterio tuo demorarer; ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1416–8; HR, ed. Arnold, 2, 38. 115 Bede, HE V 20 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 532). For clerus in Aldhelm and in early glossaries, see DMLBS s. v.; for Alcuin’s own usage, see ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1180, 1430, 1587, ep. no. 114 (p. 169)—all relating to York—etc. For York contemporaries see, e.g., epp. nos 43, 44, Vita c. 8, ed. Arndt, p. 189. Compare also the ‘Northumbrian Annals’, s.a. 796, HR, ed. Arnold, 2, 58. 116 Ep. no. 114 (p. 169), Chase, Two Letter-Books, II/8 (p. 68). For the problems of translation and interpretation of this passage, see below. 117 Vita, c. 2, ed. Arndt, p. 185. The writer’s nocturnae vigiliae is also the language of the Benedictine Rule (cc. 9, 10, 16, 43), although not peculiar to it; ‘cock-crow’ does not figure there but it does in some other Offices and Rules, including Regula Magistri. In one of Alcuin’s last letters (ep. no. 311 (p. 479) he compares a good bishop with the cock of Prv 30.31 (!), characterized as praedicator optatae aurorae quae numquam tenebris fuscatur: with which compare the Ambrosian hymn Aeterne rerum conditor lines 5, 21 etc. (Ambroise de Milan: Hymnes, ed. Fontaine, pp. 149, 151: praeco diei iam sonat, Gallo canente spes redit) and perhaps Isidore, De natura rerum 2, 3.

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his widely-circulated ‘Rule for Canons’, can legitimately be inferred from a later passage, where causa cantus is the declared reason for sending two York clergy there; and Alcuin’s exceptional allusions, in letters of ?794, to the cathedral’s regularis vitae disciplina—a term he otherwise uses only of coenobitic monastic communities—could be a reflection of this.118 Apart from the Vita’s two references to a York custos, the character and scale of any imitatio during Egberht’s and Ælberht’s pontificates is nowhere indicated, and might not be clear even if we had the evidence of charters.119 In a conspicuous departure from well-established hagiographic conventions, Alcuin’s ‘biographer’ records at length how, whenever Archbishop Egberht had his mornings free, he taught his discipuli (who are also referred to as his pueri ) from his bed, and every evening except during Lent he ate with them while a lector read an improving book; similarly, when Alcuin was a youth, the archbishop celebrated compline ‘with all of ’ his pupils, and none of them dared take himself to bed until he had received the archbishop’s personal blessing.120 118 Metz visit: Vita, c. 8, ed. Arndt, p. 189. Paul the Deacon, in his Gesta episcoporum Mettensium (MGH SS II, p. 268), describes Chrodegang as the person who Ipsumque clerum abundanter lege divina Romanaque imbutum cantilena, morem atque ordinem Romanae ecclesiae servare praecepit quod usque ad id tempus in Mettensi ecclesia factum minime fuit. For editions of the original Regula see above, n. 113; and note that the Leiden manuscript, containing the earliest complete text (the earlier Metz-origin Bern Burgerbibl. 289 is incomplete) was judged by the late Prof. B. Bischoff to be a western-French, possibly ‘vicinity of Tours’, manuscript of s. ix1. Alcuin’s one reference to Chrodegang by name is in a short titulus he composed (on a visit many years later? cf. olim in l. 2) to commemorate the archipater’s consecration of the church at Lorsch (not Gorze!) on 11 July 765, following the adventus of the relics of St. Nazarius: carm. ciii/3 (MGH Poet. I, p. 330); Berlin Phillips 1869 fol. 6, and later calendars. For York’s regularis vitae disciplina, see epp. nos 42, 43 and Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, ASE 22, 98–101. 119 York custos: Vita cc. 2 (quoted in the text, above), 8 (Sigulfus presbiter), as previous note; but for another possible instance of copying Metz, see below, p. 172 and n. 127. Alcuin’s epitaph for the abbot and arch-chaplain Fulrad (ob.784), carm. xcii/2 (MGH Poet. I, pp. 318–9) describes him as Inclytus iste sacrae fuerat custosque capellae. For the Metz custos, see Chrodegang’s Rule, original version, cc. 6, 27 (plural!), ed. Pelt, pp. 12, 22; and compare OR. XV, ed. Andrieu, Ordines Romani, 3, 101: archaeclavius . . . ipse custodit et oras canonicas ad cursum celebrandum by knowing quando signum pulsare. Custos, -odes occurs in several chapters of Regula Magistri but nowhere in Regula Benedicti. Isidore, in his earliest list of ecclesiastical grades or offices (in De ecclesiasticis officiis), inserts a custos sacrorum between the deacon and the subdeacon. 120 Vita cc. 4, 5: ed. Arndt, p. 187. If the Vita-author was reporting an authentic tradition, this would seem to be the earliest evidence, except for (significantly?) Chrodegang’s Regula c. 4 (ed. Pelt, pp. 11–12), of Compline celebrated in a church served by seculars; for the form of the office, cf. below. The term completorium is, however, not to be found in Alcuin’s authentic writing.

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This is the scola puerorum from which Alcuin was briefly removed to be company for a nervous older cleric: a residential community of the young, tonsured but not ordained or advanced to the lowest of the minor orders, such as is possible when the church of which it is a part can accept boy-entrants every year or two. It had been a feature of southern-European cathedral churches for centuries; it may be implicit in a remarkable decree of the Southumbrian council of Cloveshoe in 747, which has no parallel in Frankish conciliar acta of the 740s or indeed until very much later; and Bede’s characterisation of Acca’s education suggests that the York scola was not new in Egberht’s day.121 It is here that Alcuin and his older and younger condiscipuli—Seneca of the remarkable vision before his early death, Sigwulf, Eanbald (I) who succeeded to the archbishopric in 778/80— were prepared for a lifetime’s service in a worshipping community. Here they received their first instruction in ‘letters’, in the several senses of that word, and in the companion art of reading aloud; here they became familiar with the daily cycle of praise and prayer and its musical settings (cantilena, cantus), although not yet with the night Offices; here they were introduced to the structure of the Church’s year, its feasts and fasts, and its place in Creation;122 and from it they moved in due time to a place among the ordained clergy. An older Alcuin would urge Archbishop Eanbald (II) on the occasion of his appointment in 796, in a passage that has been variously construed (and not always with proper regard for syntax or Alcuin’s style), to appoint teachers (magistri ) to take charge of the boys, who are to be kept apart from the clergy; with the further recommendation that separate classes, each with its own master, should be organized for instruction in (public?) reading, ‘the practice of chant’ or ‘serving the sung liturgy’ and writing-skills, and thus keep

121 Continental cathedrals: see Bullough, ‘Le scuole cattedrali e la cultura dell’Italia settentrionale prima dei Comuni’ in: Vescovi e Città in Italia nel Medioevo (= Italia Sacra, 5; Padua, 1964), pp. 111–43, esp. pp. 113–15, 121–2. Cloveshoe: c. 7 (with the title De lectionis studio per singula monasteria), Haddan & Stubbs, Councils, 3, 364–5, Ut episcopi, abbates . . . provideant ut per familias suas lectionis studium etc. et exerceantur in scholis pueri . . .; the sources of its distinctive wording have yet to be identified (Cubitt, Church Councils, ch. 4, seemingly offers no comment on this decree). Bede: as n. 114. 122 Scolares . . . diligenter discere faciant psalmos et cantilenam ecclesiasticam: ep. no. 169, to Archbishop Arn of Salzburg (799); cf. ep. no. 114, Chase, Two Letter-Books, II/8, p. 68 (next note). According to the Vita Alcuini, c. 2, ed. Arndt, p. 185, Dumque adhuc esset parvulus, diurna sub luce per canonicas cum aliis saepe frequentebat ecclesiam horas, nocturnis autem perraro temporibus.

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the young out of mischief because fully occupied. It is very unlikely that he was reminding his former pupil of arrangements that had previously existed at the cathedral—rather, making a recommendation based on current practice in some Frankish churches—and there is no evidence that the archbishop followed his advice.123 Over many centuries, before and after this time, the standard text from which the tonsured child and the occasional lay-person learnt to read, and was introduced to the Latin language, was the Psalter. This, in its several versions, also provided beginning, and older scribes, with writing-models and exercises.124 Alcuin’s memorising of the 123 The text of ep. no. 114, Chase, Two Letter-Books, II/8, reads Praevideat sancta sollertia [solertio(!), S ] tua magistros pueris [;] clero segregentur separati [separatim, A2] more illorum qui libris legant qui cantilene inserviant qui scribendi studio deputentur. Habeas et singulis his ordinibus magistros suos. Dümmler’s debatable punctuation (p. 169), with a comma between pueris and clero segregentur seperatim more, although beginning a new sentence at Habeas, has influenced subsequent commentary and translation (e.g. Kleinclausz and to some extent Allott). The words Praevideat . . . pueris are certainly best read as an independent sentence. But commentators/translators are divided between those who suppose that the phrases after clero relate to the pueri (scola puerorum) and those who believe that they are referring to ‘the (young or adolescent) clerics’. Apart from those who ‘cut the knot’ by simply ignoring clero, interpretation seems to turn on whether clero is understood as an ablative of separation or as a dative of reference. Chase supposed the second and translated: ‘for the clerical order, let those who read books (aloud) etc. . . . be divided separately according to their habitual activity’. Apart from the questionable translation of more illorum (Alcuin uses mos in several letters but never, I think, in this way), this creates an awkward transition and the consequence that the inanes ludos etc. are those of the young clergy, not of the pueri—although in ep. no. 250 to Fulda it is the community’s seniores who are urged non inanes sequentes ludos! An ablative usage provides the interpretation adopted in the text; and I owe to Prof. Francis Newton, whose help I sought, not only confirmation of this but the further point that Alcuin has made his meaning doubly clear ‘by (in lieu of a preposition before clero) repeating the separative prefix se- so that we have [an] emphatic “set apart from” and “separated from” ’—‘extraordinarily vivid and forceful, in addition to clear’! Duckett, Alcuin, p. 205 n. 5 is among those who suppose that the recommendations reflected arrangements formerly existing at York (during Alcuin’s time as magister or even earlier), citing in support Hauck, Kirchengeschichte, 2, 195—wrongly, since Hauck says specifically that ‘die Ratschläge . . . werden das enthalten, was sich im fränkischen Reich bewährt hatte’. 124 A characteristic instance is Gregory of Tours’s account of the priest (later bishop of Lyons) Nicetius, who while still in the family home, studebat ut omnes pueros qui in domus eius nascebantur . . . statim litteris doceret ac psalmis imbueret, including the seven-year old Gregory himself: Vitae Patrum VIII, 2 (MGH SSRM, p. 692). Other representative examples are listed in F.A. Specht, Geschichte des Unterrichtswesens in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1885), pp. 60–1, 67–9, and P. Riché, ‘Le Psautier, livre de lecture élémentaire . . .’, Études Mérovingiennes: Actes des journées de Poitiers (Paris, 1952), 253–6. For the Psalter taught to girls in the early Middle Ages, see the Vita Ciarani de Cluain, c. xvi, Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae, ed. C. Plummer (Oxford, 1910), 1, 205–6 (supposedly sixth-century).

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Psalms, under Egberht’s guidance, by the time he was eleven is illustrated by the account of his scaring off evil spirits with the sign of the Cross and a reciting of Psalm 12 ‘Usque quo Domine oblivisceris me’.125 But while there were those to whom this was indeed the doorway to full literacy and ‘book-learning’, there were others whose involvement in their community’s worship continued to depend on rote and memory. For its musical settings, no help was to be found in books. ‘The York poem’, using contrasting (Biblical and Classical) metaphors in the two places, credits both Egberht and Ælberht with the teaching of music, apparently both theoretical and practical.126 Instruction in chant would normally, however, have been given by a master-singer, the primus scolae or cantor, who had himself committed to memory an already-substantial and complex repertoire. At Metz in the late-eighth century the skills of such men earned them monetary rewards on festival days; a short related text unexpectedly incorporated in an eleventh-century expositio missae connected in some way with Archbishop Wulfstan is tenuous evidence that York may for a time have followed suit.127 The mature Alcuin stressed the 125 Vita c. 2: ed. Arndt, pp. 185–6 (the continuation of the story of the ‘simple rustic’ who overslept). The correct interpretation of Cum alter a decimo annus teneret in ancient and early-medieval texts is a familiar crux. Servius asserted in his Commentary that Virgil’s alter ab undecimo tum me iam acceperat annus in Ecl. VIII 39 meant ‘the thirteenth year’ (cf. Ven. Fortunatus carm. IV 26 v. 35: tertius a decimo ut hanc primum acceperat annus), but he is now usually thought to be wrong. Paul the Deacon’s Alter ab undecimo iam te susceperat annus/Cum vos mellifluus consociavit amor./ Alter ab undecimo rursum te sustulit annus in his epitaph for Queen Hildegard (Neff, Gedichte Paulus, p. 115) is best understood as meaning that her death on 30 April 783 occurred during her twelfth year of marriage and that she was in her twelfth year or aged twelve when she married Charles (in ?771). 126 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1271–2, 1437–8 (for the spelling concinnere, required metrically, cf. Æthelwulf, De Abbatibus, ed. Campbell, lines 238, 671), with the medieval glosses to the latter and Godman’s comments ad loc. (p. 113). If line 1271 is metaphorical for ‘the chanting of the Psalms’ and not referring literally to a reedpipe, the hymnos of 1272 are surely all other ‘chants in praise of God’ (cf. Augustine, Isidore etc., and not hymnody in the restricted sense. 127 Cantor etc.: Alcuin’s carm. xciii (MGH Poet. 1, 319; S.-K. no. 6634), Hic pueri discant senioris ab ore magistri/ Hymnidicas laudes et resonare queant; Bullough (with A. HartingCorrêa), ‘Texts, chant . . .’ [1990], Carolingian Renewal, pp. 242, 257 with the notes on pp. 260, 270. Metz: the text published from the unique manuscript source, London BL Add. 15222 fols 70v–73 (where it is inserted in a copy of collectio A of the ordines after OR. XXXIV) by M. Andrieu, ‘Règlement d’Angilramne de Metz fixant les honoraires de quelques fonctions liturgiques’, Revue des Sciences religieuses, 10 (1930), 349–69. York (evidence, however, which certainly must not be pressed!): the short section, immediately after the section of the expositio concerned with the gradual and the reading of the Gospel, in Cambridge, CCC 190, p. 147 (item IXf in the contents-listing in Wormald, Making of English Law, 1, pp. 214–5), inc. GREGORIUS [sic]

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importance of mastering the arts of performance while still young— old-age is too late!—and of singing in a properly controlled way, in voce moderata: for ‘raising the voice is a form of boastfulness’. Of his own vocal skills he unfortunately tells us nothing.128 Alcuin’s early progression to a mastery of the written word, and to a spirituality of which it was the foundation, is exemplified by the account of his ecstatic vision when he was reading St. John’s Gospel to his master Ælberht and his fellow-pupils,129 an episode which if authentic should belong to Alcuin’s teens or early twenties and the late 750s/early 760s. At the onset of adolescence—conventionally linked with age 14—the voice breaking and new physical strengths developing, some of the pueri of secular cathedrals on both sides of the Channel seem to have returned to the world, and thus help to account for the occasional evidence of lay literacy even before the Carolingian reforms; for unlike monastic oblates, they had not been bound to the Church in perpetuity. Most of the others will have become junior members of the cathedral clerici, the conventional inclusive term (when it was not simply providing a contrast with laicus or monachus) for those who had yet to proceed to the ‘major orders’ of deacon, priest and bishop: in that sense it is a category in the ‘Lindisfarne’ Liber Vitae, and used in occasional Midland and south English charters and a wide range of contemporary non-English texts.130 If we rely on the sequence of events suggested by the Vita, which in

Censuimus namque ut in circulo anno in die natalis domini primus scolç qui ipsa die officium facit solidum unum accipiat expl. ‘. . . qui evangelium legerit solidum unum accipiat’, which appears to be a variant or a missing portion of the Angilram regulations. 128 See carm. xciii (last note), esp. lines 13–14, Nec bene namque senex poterit vel discere, postquam/Tondenti in gremium candida barba cadit; ep. no. 114 (p. 169), Chase, Two Letter-books II/8 (p. 68), to the York clergy in 796. For Alcuin’s supposed authorship of the short treatise Octo tonos . . ., which covers aspects of music where theory and practice overlap, see above, Pt. I. 129 And not to Egberht, as some modern biographies assert: Vita, c. 7, ed. Arndt, pp. 188–9. 130 Gerchow, Gedenküberlieferung, pp. 309–15 (1175 names, in comparison with 372 nomina praesbyterorum and the forty nomina diaconorum); and the witness-lists of, e.g., the Kentish charters BCS. 319 of 805, BCS. 342 of 813 (Sawyer nos 1259, 1265), but cf. F.E. Harmer, Select English Historical Documents of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1914), no. II of 833/9 (Sawyer no. 1482) which records three subdeacons! Compare Paulinus of Aquileia’s account of the Frankfurt synod in 794: Quadam die residentibus cunctis in aula sacri palatii, adsistentibus in modum coronae presbyteris, diaconibus cunctoque clero, sub praesentia principis [Karoli] (MGH Conc. II/i, p. 131). For clericus contrasted with monachus etc., see e.g. Dialogus Egberti, int. xii, xiv, ed. Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 408, 409.

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matters of chronology is confused and confusing, it was only in Archbishop Egberht’s later years or his successor Ælberht’s very early ones, when Alcuin was well on his twenties, that he was ordained deacon.131 What ‘order’ or ‘orders’ he had received in his years of adolescence is as obscure as it is for most of his clerical contemporaries. One of the riddles in the Alcuinian Propositiones has a bishop distributing loaves among his clergy, defined as priests, deacons and lectores. The list of the conditions of men in the Prologue to ‘Egberht’s Penitential’, however, proceeds with episcopus, presbyter, diaconus, subdiaconus, lector . . .; and, writing to the newly-elected archbishop of York in 796, Alcuin expressly recommends that the clergy supporting him should include sub-deacons, an ‘order’ of which, as he records in a contemporary poem, was among the clergy serving the Palace chapel.132 In the letter Alcuin goes on to say that the York church should also have the other ‘minor’ clerical grades so that the seven-fold gifts of the Spirit will be matched by a seven-fold hierarchy or order. From this it has been rashly (and, I believe, wrongly) inferred that he had in mind four grades below that of sub-deacon (i.e. acolyte, exorcist, lector and doorkeeper (ostiarius)), and that in consequence he was reducing the ‘major’ orders from three to two, by the exclusion of the bishop.133 Isidore in his De ecclesiasticis officiis, however, describes nine grades (ten if corepiscopi are counted) without that of acolyte, while his basic list in the later Etymologies has nine, acolythus being introduced between exorcist and sub-deacon.134 Additions made (it 131 Vita c. 8 (ad init.): ed. Arndt, p. 189; the previous chapters 6 and 7 (idem, pp. 188–9) and the rest of c. 8 mingle accounts of the years when Ælberht was magister under Egberht and the period of his own episcopacy. Alcuin himself provides no help, in the ‘York poem’ or elsewhere; and for the difficulties created by the Vita’s record of his diaconal ordination, see above Pt. I. 132 Propositiones, ed. Folkerts, c. 47; ‘Egberht’, ed. Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 417; ep. no. 114 (p. 168), Chase, Two Letter-Books II/8 (pp. 67–8). For the Nathanei of Alcuin’s carm. xxvi (MGH Poet. I, p. 245–6), line 11, compare Isidore, De eccl. officiis II.x.1 (CCSL cxiii [Turnhout, 1989], ed. C. Lawson, p. 69) and idem, Etym. VII. xii. 23). 133 See Chase, Two Letter-Books, p. 67 note. The (Roman) consecratory prayer for the ordination of deacons, but not for other orders, in the ‘old Gelasian’ (ed. Wilson I xxii, ed. Mohlberg no. 154) and ‘Frankish Gelasian’ sacramentaries, petitions for the sending upon them of the spiritum sanctum quo in opus ministerii fideliter exequendi muneri septiformis tuae gratiae roborentur, with a previous reference to the ‘three grades of ministers to do battle’. Closer to the letter’s quatinus septiformis in donis sancti spiritus aecclesia septiformi aecclesiasticorum graduum distinctione fulgeat, however, is qui septiformes ecclesiasticae dignitatis gradus septemplici dono sancti spiritus decorasti . . . in the praefatio of Alcuin’s ‘votive’ missa sacerdotis, composed no more than a year or two later: Sacr. Grég., ed. Deshusses, 2 (p. 86), no. 2102. 134 De eccl. off., II. v–xiv, ed. Lawson, pp. 56–73; Etym., VII. xii 2. A widespread

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is generally agreed) in Gaul to the Roman nucleus of the ‘Old Gelasian’ Sacramentary, included in the primary manuscript-source Vatican, Reg. Lat. 316 and indicated by the Index of St.-Thierry (Rheims Bibl. Mun. 8, fols 1–2), provide rituals for admission by the bishop to five of the ‘minor’ grades, as well as for the admission without episcopal intervention of a psalmista, id est cantor. Even though this text was almost certainly known in Northumbria, it is likely that there, as in most ‘new’ churches in the West, the very lowest grades never effectively existed.135 Aldhelm and glossary-compilers are aware of at least the grades of acolyte and exorcist. Alcuin seems never to refer to them as such, even in his writings on baptism, although he knew and made use of the letter of the sixth-century John the Deacon ad Senarium, which has an interesting discussion of the different functions of the two grades.136 The ‘Old Gelasian’s’ (and ‘Frankish Gelasians’s’) rituals are introduced by an extract from a letter of Pope Zosimus which declares that ‘If a person has been enrolled from childhood (ab infancia) among the ministers of the church, he must remain a lector until he is twenty’. It is therefore plausible— but no more—that Alcuin’s own first clerical grade was that of lector, whether or not his interest in the subdiaconate (normal in Rome’s churches but seemingly unusual elsewhere) implies that he had been in that ordo on his way to the diaconate.137 In Alcuin’s lifetime, however, the word came to be widely used by English writers in the sense of ‘learned man, teacher’: it was indeed so applied to Alcuin himself, and to his companion Pyttel, in the record of the legatine

desire to align the historic eight or nine clerical grades with the special symbolism of the number ‘seven’ prompted extensive and varied juggling with texts in the Patristic and early-medieval periods: see the various writings of R.E. Reynolds, beginning with ‘The De officiis vii graduum. Its Origins and early medieval Developments’, Mediaeval Studies 34 (1972), 113–51. 135 Sacr. Gelas., I xcv–xcvi: ed. Wilson, pp. 144–9, ed. Mohlberg, nos 741–56; Index: ed. A. Wilmart, RevBén 30 (1913), 437–50 (CLA VI, 822), [I] xc, xci; with the discussion by Chavasse, Sacramentaire gélasien, pp. 5–27. Similarly, but omitting the psalmista in ‘Frankish Gelasians’, e.g., Gell., nos 2502–18, 2520–23, 2537. For the relevance of ‘Old Gelasian’ material to eighth-century Northumbria, see below. 136 Compare DMLBS s. vv. acolytus, exorcista, with A. Wilmart, Analecta Reginensia (StT. 59; Vatican, 1933), pp. 170–9, here p. 176. 137 Sacr. Gel. I xcv, ed. Wilson, p. 144, ed. Mohlberg, no. 737; not in Gell. but in Engol., no. 2058. The letter-extract goes on to say that candidates for the diaconate should have been for four years either an acolyte or a subdeacon. For the ordination rituals, see the succeeding sections of the several sacramentaries, and OR.XXXIV, cc. 1–3, Ordines, ed. Andrieu, 3, 603–4, with the editor’s commentary ibid., pp. 543–54. For sub-deacons at Canterbury in the next century, see above, n. 130.

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visitation of 786, as well as to Alcuin’s correspondent, the teacher and priest Colcu, by his Northumbrian contemporaries.138

The Liturgy as Schooling Time spent in classes was only a small part of ‘schooling’. For pueri and clerici, then as later, the collective celebration ‘in choir’ of the daily Offices or Hours, the Sunday and feast-day Mass and the occasional sacrament was an instrument of education, of mental formation, as well as an ordering of life, which is now difficult to grasp. It was the dominant influence on almost every aspect of a participant’s later language, thought and writings. The texts, Biblical and non-Biblical, used for the Liturgy provided the essential grounding in Latin syntax, and a vocabulary with a distinctive semantic and semiotic range, which subsequent teaching and reading might enlarge or modify but could never obliterate: for Alcuin, this is finely illustrated by a letter in which he analyses the several senses of confiteri/confessio, and is reflected in his use elsewhere of commonplace but post-Classical (‘ecclesiastical Latin’) terms such as carnalis or tribulatio.139 These same texts supplied a range of quotations and allusions, whether indicated or not; and modern scholars need often look no further for the source or inspiration of a writer’s phraseology.

138 Epist. Select. 1, ed. Tangl, no. 75, Boniface to Egberht: de opusculis Bedan lectoris aliquos tractatus; MGH Epp., IV, p. 28; the head-note of Alcuin’s ep. no. 7 and HR ed. Arnold, 2, 56; etc. In the ‘York poem’, lector (twice) is simply the reader to whom the poem is addressed. 139 Ep. no. 138 (p. 217), to the laity, monks and clerics of Gothia and included in the collections K, T and S, has a brief discussion of confessio etc. (where, however, the opening citation from Ps 91.2 (all versions) does not accurately reflect Jerome’s usage here); similarly, (the authentic) Haimo of Auxerre, expounding Mt 11.25 and with a better Psalm quotation (105, 1), in PL 118, 796A–B. Another instance of confessio in the letters, with an additional sense, is in confessione regularis vitae in ep. no. 272 (p. 431) (not noticed in DMLBS, 2, 431–2). Carnalis and tribulatio, used by Alcuin in his ep. no. 2 and frequently thereafter, are first recorded in third-century Christian writings, occur frequently in the Vulgate Bible, and feature in a number of Gelasian and Gregorian mass-prayers. An unusual use of carnalis is ep. no. 19 (p. 54), Nolite in fuga confidere carnali (‘physical flight’) sed in prece patrum vestrorum: carnali is, however, omitted in both the ‘Tours collection’ and ‘English collection’ manuscripts, and is therefore peculiar to the Salzburg text of the letter; but the sentence is characteristically Alcuinian in both assonance and rhythm.

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It is only to be expected that the impact will be most strongly felt in the composition of letters, whether to fellow churchmen or to lay persons, even at the end of a long life. For Alcuin that uniquely rich body of evidence is supported by the contents of a florilegium in four books De laude Dei et de confessione orationibusque sanctorum collect[i], preserved in two Continental manuscripts that are of widely-separated date and place of origin: namely, Bamberg, Stadtbibl., Msc. Patr. 17 (B. II. 10), a Mainz book of the early-eleventh century, from which alone it has been quoted intermittently by scholars in various fields; and the earlier El Escorial manuscript B-IV-17 (doubtfully attributed to S. France, s. IX3/4), a generally but by no means invariably inferior copy.140 Textual evidence supports its early northernEnglish connections; and Alcuin’s ‘authorship’ seems securely established by the rubric of the first book (Bamberg, fol. 133v): Liber primus de laude Dei etc. collectus ab Alchonio levita. There is no clear internal evidence for the date or circumstances of its compilation: the supposed arguments in favour of ca. 790, based as they are on the ‘Ninian’ appendix and its evident link with Alcuin’s ep. no. 273 (in the English letter-collections) are—I argue—misconceived; and I have been unable to find any supporting evidence in the florilegium itself. The overall impression given by its contents is, none the less, that we have here a personal reflection of the public worship and private study of Alcuin’s York years. As such, it offers glimpses of the earliest phases of his lifelong activity as excerpter and creator of fiches, which 140 The presence of this florilegium in the Bamberg codex, at fols 133–157v, was first effectively made known by F. Vollmer in his introduction to MGH AA XIV (Merobaudes, Dracontius, etc.), xiv–xvii. Origin and date were established by H. Hoffmann, Buchkunst und Königtum im ottonischen und frühsalischen Reich, Textband, MGH Schriften, XXX.i (Stuttgart, 1986), pp. 232–3; the Alcuin etc. portion (apart from the final replacement-leaf, fol. 162) is the work of a single hand not found elsewhere. The codex’s concluding folios 157v–162 are in fact verse Miracula et Hymnus Nynie episcopi and a poem ‘titled’ Albinus Credulus (sic) in the index on fol. 133v, which are not in the Escorial copy and in my view are early additions to the ‘original’ De laude Dei (cf. K. Strecker in MGH Poet. IV, fasc. 2, pp. 452–4: idem pp. 943–62 are Strecker’s edition of the Miracula). The most comprehensive account of its contents, with editions of certain portions, is that of Radu Constantinescu, ‘Alcuin et les “Libelli precum” de l’époque carolingienne’, Revue de l’histoire de la spiritualité 50 (1974), 17–56. My and other scholars’ debt to this publication is very great, although I often find myself in disagreement with Father Constantinescu on points of detail. For the El Escorial manuscript, where the De laude is at fols 93–108, see Bischoff, Katalog, 1, no. 1193; the main text is Isidore’s Synonyma). For a major omission from the Bamberg copy, preserved by the El Escorial one, see below, ch. 2. A complete edition, based on both manuscripts, with commentary, is in preparation.

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provided the raw material for his teaching and writing and for the progress of his own life ‘in the spirit’.141 The De laude in its transmitted form—which could well belong to the time when Alcuin was already in Francia—invites comparison with other devotional handbooks including substantial elements of ‘private prayer’ composed in England, possibly for the first time in the Latin West, in the eighth or early-ninth centuries.142 Of the four still extant, two are certainly, a third probably, Mercian (Southumbrian).143 The fourth and most substantial, the ‘Book of Cerne’, was also written 141 The ca. 790 dating was proposed by Constantinescu, ‘“Libelli precum”’, p. 56; Marsden, Text of the Old Testament, pp. 222, 223, etc., similarly associates the De laude with Alcuin’s return to Northumbria, 790/93, albeit with considerable reservations. The centuries-old tradition on which Alcuin draws here is finely characterized by J. Fontaine, Isidore de Séville et la culture classique dans l’Espagne wisigothique, 3 vols. (Paris, 1959–83), here vol. 2, esp. pp. 750–65; for pre-Carolingian excerpting of the Fathers, see also Bullough, ‘Iuxta Vestigia Patrum’ (unpublished) and for other eighth-century florilegia, below. Note Constantinescu’s suggestion (“Libelli precum”, p. 27) that the original character of Alcuin’s fiches may be particularly reflected in the section of Book III on fols 145v–146v of the Bamberg copy. 142 Thanks to Dom André Wilmart and others, the epithet libellus precum has firmly attached itself to both the earliest and later examples of the genre. Helmut Gneuss observed that ‘An Old English term for “prayer-book” does not seem to exist, and I have not found a special Latin expression in Anglo-Saxon sources’: ‘Liturgical books in Anglo-Saxon England and their Old English terminology’, in: Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies presented to Peter Clemoes . . ., ed. M. Lapidge and H. Gneuss (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 91–142, at p. 138. But S. Keynes and M. Lapidge are surely right in supposing (Alfred the Great [London, Harmondsworth, 1983], p. 268 n. 208) that King Alfred’s libellus referred to in Asser’s Vita Alfredi c. 88, and as enchiridion in id. c. 89, was a devotional book with a prayer component: compare Cathwulf ’s letter to King Charles, MGH Epp. IV, p. 503, ut sepius habeas enchyridion, quod est librum manualem, legem Dei tui scriptum in manibus tuis; Alcuin’s ep. no. 243 (p. 389): quasi quoddam enchiridion, id est manualem librum, id. no. 259 (p. 417): Direxi . . . manualem libellum, sc. the collection copied into Cologne Dombibl. 106 (discussed below). 143 Namely: i. London BL Royal 2. A. xx (CLA II, 215; Ker, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts no. 248), ed. Kuypers, Book of Cerne, pp. 200–25; ii. BL Harl. 7653 (CLA II, 204; Ker, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, no. 244), ed. F.E. Warren, Antiphonary of Bangor, 2 (HBS 10: London, 1895), pp. 83–6; apparently for a woman, see the litany; both books composed (or compiled) in the Worcester region. iii. BL Harl. 2965, ‘the Book of Nunnaminster’ (CLA II, 199; Ker, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, no. 237), ed. W. de G. Birch, An Ancient Manuscript of the Eighth or Ninth Century formerly belonging to St. Mary’s Abbey (London, 1889); probably written for a woman, see fols 20v, 23v, 25v (Birch pp. 63, 66, 69), but not the ora pro me peccatrice of fol. 91 (Birch, p. 97: cf. idem, pp. 15–16) since this is an addition of s. x1 (Ker cit.): the possibility of Mercian royal origin would be greatly strengthened if the Ealhswith whose property bounds were also added in s. x1 on fol. 40 (Birch p. 96) were indeed Alfred’s queen (ob. 909) and was or had been the manuscript’s owner, since she was descended on her mother’s side from the Mercian royal dynasty. The books and their context were splendidly discussed, with particular reference to the two from Worcester, by SimsWilliams, Religion and Literature, pp. 275–327; but see further Brown, The Book of Cerne (as next note), ch. 5.

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in Mercia in the first half of the ninth century, and includes on its ninety-nine surviving leaves a number of texts (mostly prayers) found also in one or more of the other books, as well as others peculiar to it. Some parts of it, although how much continues to be controversial, may have been taken over from an earlier Northumbrian assemblage.144 Certainly, an ill-defined link with York or its region is apparent in some of its most recent items: particularly relevant and revealing are the three prayers, two Ad dominum and one Ad sanctam Mariam, which declare themselves to be compositions of the anchorite Alchfrith.145 His name does not figure in the ‘Lindisfarne’ Liber Vitae’s list of anchorites. He is, however, the author of a letter to Higlacum lectorem et presbiterum copied in the two English manuscripts of Alcuin’s letters; and the addressee can safely be identified with the ‘distinguished teacher’ of that name and grade living at the end of the eighth century in the southern Northumbrian monastery described in Æthelwulf ’s De Abbatibus.146 The scope, structure and, indeed, manuscript-title of the De laude distinguish it none the less from the other English books; it is significantly different also, except for a small group of prayers included in Book III, from the later Continental libelli precum in the creation and dissemination of which Alcuin was evidently a major influence.147 It has more similarities with other pre-750 florilegia copied in 144 Cambridge Univ. Libr. Ll. 1. 10, (Ker, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, no. 27; Dated Mss.: Cambridge, no. 73), ‘the Book of Cerne’ from its later monastic provenance: Book of Cerne, ed. Kuypers, pp. viii–xxxvi, 3–198. The origins of the book as a whole and of its component elements have provoked a considerable literature, latterly comprehensively reviewed and re-interpreted by Michelle P. Brown, The Book of Cerne: Prayer, Patronage and Power in Ninth-Century England, British Library Studies in Medieval Culture (London and Toronto, 1996); Brown argues for a ‘thematic structure’ resting on the ‘doctrine’ of communio sanctorum (which leaves me uneasy), and distinguishing it in this respect—among others—from both the earliest English and later Continental books. For verses in Cerne probably of Canterbury origin, the second of the three familiar to Alcuin, which are copied on fols 62v, 66–66v see M. Lapidge, ‘Theodore and Anglo-Latin octosyllabic verse’, in: M. Lapidge ed., Archbishop Theodore (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 260–80, esp. pp. 276–80. 145 Book of Cerne, ed. Kuypers, nos 47, 48, 58. See also Brown, Book of Cerne, pp. 137, 139–40, where eleventh-century English and later copies of no. 58, without the attribution to Alchfrith, are noted. 146 Above, Pt. I p. 88 and n. 217; addenda and corrigenda to Levison’s and Chase’s editions in Additional Note I, below. 147 One of the most notable differences between the Continental and the English libelli is that the latter, but not the former, ‘return again and again to the theme of protection against illness, death and supernatural adversity’: Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, pp. 285–6, in a chapter titled ‘Prayer and Magic’.

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Carolingian-period manuscripts, although lacking their ‘topical’ arrangement.148 More than one-third of it consists of short extracts from books of the Old and the New Testaments, occasionally with the addition of a short invocation or prayer. After the Octateuch, the sequence of Old Testament books does not correspond with any that is to be found in early ‘Vulgate Bibles’ (including those of Tours) or in the Fathers. It appears, moreover, that Alcuin has used here Bibletexts of more than one type: most notably, the several passages from Tobit are dependent on the ‘Ceolfrithian’ text of that book, preserved complete in the Wearmouth-Jarrow Codex Amiatinus, although none of the other Old Testament extracts are clearly linked with the pandect.149 The second half of Book III consists predominantly of short Patristic excerpts and some extended prayers of varied origin.150 The fourth and last Book of the De laude Dei, which concludes with verses from nine named Christian poets, begins with a lengthy and distinctive sequence of liturgical texts and excerpts. What do florilegium and letters reveal about Alcuin’s early experience of the liturgy? I begin, as he will have done, with the Psalter. What bread was to the body the Psalms were to the soul—an essential part of daily nutrition. But it was also something very much more. The Psalter is (to quote an outstanding modern liturgist) ‘above all, a school in which to learn the contemplation of God and his perfections; it teaches us to admire him at work in the splendor of creation; it also teaches us the language of intimacy with him’. Alcuin himself used similar language, concluding that ‘You will find every virtue in the Psalms, if God in his mercy will deign to reveal to you their secrets’.151 Cassian had commented that the regular recitation of 148 E.g. those edited by A. Lehner (one of them from the Freising manuscript Munich clm. 6433, written by the Anglo-Saxon Peregrinus) in CCSL 108D (Turnhout, 1987). Such florilegia should not be confused with any and every manuscript miscellany of the period, of which they are often in fact only one item: where these miscellanies have some unity of subject-matter, a better term for them might be ‘compendium’. 149 R. Marsden, The Text of the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 222–35; the same author’s ‘The survival of Ceolfrith’s Tobit in a tenthcentury Insular manuscript [Bodley 572]’, JTS n. s. 45 (1994), 1–23 (with a fuller discussion of the Am. text of Tobit, cf. Text of the Old Testament, pp. 171–81); and personal correspondence in 1994, to which I am greatly indebted. See also below (ch. 3) for Alcuin’s possible access to one of the Wearmouth-Jarrow pandects. 150 Constantinescu, “Libelli precum”, pp. 24–36; below, ch. 2. 151 A.G. Martimort, in The Church at Prayer, 4, 196, with an apposite quotation from Augustine’s Enarrationes, 144, 1; the text Prophetiae spiritus, PL 101, cols 465C–466B, transl. Southern, St. Anselm (1990), p. 96; and if Alcuin’s authorship

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the Psalms made the Psalmist’s words one’s own; and a Southumbrian council, during Alcuin’s boyhood, declared that someone who mouthed the Psalms without understanding the Latin words would still be communicating his ‘internalized’ desires to God.152 The version used liturgically at York and most other churches and monasteries in the England of Alcuin’s day, as by Bede earlier at Wearmouth-Jarrow, was the pre-Jerome Romanum. Lindisfarne on the other hand, as is apparent from the Anonymous Vita Cuthberti, and some other ‘Irish’ foundations, continued to use the Gallicanum version ( Jerome’s first revision) well into the eighth century.153 The collection of verses De psalterio with which Alcuin begins Book II of the De Laude —a socalled Breviate Psalter, intended as a continuous prayer—uses the phraseology of the ‘Roman’ version, with a very few divergences; so does the somewhat different but frequently-overlapping selection in the ‘Book of Cerne’, with the heading Hoc argumentum forsorum [for versorum?] oedel ald episcopus decerpsit.154 By contrast, the ‘little Psalter which is called the Psalter of the blessed Bede, priest’, included by Alcuin in a devotional handbook sent to Arn of Salzburg ca. 802, is, he asserts in a separately-conveyed letter, a selection of psalmverses iuxta Hebraicam veritatem—which seems to be only partly true.155 of the latter is questioned, see the remarks in his letter to Arn of Salzburg, ep. no. 243, which prefaced his manualis libellus (of which Duckett, Alcuin p. 266, is a free paraphrase rather than a translation). 152 Cassian, Conlationes X.11, cited Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, p. 319 n. 192; Council of Cloveshoe, 747, ed. Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 372: Voce autem sine sensu cordis canentibus sonitum alicuius rei facere simillimum est, unde quamvis psallendo Latina quis nesciat verba, suas tamen cordis intentiones, ad ea quae in praesenti poscenda sunt a Deo suppliciter referre ac pro viribus detinere debet. 153 The evidence is summarised in Bullough, ‘A neglected early-ninth-century manuscript’, ASE 27, p. 116 n. 39; see also Marsden, Text of the Old Testament, passim (index ‘text of Psalms’ at p. 502. Note additionally that torrente voluptatis suae potabit nos in Bede’s V. Cuthberti (pr.), c. 18 (ed. Colgrave, p. 218) is much the earliest testimony to the aberrant reading voluptatis for voluntatis in Ps 35.9 (Ro., Ga.): indeed in manuscripts of Ro. it is only recorded from s. xi onwards, although in Ga. voluptates is exceptionally reported in the mid-eighth-century ‘Corbie triple psalter’ at St.Petersburg (CLA XI, 1601), and voluptatis is adopted for the text in the Tours Bibles! 154 De laude, Bamberg version, fols 137–40, Escorial version, fols 102–7v (with some noteworty differences). The selective collation in Constantinescu, “Libelli precum”, pp. 21–3 is unfortunately not always reliable, and the comments, idem, pp. 19–22, are correspondingly often erroneous (cf. Marsden, Text of the Old Testament, p. 225 n. 126). ‘Cerne’: Kuypers, Book of Cerne pp. 174–95 (with the reading forsorii ); discussion in Brown, Book of Cerne, pp. 143–5. For supposed Irish ‘precedents’, see P. Salmon, Analecta Liturgica, Studi e Testi 273 (Città del Vaticano, 1974), pp. 71–2 and Brown, Book of Cerne, p. 144. 155 Ep. no. 259, complete only in Vienna lat. 808 (S1), abbreviated in Munich

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The succinct verse-by-verse commentaries on twenty-three of the Psalms (seven Penitential, fifteen Gradual and Ps. 118 [Vg.]), which constitute a large part of the same handbook, raise complex and unresolved problems: not least, because neither the eighteenth-century edition of the Alcuin texts nor the most recent edition of Cassiodorus’s substantial Expositio Psalmorum, on some version of which Alcuin was heavily dependent, are a reliable guide to the original form of their Psalm lemmata or rubrics.156 I limit myself to two fairly characteristic examples. The eighth verse of Ps 6 is quoted by Alcuin in the Roman form Turbatus est prae ira oculus meus, which is required by both Cassiodorus’s and his own commentary (Ga.: a furore); but the eleventh and final verse of the same psalm as printed by Frobenius Forster is neither Ro. (the version in the printed text of the Expositio) nor Ga., yet Alcuin’s commentary, in a section not taken from Cassiodorus, is obviously responding to the Gallican version’s vehementer! In Alcuin’s commentary on Ps 37, the rubric of v. 2 is Ro.—with ira tua preceding furore tuo—as is Cassiodorus’s version, while vv. 5 and 20 (the latter some manuscripts only) are Ga., and several other verses are a mixture of the two (vv. 4, 6, 7, 9); sometimes the Roman elements are reflected in Cassiodorus’s text but at other times not.157 The one explicit Psalm-citation in Alcuin’s verse, in a letter-poem of ?796–7 (where unusually it is introduced by the words Sanctus ait), depends on the Roman version of Ps 38.8.158 The fullest and genclm. 14743 (S1*). Only the earliest copy of Alcuin’s manualis libellus, that in Cologne Erzdiözesan- u. Dom-Bibliothek, cod. 106, includes a text of the ‘little Psalter’, although there are other ‘copies’ of this, with many variants, in ninth-century libelli precum, etc.: see J. Fraipont’s edition in Bedae Opera, IV: Liber hymnorum etc. (CCSL cxxii/3–4; Turnhout, 1955), no. xx, pp. 452–70, which creates a text-version that in my view never existed! 156 Expositiones in Psalmos poenitentiales, Psalmum CXVIII et Psalmos graduales, PL 100, cols 575–638; Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. M. Adriaen (CCSL 97–8; Turnhout, 1958). Compare J.W. Halporn, ‘The modern edition of Cassiodorus’ Psalm Commentary’, Texte u. Untersuchungen der altchristl. Literatur, 133 (1987), 239–47 (but written, as a letter from the author advised me, in 1971 and printed without the requested addenda!); idem, ‘Pandectes, Pandecta and the Cassiodorian Commentary on the Psalms’, RevBén 90 (1980), 290–300, noting at p. 296 n. 2 (contra Adriaen) the mixed nature of his Psalter text, and correcting my remarks in ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 173, 216 (n. 41), 217 (n. 44); Halporn, ‘Cassiodorus’ Commentary on Psalms 20 and 21: text and context’, RevÉtAug. 32 (1986), 92–102. For Alcuin’s Cassiodorus text, compare below, ch. 2, pp. 257–8. 157 PL 100, cols 576A,B, 579–82; Cassiodorus, Expositio, ed. Adriaen, pp. 77, 343–7, 351. 158 Carm. xlvi, MGH Poet., I, pp. 259–60, S.-K. no. 2145 lines 17–18: the Gallican version has quaerens panes al.-em (e.g. the Tours Bibles), while the Roman version

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erally most revealing picture is inevitably provided by the correspondence. The three verses in Alcuin’s earliest surviving letters (of 783 × 4?), two from Psalm 33 and one from Psalm 143, are unsurprisingly and unequivocally Roman.159 Many of the approximately one hundred and twenty Psalter quotations (excluding mere echoes and probable paraphrases, which are numerous) in the rest of the correspondence, representing nearly one hundred different verses, are ones which are identical in the Roman and the Gallican versions, and therefore of no help in the present context. A few are of a type which textual scholars are accustomed to call ‘peculiar’, as for example the repeatedly quoted Ps 80.11 in the form Aperi os tuum et ego implebo illud, to which Mr Paul Meyvaert has called attention and suggested an (unidentified) liturgical origin.160 There are a small number of quotations that are certainly or probably from the Gallican version. Some of them Alcuin seems simply to have copied from another author’s text which he is closely following—part of Ps 31.5, for example, in his letter about confession to the inhabitants of Gothia, and probably in his earlier letter on the same subject to the young men of St. Martin’s.161 Most

reads, with the poem, egens pane. ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, line 211, qui Domini legem meditans in nocte dieque depends on Ps. 1 v. 2, which in this regard is identical in the two versions. In his letters, Alcuin always refers to David the Psalmist as psalmista (epp. nos 1, 124 etc.) or propheta (epp. nos 15, 19 [p. 54] etc.). But David is sanctus, with other Old Testament figures, in the (?Irish) oratio sancti Gregorii papae in three of the English prayer-books and in the Tours libellus precum in Troyes, BM, 1742: texts in Kuypers, Book of Cerne, pp. 103–6 (no. 15) and Wilmart, Precum Libelli, pp. 11–13. 159 In ep. no. 1, Multae tribulationes iustorum sed de his omnibus liberavit eos Dominus, Ps 33.20 Ro. where Ga. omits Dominus and has omnibus his and liberavit, against the majority of witnesses’ liberabit, correctly represents the early English tradition (see Weber’s app. ad loc.); Timete Dominum omnes sancti eius quia (leg. quoniam?) nihil deest timentibus eum, Ps 33.10 Ro. where Ga. has non est inopia: all witnesses to both Psalter versions read quoniam, but the St. Denis scribes of the manuscripts H and H2 or the scribe of their exemplar have frequently wrongly extended a presumable abbreviation qu. In ep. no. 2, Misericordia mea . . . liberator meus, Ps 143.2 is identical in Ro. and Ga. but the immediately-following in ipso speravit cor echoes Ro.’s in ipso speravi (again in the early English manuscript tradition) subiciens, not Ga.’s in eo speravi qui subdis. 160 RevBén, 89 (1979), 36. All Psalter-versions (including He.!) have Dilata as the opening word. 161 Ep. nos 138, 131. The citation in no. 138 (pp. 218–9) of the Psalm verse in its Gallican form Dixi confitebor adversus me iniustitiam meam Domino (against Ro.’s pronuntiabo, adversum and in-ias meas) and of Ps 31.3 as invetaverunt ossa mea are witnessed by the two early and independent manuscripts, Vienna 795 (S ) and Troyes 1165 (T ). The readings iniustitias meas and omnia ossa in Milan, Bibl. Ambrosiana, I 89 sup. (N. It., s. ix/x: most recent and fullest description by C.E. Ineichen-Eder in Scriptorium, 37 (1983), 98–104), where the letter occurs at fols 166–169, represent a

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of the others are in four letters composed at Tours, probably within the space of a few years either side of 800. In two of them, addressed respectively to the Frankish king and Archbishop Elipand of Toledo, Alcuin may have been deliberately adopting their regular usage in place of his own, or simply echoing quotations that had prompted his response;162 while in another the form of the quotation was required by the context. This last, if the manuscript testimony can be relied on, is certainly a special case. In a humiliating letter to the Emperor (801/2) preserved only in his ‘personal’ collection, Alcuin writes: ‘We are accustomed to say to God when confessing our sins Si iniquitates observaberis, Domine, Domine, quis sustinebit’, a quotation (Ps 129.3) which he then repeats. The standard Gallican Psalter has observabis, the standard Roman one observaveris (to which Dümmler ‘corrects’ the letter-text): but the text of the former in the ‘Dagulf Psalter’ (Vienna Nat. bibl. lat. 1861), from Aachen, has Alcuin’s precise wording!163 Finally, in a letter to Angilbert in which Alcuin is comparing prefixes in Latin and Greek with examples taken from the Psalms, the Latin citations are likewise Gallican—because that was the version in the bi-lingual Psalter he was consulting?164 Where, indeed, a different Psalter-version provided Alcuin with a better literary illustration or trope, he was perfectly capable of using it, at least in his later years. Thus, writing in 801 to Gisla of Chelles and needing a text to support his lament for a continuing ‘exile in the world’, he quotes the psalmist’s Heu mihi, quia peregrinatio mea prolongata est which is the distinctively ‘Hebrews’ text of Ps. 119, 5. (Peregripartial ‘Romanisation’ by the copyist or his exemplar. The Gallican version of Ps 31.5 (unless, perhaps, adversum for adversus) is also that of Alcuin’s De virtutibus et vitiis, PL 101, cols 621C–D. For the apparent common source (ps.-Aug. sermo 254, CPPM. 1, no. 1039), see below, ch. 3, pp. 354–5 and p. 384. 162 Ep. no. 163, answering queries from the king and drawing on Patristic and other older texts to do so; ep. no. 166, a reply to Elipand and a rebuttal of Felix. The longest quotation in the second of these (MGH Epp. IV, p. 270), from Ps 49.3–4, does not correspond precisely with any standard version, and the subsequent quotation from vv. 1–2 also has non-standard features: they could well have originated with Elipand. Dom Bernard Capelle’s suggestion (Bull. d’Anc. Littér. Chrét. Latine (Supplément à la Revue Bénédictine), I (1929), [115–7]) that Alcuin’s own Psalter-text had ‘Spanish symptoms’ is hardly acceptable. 163 Ep. no. 249 (p. 403). Observaberis is also the reading of the (north-east French?) BAV Reg. lat. 11 some decades previously: see the apparatus to R. Weber’s edition, Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem (Stuttgart, 1969), 1, 934. When, earlier, Alcuin had adapted a passage in Isidore’s Synonyma for his De laude Dei he wrote (Bamb. fol. 147) observaveris . . . quis sustinebit; and this is likewise the reading of most of the manuscripts of his Expositio in Psalmos paenitentiales (PL 100, col 593). 164 Ep. no. 162.

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natio is a word unknown to the Roman Psalter.)165 Since knowledge of the ‘Hebrews’ version in eighth-century Northumbria was clearly not exclusive to Bede’s Wearmouth and Jarrow, Alcuin here also may be relying on what he had learnt at York; but the availability at Tours in his lifetime of a good, non-Insular, text of that version is almost certainly established by the manuscript BL Harley 2793.166 Even in Alcuin’s last writings, however, Psalter quotations not in the Roman version are very much the exception. Among the very few Psalm-texts cited in the De fide sancti Trinitatis is a verse of the Eightythird: Beati qui habitant in domo tua, Domine in saeculum saeculi laudabunt te—the language of the Heavenly Hosts themselves, and a recurrent favourite in letters written around the same time.167 Collectively, the Psalter quotations and echoes which came readily to Alcuin’s mind as he wrote or dictated are enduring evidence of the version he had intoned as a participant in the York community’s daily worship. The first Roman ‘preachers to and teachers of the English’, Augustine ‘of Canterbury’ and indirectly therefore pope Gregory,168 165 Ep. no. 216 (p. 360). The verse reads in Ro. and Ga. Heu me (Ro.; mihi Ga.) quia (Ga. and most witnesses to Ro. including Vesp. although Weber prints quod) incolatus meus prolongatus est. The lemma in Alcuin’s own commentary on the psalm (PL 100, cols 619–21) is likewise Heu me quia incolatus etc. in most manuscripts. Cassiodorus has the simple ‘Incolatus’ autem significat peregrinationem (ed. Adriaen, CCSL 98, p. 1143); Alcuin revealingly expands this to . . . quod diu in peregrinatione huius mortalitatis incolatus eius prolongetur (col. 620D). 166 For its textual affinities see de Sainte-Marie, Psalterium iuxta Hebraeos, pp. xxxvii– xxviii and Fischer, ‘Bibeltext und Bibelreform unter Karl dem Grossen’ (1965), Lateinische Bibelhandschriften, p. 126; for its date (early Fridugis?) see Koehler, Karolingischen Miniaturen, I/1, no. 7, cf. Fischer, ‘Alkuin-Bibeln’ (1971), Lateinische Bibelhandschriften, p. 258. 167 Ps 83.5 (Ro.); De fide, III 22, PL 101, 54 A; verbatim in epp. nos 213 (p. 357), 216 (p. 360), 278 (p. 435), shortened or adapted in epp. nos 198 (p. 328), 209 (p. 349), three of them in Alcuin’s ‘personal’ collection; previously in De laude, Bamberg copy; also in the breviate Psalter in Kuypers, Book of Cerne, p. 190. The Gallican version is habitant in domo tua in saecula saeculorum. 168 Agustinus primus praedicator noster, epp. nos 129 (p. 192; cf. p. 191 for doctores nostri, founders of the faith), 293 (p. 450); primi doctoris patrie nostri sanctissima sedes (sc. Cantuariensis), ep. no. 255 (p. 412); also ep. no. 291 . . . in relegionem cristianam quae purissima tradita est a beato Agustino et caeteris doctoribus Britanniae. Gregorius (papa) praedicator noster: letter of 792 ex to King Offa, ed. Lehmann (above, Part I, p. 36 n. 79), epp. nos 124 (p. 182), 125 (p. 184), 128 (p. 189), all of 796/7; beatus Gregorius doctor noster, ep. no. 279 (p. 436). For Alcuin’s usage here, see my comments in ‘Hagiography as patriotism’, pp. 340, 355 n. 6. He had been partly anticipated by Aldhelm, while the Dialogus Egberti resp. xvi, ed. Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 411 (a post-Egberht addition to the original text?) speaks of noster didasculus beatus Gregorius and pedagogum nostrum beatum Augustinum. Earlier, the Epilogue to Theodore’s Penitential (‘discipulus Umbrensium’ version, complete text: Canones Theodori, ed. Finsterwalder, p. 334) refers to Gregorium apostolum nostrum, an epithet adopted also by Bede but not by Alcuin.

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had likewise provided them with a distinctive set of nine Canticles for the office. The earliest complete text of this ‘old Roman’ series is in the Canterbury Vespasian Psalter (BL Cotton Vespasian A. i) of ca. 700; and three canticles from it are also included in the Worcesterregion ‘Royal’ prayer-book. With typical liturgical conservatism, three of the six Old Testament canticles sung on successive weekdays at Lauds, as well as the Hymnus trium puerorum (Dn 3.57–88+56) included in the Sunday office, the New Testament Canticum Zachariae or Benedictus sung daily at Lauds and the Magnificat (Lc 1.46–55) which was—and is—the high-point of Vespers, were in a Vetus Latina (not the Vulgate) version.169 It is at least partly demonstrable from Alcuin’s writings that the same series and versions were the ones he had committed to memory as a boy or young adolescent at York. Quoting from Deuteronomy 32.41 in the course of an intricately-constructed account of swords in the Bible and their various meanings in 798, Alcuin adopts the distinctively ‘Old Latin’ wording quia exacuam ut fulgor gladium meum, et agit iudicium manus mea.170 None of the attributed quotations or paraphrases of the Book of Daniel in Alcuin’s letters is from its third book; but the comparatively long series of Daniel extracts in the De laude includes 3.52–88+90, which at several points follows the Roman canticle version although not consistently.171 Boniface once quotes from the Habakkuk canticle (3.2–19) in its ‘Old Latin’ version. Bede wrote a commentary on it, at the request of an unnamed nun, explaining that it was sung every Friday to commemorate the death of Christ: the text lemmata are ‘Old Latin’.172 Again, it is evi169 H. Schneider, Die asltlateinischen biblischen Cantica, Texte u. Arbeiten (Erzabtei Beuron), I 29–30 (Beuron, 1938), pp. 46–50, 58–64, 75–81; The Vespasian Psalter: British Museum Cotton Vesp. A.I, ed. D.H. Wright, EEMF 14 (Copenhagen, 1967), pp. 52–3, 95 and fols 142–52; BL Royal 2. A. xx (above, n. 143), fols 13v–16, ed. Kuypers, Book of Cerne, pp. 206–7, has Vetus Latina texts of the ymnus scae mariae, the canticum Zachariae and the canticum trium puerorum (with additional verses: for the significance of this, see below). For Boniface’s and Bede’s familiarity with the cantica romana, see Schneider, Biblische Cantica, pp. 47–8, Marsden, Text of the Old Testament, pp. 69–70, 214–5, and below. 170 Ep. no. 136 (p. 206). Dümmler prints aget, which is also the reading of the Vespasian Psalter; but the manuscript evidence for the letter strongly supports agit. The Vulgate version reads (with no important variations) si acuero ut fulgur gladium meum et arripuerit iudicum manus mea. 171 Details in Marsden, Text of the Old Testament, pp. 227–8. For the use of the hymnus (Dn 3.52–90 or sections of it) in other pre-Carolingian liturgies, see further P. Salmon, Lectionnaire de Luxeuil . . . Édition et Étude Comparative, Coll. Bibl. Lat. 7 (Rome, 1944), p. 9 n. 172 Boniface: Epist. Select. 1, ed. Tangl, no. 78 (p. 165); Marsden, Text of the Old Testament, pp. 69–70. Bede: Expositio in canticum Abacuc, ed. J.E. Hudson, CCSL 119B (Turnhout, 1983), pp. 379–409. But the editor seems not to have realised that the

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dently the canticle that has determined the selection from the prophet in the De laude, namely, Hab 3.2 [part], 3, 4, 11 [part], 13 [part], 18, 19; and although the text here is in large part that of the Vulgate (with readings that may provide a link between the early York or south-Northumbrian and the later Turonian texts), in the opening line auditionem tuam is replaced by the ‘Old Latin’ auditum tuum, as in Vesp. and Bede, and v. 11 is in the canticle version.173 The influence of the liturgy can also be invoked to explain the form of some of Alcuin’s citations from the New Testament in his correspondence. Many, probably the majority, of these are indeed in a standard Vulgate form with only minor verbal differences (one or two words) which are demanded by their syntactical context or are simply the result of mis-remembering. Some of the divergences, moreover, are supported by early and relevant manuscripts of the Gospels and of the Pauline and Catholic Epistles; and they may accordingly point to text-versions current at York in the early eighth century if, as seems likely, these differed from those represented by the Codex Amiatinus, the Lindisfarne Gospels and some related manuscripts. A probable example is the quotation from Christ’s call to the disciples in St. Luke’s Gospel (12.35) in a letter of 793 as (ipsa attestante veritate)174 ‘Sint lumbi vestri praecincti et lucernae ardentes in manibus vestris’. The last three words are not a part of the standard Vulgate text, but they feature exceptionally in BL Egerton 609, an earlyninth-century Gospel-book with ‘Irish’ affiliations, probably written in Brittany; and that this was the version that Alcuin recalled from past reading (or being read to) is confirmed by the partial paraphrase in a letter to ‘the bishops of Britain’ in 796, State lumbis accinctis in acie Christi, ardentes in manibus lucernas tenetes.175 Writing to the original text lemmata were ‘Old Latin’, and this prevents his recognising the nature of the variants in some manuscripts (where Vulgate readings have been introduced) and, more importantly, utilising the Vespasian Psalter’s readings when the expositio manuscripts disagree: e.g. (v. 8, wrongly numbered 9) quoniam ascendens ascendes (corr. from -ens) Vesp.; (v. 10) aspargens Vesp. with the Bede manuscripts OP1P2; (v. 13) inimicorum ed., iniquorum Vesp. with OP2T (Vulg. impii ); cervicem ed. as OP1P2T, verticem rell., cervices Vesp., where Bede clearly wrote cervicem but was evidently familiar also with the alternative c-es, cf. p. 399 l. 521 Quod si quis numero plurali legendum dixerit etc.; (v. 16) custodivi ed. (Vulg. audiv), custodivit Vesp. with OP2TL2Ox. 173 Bamb., fol. 137, Esc., fol. 101; Marsden, Text of the Old Testament, p. 228. 174 Veritas for Christ (God-in-Christ) in the Gospels is found (earliest?) in the letters of Gregory I, as Reg. III, 52, XI, 4 (quoted below, p. 192. It is always rare and not so used by, e.g., Aldhelm. 175 Letters: ep. no. 17 (p. 46), Chase, Two Letter-Books, II/10; ep. no. 104 (p. 150). Gospel-text: Novum Testamentum Domini Iesu Christi Latine, ed. Wordsworth and White, app.; Fischer, ‘Bibeltext’[1965], Lateinische Bibelhandschriften, p. 234. The verse is the

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doubly-bereft Queen Æthelthryth(a) in the same year, Alcuin quotes the familiar ‘Whosoever does the will of my father’ etc. (‘as in the Gospel [Mt 12.50] our Lord Jesus Christ replied’)—the last sentence of a widely-used pericope in ‘Roman’ lectionaries—in the distinctive form Omnis qui fecerit voluntatem patris mei qui in caelis est ipse mihi mater et frater.176 In 794/6 (writing in Charlemagne’s name!) and again in 798 Alcuin quotes Lc 6.37 in the form Dimittite et dimittetur vobis: according to the Beuron data-base of pre-900 Gospel texts (several hundred examples!), this particular wording is peculiar to a minority of pre-Carolingian manuscripts, including however the Northumbrian book now Cambridge, CCC 197, the Italian book BL Harley 1775 and the Irish books Oxford, Bodl., Rawlinson G.167 and the ‘Book of Mulling’.177 Similarly several years apart, he quotes Lc 11.17—a verse of a widely-used pericope, unlike its synoptic parallel Mt 12.25— in the non-standard-Vulgate wording Omne regnum in se divisum non stabit, which is perhaps an ‘Old Latin’ version familiar to seventhcentury Rome and taken into a very few Vulgate manuscripts.178 Other New Testament citations are not obviously to be accounted for in those ways. The form of the penultimate verse (28.19) of St. Matthew’s Gospel, which is unsurprisingly quoted whenever the conversion of pagans is referred to, is invariably Ite (not Euntes) docete omnes gentes, baptizantes eas in nomine Patris etc. This wording, although with eos for eas, is that with which both Gelasian and Gregorian sacramentaries conclude the consecration-prayer of the Easter Eve

opening one of several pericopes in the early ‘Roman’ and other lectionaries (sanctorale): Klauser, Capitulare Evangeliorum, p. 190, Lenker, Perikopenordnungen, p. 533, and the text-pages referred to in these index-entries. 176 Ep. no. 105 (uniquely in ms. S); Vulg. Quicumque enim fecerit. . . . ipse meus et frater et soror et mater est, the Tours Bibles like some other early witnesses omitting the et after meus. Note that Cassiodorus in his Expositio psalmorum quotes that passage (once) in the form Qui fecerit voluntatem Patris mei qui in caelis est, hic meus pater [sic] et mater et frater: ed. Adriaen, p. 203. For the pericopes Mt 12.38–50 and 46–50, see Klauser, Capitulare Evangeliorum, p. 87, Lenker, Perikopenordnungen, p. 530. 177 Epp. nos 85, 136; Fischer, Evangelien-Text, 3, 85. 178 Ep. no. 18 (p. 52), Chase, Two Letter-Books, II/1, ep. no. 129 (p. 192); for the pericope(s) see Lenker, Perikopenordnungen, p. 312 and Klauser, Capitulare Evangeliorum, p. 190 (cf. p. 187). This is the wording of, e.g., Pope Martin I’s encyclical letter of 649, ed. R. Reidinger, Concilium Lateranense a.649 Celebratum, ACO. ser.2, 1 (Berlin, 1984), p. 415 (dicit dominus . . .); Fischer, Evangelien-Text, 3, 368, records only two witnesses. Note that Vesp.’s text of ep. no. 18 (at fol. 118) has been corrected by Wulfstan to omne regnum in se ipsum divisum desolabitur (duly copied in BL Cotton Faustina B. iv fol. 192a; and printed by Chase, Two Letter-Books, p. 44), which ironically is the precise wording of the Tours Bibles (Vulg. ed., desolatur).

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Benedictio fontis.179 The no-less familiar ‘Inasmuch as you have done it to the least of my brethren, you have done it to me’ (Mt 25.40) is quoted in letters of ca. 797 to both English and Continental recipients (and with distinct manuscript traditions) in the form Quamdiu uni ex his minimis meis fecistis mihi fecistis, and with the omission of his and meis in a later letter: the standard Vulgate version reads . . . uni de his fratribus meis minimis . . .180 A similar example is the quotation of Mt 25.34 in the form Venite benedicti Patris mei, percipite regnum quod vobis paratum est ab origine mundi in letters with quite distinct manuscript traditions and of widely different dates—usually as their conclusion—and at the end of the fullest version of his Commentariorum in epistolam ad Hebraeos; here the Vulgate, including the Tours Bibles, has the words possidete paratum vobis regnum a constitutione mundi.181 In both instances Alcuin’s versions are well-documented liturgical ones: Venite benedicti is the Mass introit for Wednesday in Easter-week; and both texts are Office antiphons for feria II in the first week of Lent.182

179 As epp. nos 110 (p. 158), 111 (p. 160), 113 (p. 164), all of 796. Note that Alcuin and his scribes (contra Jerome) make the pronoun agree in gender as well as number with the antecedent gentes, and continue in epp. nos 111, 113 with (Mt 28.20) docentes eas. . . . The Rheims manuscript BAV Reg. lat. 272 (T *) has ‘corrected’ the texts of all three letters to eos, in which it had been anticipated by H2’s text of no. 113, although there a contemporary corrector restores eas after docentes! Sacr. Gel., I xliv, ed. Wilson, p. 86, ed. Mohlberg, no. 446; Sacr. Grég., ed. Deshusses, 1, no. 374c. Mt 28.16–20 is the almost universal pericope for Friday in Easter Week, although early Northumbria used Mk 16.8–? on that day: see Klauser, Capitulare Evangeliorum, p. 188, Lenker, Perikopenordnungen, p. 219. Mt 28.19,20 seem never to have been used for chant-texts, unlike the corresponding Mc 16.15 which is CAO no. 7028. 180 Ep. nos 74 (to Abbot Rado of St.-Vaast; dated too early by Dümmler) at p. 117, 124 at p. 183 (omitting his); the shorter version in ep. no. 302 of c. 800. Ex his minimis is also the reading of the ‘Irish’ Vulgate text, as represented by the Book of Kells and the Rushworth Gospels. Theodulf ’s Opus Caroli twice has another shortened version, Quamdiu fecistis uni de minimis istis mihi fecistis: ed. Freeman, pp. 379, 410. For two different versions in Gregory I’s letters, see Reg. IX 226 and XII 2 (ed. Norberg, CCSL 140A, pp. 800, 970), the first of these closest to Alcuin’s; for the version in Cassiodorus’s Expositio psalmorum, see ed. Adriaen, pp. 373, 528. 181 The conclusion of epp. nos 117 of 796, 243 (p. 391) of 798–?802, 251 of 801/2, 271 and 282, and of ep. no. 23, where it is abbreviated; in the body of the text of ep. no. 302; but earliest of all in the Epistola Karoli ad Elipandum of 794, MGH Conc. 2/1, 162, for Alcuin’s ‘authorship’ of which see ch. 3 below; Comm. in ep. ad Hebr. fin., in the manuscripts Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibl., 182 (Reichenau, ‘spätestens 846’) and Orléans, Bib. mun. 85 (82), ed. PL 100, col. 1084B. For Venite . . . ab origine mundi as a letter- and sermon-ending before Alcuin, see below. 182 Hesbert, Antiph. Miss., no. 83; CAO nos 4560 (except Quod for Quamdiu and omitting his—as in Gregory’s Reg. IX 226, ed. Norberg, p. 800) and 5350. Additional

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In the more numerous Epistle-citations, Alcuin’s departures from both the standard Vulgate text and known early variants are numerous and striking, and generally consistent in letters written several years apart. An example of the latter is the version, apparently peculiar to him (by conflation or confusion with I Cor 12.24?), of the concluding verse of I Corinthians 14, which lent itself to use in very different contexts: ‘the Apostle said Omnia vestra honesta cum ordine fiant’—although modern editors in two places reject the unanimous testimony of the manuscripts and ‘correct’ to honeste, to bring it closer to the Vulgate’s Omnia autem honeste et secundum ordinem fiant (‘But let everything be done in a proper and orderly fashion’).183 Such, however, is not always the case. In letters on the proper approach to the conversion of the newly-conquered Avars, Alcuin several times draws on the third chapter of St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians ‘as infants in Christ’. Writing to a courtier whom he hopes will influence the king he ‘quotes’ the second verse as Lac vobis dedi potum non solidum cibum (Vulg. escam) and mistakenly connects it with Galatians. A letter to the king, of which a copy was also sent to Salzburg, deploys a much longer quotation dicente apostolo Paulo: a correctly cited first verse is followed by the equally correct lac vobis potum dedi non escam nondum enim poteratis but is then completed by the non-standard sed necdum potestis. In a letter to Arn, however, for which the manuscript testimony is the earliest of any (i.e. the St.-Amand manuscript S) and of which Alcuin’s ‘personal collection’ gives an identical text, he offers the startlingly incorrect version Lac vobis dedi escam [sic] non solidum cibum quia non potuistis accipere sed necdum potestis quia carnales [-is in S ] estis.184 The most reasonable explanation of the citations in the first letter and in that to Arn is that Alcuin had misremembered the passage in question and had failed to check it against a written version in the interval between the composition of the two letters: since, moreover, the mis-quotation is retained in his ‘personal testimonies for both include the Metz Tonary, ed. W. Lipphardt, Der karolingische Tonar von Metz, Liturgiewissenschaftliche Qu. u. Forsch, 43 (Münster-Westfalen, 1965), pp. 43, 45, 139, and the eleventh-century English ‘Portiforium of Saint Wulfstan’ (of Worcester), ed. A. Hughes, 1, HBS 89 (Leighton Buzzard, 1958), p. 28; in the ninth-century Compiègne Antiphonary, CAO no. 5350 is also an antiphon for the Common of Apostles, at Lauds. 183 Epp. nos 19 (where the manuscript D can be added to the witnesses), 110 (honesta in the edition), 209; cf. I Cor 12.24, honesta autem nostra nullius egent. Did Alcuin interpret the substantive as ‘virtuous acts, seemly behaviour’? 184 Epp. nos 111 (p. 160), 110 (p. 157), 113 (p. 165).

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collection’, the substantial correction in the letter addressed to the king must surely be credited to the Tours scribe responsible for the exemplar(s) of the later copies. Again, however, it is unsound to explain all the deviations from the standard Vulgate text, including variants to which there is good testimony elsewhere, in this way. It is to be expected that among the quotations that came so readily to Alcuin’s pen in his later years were reminiscences, not always wholly correct, of the mass-lections (Biblical pericopes) which he had listened to as a boy and young man—only once a year, and not (as with the Psalter) at least once a week. Indeed, some two-thirds of his Epistle quotations come from passages specified (by their opening and closing words only) in the early-Roman lectionary copied by an accomplished English scribe in the mid-eighth century and taken to Würzburg, and a slightly lower proportion from the overlapping collection in the lectionary to which Alcuin’s name was attached in the early-ninth century: although there is no independent evidence that either series was used in England.185 A recalled lectio would satisfactorily account for the apparently anomalous wording of a citation (apostolo dicente) from the Letter to the Galatians (5.21) in 793, Quoniam qui talia agunt regnum Dei non possidebunt (Vulg. consequentur), which unexpectedly recurs in a later (Spanish) lectionary.186 A very different origin is, however, possible. The letter’s possidebunt is anticipated in a longer quotation (Gal 5.19–21) towards the end of the great Frankish capitulary of 789, the non-standard wording of which adds animositates and haereses to its list of ‘sins of the flesh’: their inclusion, in conjunction with possidebunt, is reportedly unique to a version of the apostolica lectio used by Augustine for a sermon outside the main collections, which may therefore be Alcuin’s source-text! Similarly, neither of the passages quoted from I Corinthians is likely to have orginated in a lectionary.187

185 Würzburg Univ.bibl., cod. M.p. th. f. 62 (CLA IX, 1417), fol. 2v–10v, ed. G. Morin, ‘Le plus ancien Comes ou lectionnaire de l’Église romaine’, RevBén 27 (1910), 41–74; Wilmart, ‘Lectionnaire d’Alcuin’, pp. 136–97. 186 Ep. no. 18 (p. 50); Liber Comicus sive Lectionarius Missae (of Toledo), ed. G. Morin, Anecdota Maredsolana, 1 (1893), 370. In ‘Alcuin’s Lectionary’, ed. Wilmart, p. 160, Ga 5.16–24 is the pericope for Ebdomada V post sancti Laurentii (sic); other lectionaries prescribe these verses for different days. 187 The quotation in MGH Capit. I, ed. A. Boretius, p. 61 (c. 82) (for Alcuin’s involvement, see below, Ch. 3); the sermon is Morin 10, Miscellanea Agostiniana: Testi e Studi pubblicati a cura dell’Ordine Eremitano di S. Agostino 1, ed. G. Morin (Rome,

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The possibility has always to be borne in mind that Alcuin was using Patristic writings or Papal letters as part-‘models’ and simply copied the Biblical quotations he found there. In his exegetical and dogmatic works, this is usually evident even without the help of a modern computer concordance: a familiar example is the non-Vulgate version of Genesis 1.26 quoted in the response to an interrogatio on Genesis 47.3, which has been taken over in its entirety from Augustine.188 Several of the OT and NT quotations in Alcuin’s successive writings on confession and penitence, including ones from the Psalter in its Gallican version, seemingly depend on an earlier sermon or sermons.189 Identifying ‘second-hand’ Biblical quotations in his regular correspondence is more problematic unless they are in a distinctive context, and definitive source-attributions are likely to be rare. Thus, when in an early (pre-790) letter Alcuin quotes Matthew 7.12 with the final clause in the form haec eadem et vos facite illis (against the Vulgate’s et vos facite eis), the preceding Dicit enim Veritas suggests a link with the only quotation of that same verse in Pope Gregory’s extant letters, without its being an exact parallel—. . . Veritas dicit ‘Quae vultis ut faciant vobis homines, et vos eadem facite illis’.190 Again, when Alcuin concluded a letter to the monks of Murbach (796) with the ‘liturgical’ version of Matthew 25.34, the immediately preceding clauses ut Dei donante clementia, peccatorum meorum merear accipere veniam ac vobiscum desiderabilem audire vocem link his final salutation here with that of eighth-century papal letters, with a passage in a papal sermon included in the Liber Diurnus and with the concluding perorations of several homilies of the sixth-century Caesarius of Arles which cite it in identical form.191 1930), pp. 624–6, at p. 626. I Cor 3.2, in the more or less standard form lac potum dedi vobis non escam, is in the Toledo Liber Comicus for the local feast of SS Iustus et Pastor (ed. Morin, p. 264): I have not noted it elsewhere; and I have not found I Cor 14.40 in any lectionary. 188 Interrogationes et responsiones in Genesin, resp. 273 (PL 100, cols 557A–B) = Augustine, Quaestiones in Heptateuchum (Gen.) ed. J. Fraipont, CCSL 33 (Turnhout, 1958), p. 59, lines 2013–27. 189 See above. 190 Ep. no. 4; Gregory, Reg. XI, 4 (ed. Norberg, p. 863). Veritas for Christ is, however, common in later letters of Alcuin’s where there is no reason to suppose second-hand quotation. 191 Ep. no. 117 (p. 173); Codex Carolinus nos 8 = 9, MGH Epp. III, pp. 497, 500: gaudia adipisci merearis, audiens nimirum paternam desiderabilem vocem illam inquientis ‘Venite . . .’ (with the words ecclesiam Dei a superna clementia in the previous sentence); Leo III’s letter to the Salzburg suffragans, MGH Epp. V, p. 5, 63: cum his qui a dextris eius

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“De laude Dei” and the York liturgy It would be possible to pursue this inquiry through other Old Testament and New Testament books. It is unlikely that it would make significant changes to the overall picture of the probable and possible sources of Alcuin’s quotations; and it would add only marginally, if at all, to the texts identifiable as having featured in the cathedral’s lectionaries or chants during Alcuin’s boyhood and adolescence.192 More direct and more detailed evidence for aspects of York’s eighth-century liturgy, not necessarily always contemporaneous, is to be found in the Fourth Book of his De laude Dei. This begins with a text of the Gloria in excelsis Deo, unfortunately without any indication of its place in the liturgical order and titled in the Bamberg copy Carmen Augustini; in contrast with the earliest Irish texts but like that included in the ‘Royal’ prayer-book (where the rubric is Hymnus angelicus), its version is essentially the ‘standard’ one, omitting magnificamus te and with the formula-wordings propter magnam gloriam tuam and domine Deus agnus Dei filius patris.193 Next in the De laude is Simbolum, a text of the so-called ‘Nicene’ (but, better, ‘Constantinopolitan’) creed—theologians’ C or NC—with some distinctive variants, which Father Constantinescu supposed linked it with that in the Irish ‘Stowe Missal’, which is no more than partly true.194 victuri sunt, desiderabilem illam vocem Domini audire mereantur, ‘Venite . . .’; Liber Diurnus, ed. Foerster, p. 163 (V no. 85); Caesarius Arel., Sermones, nos 15, 19, etc., ed. Morin, pp. 76, 91, ed. Delage, 1, 450, 492. 192 For Alcuin’s citations from the Wisdom books and their low correlation with the pericopes in the Würzburg and ‘Alcuin’ lectionaries, see below. 193 De laude, Bamb. fol. 148v, Esc. fol. 128v; ‘Royal’ prayer book fol. 28, Kuypers, Book of Cerne, pp. 212–13, where it follows an untitled and ?unique prayer on which ‘Gallican liturgical influence’ has been supposed (Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, pp. 315–6). ‘Cerne’, fols 50–50v, Kuypers, Book of Cerne, pp. 99–100, under the rubric Laus Dei, has only the opening formula, followed by et reliqua. For the textual tradition see B. Capelle, ‘Le texte du Gloria in excelsis’ (1949), Travaux Liturgiques, 2, 176–91. But for the earliest Irish versions (‘Antiphonary of Bangor’ and ‘Stowe Missal’), see further Warren in The Antiphonary of Bangor, pt. ii, ed. F.E. Warren, HBS 10 (London, 1895), pp. 31, 75–80, where also the more-nearly ‘standard’ later Irish texts, on which additionally The Irish ‘Liber Hymnorum’, ed. J.H. Bernard and R. Atkinson, HBS 13 (London, 1898), pp. 50–51, cf. p. xxviii. Liturgical use: for its anomalous place in the Bangor Office, see M. Curran, The Antiphonary of Bangor (Irish Academic Press; Blackrock, 1984), p. 173; for the extension of its use in lateeighth-century Francia to all Sunday and Feast-day Masses, see OR. XV c. 124, ed. Andrieu, Ordines, 3, 121. 194 Bamb. fols 148v–149, Esc. fols 128v–129, ed. Constantinescu, ‘Alcuin et les «libelli precum», p. 37; on which see Bullough, ‘Alcuin, Arn and the Creed in the

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The following and much longer section has the title De antiphonario, an apparently recently-coined term for a collection of the ‘occasional’ chanted parts, not exclusively antiphons, of the liturgy.195 Under this heading Alcuin has transcribed almost one-hundred short texts, beginning with Expectamus te Dominum Deum nostrum et timemus te and concluding with Sancta Maria nos laudamus te gloriosa glorificamus te, corona regni coronata es, intercede pro nobis quia beata es. Many, including the first, have no parallel, or no precise parallel, in later antiphonaries or other liturgical books; but it is apparent that they are arranged roughly in the order of the liturgical year, beginning with Advent. Northumbria when Alcuin was young probably but not certainly observed a sixSunday Advent—still the Gallican practice and seemingly implicit in the ‘Old Gelasian’ sacramentary’s arrangement of Advent masses at the end of Bk. II—or the ‘unhistorical’ one of five Sundays (because of a misunderstanding on the part of the compiler(s) of the ‘Frankish Gelasians’), not the ‘Gregorian’ four-Sunday Advent.196 Mass’ (lecture at the Inst. f. Österr. Geschichtsforsch. Vienna, December 2000; publication forthcoming). The fides catholica that follows the text of the Gloria in the ‘Royal’ prayer-book, Kuypers, Book of Cerne, p. 213, is the opening clauses (only) of the ps.-Hieronymian creed (‘Creed of Damasus’), ed. Hahn, Bibliothek3, pp. 275–6 and (better) A.R. Burn, An Introduction to the Creeds (London, 1899), pp. 245–6; and note that the corresponding entries in CPPM., 2A (nos 626 and 781, cf. 864) and in CPL3 (no. 554) incorrectly report the second clause as et unigenitum Filium eius. 195 The earliest place noted in MLWB. s. v. is from OR. XV, c. 79, Ordines, ed. Andrieu, 3, p. 113, which would appear to carry its history back to the thirdquarter of the eighth century in Francia; but as Andrieu makes clear in his edition, pp. 61, 52–3, 113, this particular section uses a Roman document in which the term does not occur, the words sicut continet antephonarius being unique to the expanded version of (probably) the early-ninth century in Wolfenbüttel cod. Weissenburg 91 (4175), for which a possibly Worms Domstift origin has been suggested (Bischoff, MaSt, 3, 93: definitely not Weissenburg, cf. R. McKitterick, The Frankish Church and the Carolingian Reforms, 789 –895, Royal Historical Society Studies in History (London, 1977), p. 193). That the earliest Roman (Papal) usage was antiphonale is implied by the famous but puzzling letter of Pope Paul I to Pippin, MGH Epp., III, p. 529. The earliest examples of the term adopted by Alcuin are in two texts associated with Egberht of York, although not certainly of his authorship: viz. the Preface of the Paenitentiale Egberti, Haddan & Stubbs, Councils, 3, 417 (compare below, and the Dialogus Egberti interrogatio xvi, Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 411, 412, which I am inclined to regard as a later interpolation in a genuine text (see below); followed probably by the ‘country priest’s book’, Brussels, Bibl. roy. 10127–10144 (CLA X, 1548) at fol. 90, where however the abbreviation ANTFR leaves the precise spelling uncertain. 196 Chavasse, Sacramentaire gélasien, pp. 412–6; B. Moreton, The Eighth-Century Gelasian Sacramentary (Oxford, 1976), p. 96. Possible Northumbrian reflections of the ‘Gallican’ Advent are the forty days’ fasting ante dominicum natale reported by Bede of Cuthbert (ob. 687) and of Egberht (ob. 729): HE IV 30, III 27. The third of the De laude antiphons is Deus auferens iniquitatem et mundans peccata, which is presumably based on

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The great majority of the identifiable texts are from the Liturgy of the Hours (Office), with only a very few apparently taken from mass-chants or mass-prayers. A particularly distinctive sub-group, recorded here for the first time, is that of the ten (in contrast with Amalarius’s eight and a varying number subsequently) ‘Great’ or ‘“O” Antiphons’, which splendidly frame the Magnificat at Vespers during the concluding days of the Advent season; the tenth indeed, beginning O, Joseph, quomodo credidisti quod ante expavisti?, is not to be found in any other collection, but its existence was postulated long ago to account for the distinctive Old-English ‘Advent Lyric 7’.197 These are followed by two formulae, based on verses of Psalm 79 and therefore proper to Advent, which are characterised in Constantinescu’s edition as ‘versets déclinatoires’ after the Great Antiphons. They do not recur in later office-books; and since Alcuin’s Veni et ostende nobis faciem tuam Domine qui sedes super cherubin et salvi erimus (cf. Ps 79.4+2) is precisely the wording of the introit for the December Ember Saturday mass and Excita potentiam tuam et veni (Ps 79.3) is the beginning of one of that same day’s four-fold graduals, these must surely be the De Laude’s source-texts.198 The texts from the Christmas season include a unique responsory, Ex nostra natura passibilis et in sua miraculis choruscabat et refulsit Deus, the language of which reflects the controversy over Monotheletism and its Papal and conciliar condemnation in the previous century: Father Constantinescu speculated that it was among the chant-texts brought from Rome by John, precentor of St. Peter’s, in 679 and subsequently introduced to York cathedral by Bishop Bosa, together with other texts that may already have been obsolescent when Alcuin joined its Is 6.7 auferetur iniquitas tua et peccatum tuam mundabitur; and Is 6.1–10 is the OT reading for Advent Dom. I in the Gallican/N. Italian lectionary in Sélestat, Bibl. de la Ville, cod.1 (1093): Salmon, Lectionnaire de Luxeuil, p. civ. 197 Bullough, ‘Alcuin and the Kingdom of Heaven’, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 165–6, 209–10 (nn. 17, 18—where the manuscript reference should be to Ivrea, Bib. cap., CVI [33]). A more accurate edition than Constantinescu’s (‘“Libelli precum”’, pp. 40–41 [nos 18–27]) is S. Rankin, ‘The liturgical background of the Old English Advent lyrics’, Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Lapidge and Gneuss, pp. 317–40, at p. 340; the musical setting of the seven which ‘appear without exception in any series’ is interestingly discussed by Rankin, pp. 328–32. 198 Constantinescu, ‘ “Libelli precum”’, p. 41 (nos 28, 29); Hesbert, Antiph. Miss., nos 7a, 7b, the earliest examples being in Brussels Bibl. roy. 10127–10144. Excita etc. is also the opening phrase of Advent-season orationes/collects in both the Gelasian and Gregorian sacramentaries. The comments and citations in Constantinescu’s n. 90 (p. 41: ad loc.) are unfortunately confused and inaccurate.

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community.199 Whether or not this is correct, it is certainly possible that Alcuin recalled the response and related texts, as he almost certainly did the Christmas Octave antiphon O admirabile commercium etc., when he began to formulate his criticisms of the Spanish Adoptionists.200 The De laude has the text of one of the ‘Roman’ antiphons for the Epiphany Octave office, identified by musicologists as translations of Greek chants; the claim by the late-ninth-century Notker of St. Gallen, or an interpolator, in his Gesta Karoli that the translations were done at Aachen in ?802 has clearly been given more credit than it deserves.201 Among the texts apparently from the liturgy for the beginning of Lent and for Holy Week which do not figure in later ‘Roman’ antiphonaries or other books is one—perhaps more than one—202 that could be cited as an example of ‘Spanish symptoms’; but it is at least as likely that a local (Insular) origin should be supposed for the respond Convertamur ad Dominum Deum nostrum et effundamus coram illo preces nostras cum lacrimis credo recordabitur et miserebitur nobis, a chanttext with resonances if not precise parallels in Alcuin’s carmina.203 199 Constantinescu, ‘ “Libelli precum”’, p. 42 (no. 32): with which compare passibilem carne et impassibilem deitate in the 649 Roman council’s statement of orthodoxy (ACO. II/1: Concilium Lateranense a. 649 celebratum, ed. R. Riedinger [Berlin, 1984], p. 371)—in fact a quotation from Gregory of Nazianzus’s epist. no. 101 (Ad Cledonium), apparently in the version previously used for the Latin Acta conc. Ephesi; and quorum unum coruscat miraculis, aliud succumbit iniuriis towards the end of the 680 Roman council’s creed sent to Constantinople (ACO. II/2.i: Concilium Universale Constantinopolitanum tertium . . . actiones I–XI, ed. R. Riedinger [Berlin, 1990], p. 131). Constantinescu’s speculations are ‘ “Libelli precum”’, pp. 52–5, the part credited to Bosa based on ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, lines 857 (cultum decoravit), 859–64. There is nothing on this in H. Chadwick, ‘Theodore, the English church and the monothelete controversy’, Archbishop Theodore, ed. M. Lapidge (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 88–95 (cf. M. Brett, ibid., 128–9). 200 Constantinescu, ‘“Libelli precum”’, p. 43 (no. 40) and n. 99, where a reference to M. Herz, Sacrum Commercium, Münchener Theol. Studien, II 15 (Munich, 1958), pp. 24 ff. should be added. When Alcuin quoted Gregory of Nazianzus’s letter Ad Cledonium in his Liber Alcuini contra Haeresim Felicis (ed. Blumenshine, p. 66), however, he did so directly from his copy of the Latin Acta conc. Ephesi. 201 Constantinescu, ‘ “Libelli precum”, p. 46 (no. 46), and the bibliographical references ibid., n. 104; with which compare Bullough, ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 164–5, 209 (n. 14) (overlooked by D. Hiley, Western Plainchant: a Handbook (Oxford, 1993), p. 530). 202 Constantinescu, ‘ “Libelli precum”’, nos 52–65. A possible second is the initial citation of Benedicite Deum coeli etc. from Tb 12.6: Constantinescu, ‘“Libelli precum”’, p. 45 n. 107. 203 Compare, for example, Le Liber Mozarabicus Sacramentorum, ed. M. Férotin, Mon. Ecclesiae Liturgica 6 (Paris, 1912), c. 438 (no. 948): tibi preces lacrymabili corde effundamus, tua promissa confidentes speremus; c. 38 (no. 74): . . . Domine, lacrymosas fundimus preces, ut suo intercessu a te, Deus, . . . quos iubes clementes in bonis actibus efficis; Le Liber Ordinum, ed. M. Férotin, Mon. Eccl. Liturg. 5 (Paris, 1904), p. 335: Deum qui contritorum non

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Custodi me Domine de manu peccatoris (from Ps 139.5), on the other hand, is a standard Mass offertory-chant for Tuesday in Holy Week.204 A major sub-group in the De laude extracts is that of the ten antiphons for the three ‘Rogation days’ preceding Ascension Day, the Ieiunium triduanum of other texts: an ancient Gallican ritual which was well-established in both northern and southern England (secundum morem priorum nostrorum) before the mid-eighth century, but only adopted in Rome ca. 800. The fourth in the series, inc. Deprecamur te, Domine, calls on the Lord to ‘take away your rage and your anger from this city and from your Holy House’.205 The general form and spirit, although not of course the details, of popular participation in the processions and chanting of litanies may be gathered from the earlyninth-century description by Angilbert—‘once a son, now a father’ commented Alcuin in 790—of the corresponding ceremonies at St.Riquier. This was among the occasions on which at Metz the cantores who led the chanting were rewarded in coin, and conceivably similarly at York.206 The De laude’s Ascension Day (I Vespers) antiphon is the one that Bede is recorded as reciting on his death-bed.207 spernit affectum, lacrimosis precibus . . . postulemus. But for criticism of Edmund Bishop’s ‘evidence’ of ‘Spanish symptoms’ in English liturgical and private prayer (in Kuypers, Book of Cerne, pp. 276–80, 282–3; and Liturgica Historica (Oxford, 1918), pp. 165–210) see, most recently, P. Sims-Williams, ‘Thoughts on Ephrem the Syrian in AngloSaxon England’, Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Lapidge and Gneuss, pp. 205–26, at 216–20. For penitential tears and weeping for the sins of others in early Insular texts, see the forthcoming work announced at the end of T. O’Loughlin and H. Conrad-O’Briain, ‘The ‘baptism of tears’ in early Anglo-Saxon sources’, ASE 22 (1993), 65–83. Comparable passages in the carmina are: ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, lines 1359–60: cum lacrimis Domino pro culpa supplicat illa/nec prius ille preces desistit fundere sacras; and MGH Poet. I, p. 306 (no. lxxxviii/7): Purgatus lacrimis humili de corde profusis . . ./Credo, pius Iesus culpas ignoscit et illi/ . . . laetior ut redeat. 204 Hesbert, Antiph. Miss., no. 75 (all testimonies except ‘Monza’). Constantinescu’s implied identification with an office text (‘“Libelli precum”’, p. 46 n. 114) is erroneous. 205 Constantinescu, ‘ “Libelli precum” ’, pp. 47–8 (nos 66–76), with Bullough, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 165, 209 (n. 15); Cuthbert’s Epist. de obitu Bedae, ed. Colgrave and Mynors (in Bede: Ecclesiastical History . . .), p. 584; Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, p. 368 (c. 16). Compare Amalarius, Lib.Off. I, 37, Opera omnia, ed. Hanssens, 2, 178–81; and Liber Pontificalis ed. Duchesne, 2, p. 12. As Constaninescu notes, the De laude series and text-forms do not correspond precisely with the testimonies of ninth-century and later antiphonalia; and no. 69 (based on Dn 3.42,43) seems peculiar to it. 206 St.-Riquier: Institutio Angilberti Centulensis, c. ix, ed. M. Wegener, H. Frank, CCCM, 1, 296–9, where Exclamemus omnes ad Dominum (Constantinescu, no. 68) is likewise quoted as the second antiphon; Alcuin’s ep. no. 9. Metz, York: texts cited in n. 127. See also Bullough, ‘The Carolingian liturgical experience’, Continuity and Change in Christian Worship, ed. R.N. Swanson, SCH 35 (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 29–64, at pp. 54–5. 207 Constantinescu, ‘ “Libelli precum”’, p. 48 (no. 77); CAO no. 4079. The text

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Exceptionally, the second of two texts associated with the season of Pentecost, namely Sancti Spiritus corda nostra mundet infusio et sui roris intima aspersione fecundet, is one that occurs in early sacramentaries— the two copies of the Papal ‘Gregorian’ and the ‘Frankish Gelasians’— as the Saturday and Sunday ad complendum prayer; a variant is in the ‘Old (or ‘Vatican’) Gelasian’ among the oraciones ad vesperos ‘within the octave of Pentecost’.208 The first of the pair is no less anomalous in an antiphonary, reading Deus patrum nostrorum, da nobis spiritum gratiae qui flammam tuae caritatis diffundis in cordibus nostris. Concordances and lexica are agreed that in liturgical prayers flamma tuae caritatis occurs only in the collect of a priest’s ordination mass in the Hadrianum Gregorian sacramentary and its derivatives—the language of which is unmistakeably echoed in a letter from Alcuin to a ?Northumbrian priest-abbot.209 Similarly, Deus patrum nostrorum, however common in later centuries, is recorded in the early Middle Ages only as the opening words of the baptismal ceremonies’ ‘Benediction after the giving of salt’ in the ‘Old Gelasian’ and ‘Frankish Gelasian’ sacramentaries, and thence in the ‘Aniane Supplement’ and in subsequent sacramentaries and missals.210 Could the De laude’s prayer, excepof the De obitu Bedae, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 582, has O rex gloriose, instead of O rex glorie; but this is either a misprint or the unique reading of the Hague Royal Library 70 H.7 (cf. the apparently unanimous testimony for glorie in E. van Kirk Dobbie, The Manuscripts of Caedmon’s Hymn and Bede’s Death-Song [New York, 1937] pp. 120, 121) and should not have been printed. My comment in Carolingian Renewal, p. 162 with n. 5 (p. 208), is accordingly superfluous. 208 Constantinescu, ‘ “Libelli precum”’, p. 49 (no. 79); Sacr. Grég. ed. Deshusses, 1, nos 525, 531 (Hadrianum; = Paduense no. 465); Sacr. Gellon., ed. Dumas and Deshusses, no. 1033, etc. Compare Sacr. Gelas. I lxxxi (5), ed. Wilson p. 124, ed. Mohlberg no. 650: Sancti spiritus Domine corda nostra mundit <sic> infusio et sui roris ubertate fecundet. 209 Constantinescu, ‘ “Libelli precum” ’, p. 48 (no. 78). Compare Sacr. Grég., ed. Deshusses, 1, no. 828; Sacr. Echternach, ed. Hen, no. 1853; Sacr. Gellon., ed. Dumas and Deshusses, no. 2487; and the English ‘Egberht Pontifical’ of c. 1000, ed. H.M.J. Banting, Two Anglo-Saxon Pontificals, HBS 104 (Woodbridge-London, 1989), p. 30. In the late-tenth-century ‘Fulda Sacramentary’, Göttingen, Univ. Bibl. cod. theol. 231, ed. G. Richter, A. Schönfelder (1912), re-issued as HBS 101 (Farnborough, 1980), pp. 241–2, the same mass-set (nos 2120–24) is In ordinatione episcopi. The first half of the ordination collect, Deus qui digne tibi servientium nos imitari desideras famulatum, da nobis caritatis tuae flamma ardere succensi . . ., is to be compared with Stabilem [esse] in servitio Dei ubi electus es in servitium Christi; . . . paenitentiae fonte extingui quatenus qui in flamma libidinis exarsit, in flamma caritatis et munditiae luceat in conspectu Dei in ep. no. 283 (p. 442); also with the elaborate opening metaphor of a letter to Paulinus of Aquileia, ep. no. 139 (p. 220). 210 Sacr. Gelas., I xxxii, ed. Wilson, p. 47, ed. Mohlberg, no. 290; Sacr. Gellon., ed. Dumas and Deshusses, no. 401; Sacr. Grég. ed. Deshusses, 1, no. 1070; Sacr. Echternach, ed. Hen, no. 622. Exceptionally, it is also a variant of the otherwise standard Deus patrum vestrorum in one of the antiphons for the litaniae maiores in the Corbie book BNF. lat. 12050 (mid-ninth century, not s. ix/x), Hesbert, Antiph. Miss., no. 201a.

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tionally, be Alcuin’s own confection from different texts used in his time at York in (presumably) the Pentecost season? The fourteen passages with which the De antiphonario concludes are, if nothing else, evidence of a well-nourished cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary at York in the later-eighth century. They pose a number of problems which are, for the moment, unresolved: their texts are almost entirely without parallel in other antiphonaries and several of them are distinctive in other ways also; and the relationship between them and current liturgical practice at York or anywhere else is very obscure.211 Leaders of the Northumbrian church in Alcuin’s younger days claimed that its antiphonaries were similar to those in use in Rome—which, however, many modern scholars identify (from the context and in the light of a decree of the 747 council of Clofesho) as mass-chant books.212 Father Constantinescu (as previously remarked) supposed that, because so many of the office-chants extracted by Alcuin in his De antiphonario are not to be found in later antiphonaries of ‘Roman’ use, he was copying from a book that was already obsolete. In the 830s, however, Amalarius of Metz was still complaining about the discrepancies in the antiphonaries he had examined and the lack of a standard version even in Rome. The inclusion in the De laude of texts that seem to be of quite recent origin, of ones that featured in contemporary non-Roman liturgies (and especially in Frankish Gaul), and of others that were apparently current in England in later centuries suggests that on the contrary their eclectic character reflects Alcuin’s experience of the liturgy in the first two-thirds of his life.213 The highly selective nature of the extracts makes it impossible to determine whether the eighth-century York ‘antiphoner’, like its counterpart in ‘Mozarabic’ Spain, or at Milan and other Italian cathedrals, and for a time apparently at Rome itself, included the chanted parts of both Mass and Divine Hours; but it seems very likely. 211 Constantinescu, ‘“Libelli precum”’, pp. 49–51; Bullough, ‘Alcuin and the Kingdom of Heaven’, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 166, 210 (nn. 19–21); Mary Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 2 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 38–40. For the Marian feasts in Northumbria, see below, pp. 216–17 and Additional Note II. 212 Dialogus Egberti, the response to Interrogatio xvi. de ieiunio quatuor temporum, Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 412, cf. 411: In suo [sc. Gregorii ] antiphonario et missali libro); 747 acta c. 13, idem, 367; Hiley, Western Plainchant, pp. 297, 507; Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, pp. 144–5, 150–51. For the possibility that Int. xvi is an early addition to the original text of the Dialogus, see above. 213 Constantinescu, ‘Libelli precum”’, p. 55; Amalarius, Opera omnia, ed. Hanssens, 1, 361, and 3, 14, 108, etc. There is, of course, no comparative material from other English churches.

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The contribution of hymns (other than canticles and the Gloria) to Alcuin’s early formation, and by extension their place in the liturgy of the cathedral community to which he then belonged, is only dimly discernible in his writings; and the evidence raises wider problems to which at the moment there is no convincing solution. The mature Alcuin was, unsurprisingly, familiar with Isidore’s dictum (anticipated by Augustine in his reflections on the Psalms) that properly speaking a hymn was a text sung in praise of God.214 Only in one of his letters is there an explicit quotation of a liturgical hymn. Not long after his establishment at Tours, Alcuin replied to questions from the Court about some points of grammar and linguistics, beginning with the gender of rubus ‘bush’ (originally ‘bramble-bush’ but already widely used in fourth-century Ecclesiastical Latin of the ‘burning bush’ in Exodus 3).215 The second of his two supporting quotations, introduced by the words Ambrosius in hymno paschali, is one of four lines beginning Et flamma famulum provocans/Rubum non perdas spineam. Dümmler noted that he had been unable to find it in Ambrose’s writings—correctly. It is the fifth stanza of a hymn which figures in the late-seventh century ‘Antiphonary of Bangor’, with the rubric Ymnum quando caeria benedicitur, and on the concluding (unnumbered) folios of a Bobbio book of c. 900; its origin in Ireland as well as its liturgical use there may be regarded as certain, although its date and precise place of composition are probably indeterminable. The form of Alcuin’s citation makes it likely that it was also part of the Easter Night liturgy in eighth-century York, although if so a distinctive one, at a time when the Exultet was presumably unknown there: nowhere in the Latin West subsequently is there evidence for the singing of any hymn at this point in the ceremonies.216 Alcuin’s 214 Ep. no. 308 (p. 472)—a letter prompted by a query from the Emperor Charles— quoting Etym. VI. xix, 17; cf. Augustine, Enarr. in Ps 72.1, ed. E. Dekkers and J. Fraipont, CCSL 39 (Turnhout, 1956), p. 986. 215 Ep. no. 162 (p. 260). For the first quotation, see below, ch. 2 at n. 80; for fourth/fifth-century usage of rubus, see A.S. Walpole, Early Latin Hymns (Cambridge, 1922), p. 347 (notes); Vg. Ex 3.2–4 (but in Lc 6.44 it has its classical-Latin meaning). 216 Inc. Ignis creator igneus, S.-K. no. 7686: ‘Antiphonary of Bangor’, Milan, Bibl. Ambrosiana C. 5 inf., fol. 11; Turin Bibl. Naz. Univ. G. v. 38, with the rubric Ymnus in sabato sancto ad cereum benedicere: edited from the first-named only, by F.E. Warren, in Antiphonary of Bangor, pt. ii, ed. Warren, p. 11 and subsequently by

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familiarity while still at York with other hymns of probable Irish origin and subsequently limited circulation is, indeed, suggested by textual links between the earliest English prayer-books and the Tours libellus precum now at Troyes of which he was at least part-‘author’. Both in the last-named and in the ‘Book of Cerne’, the comparatively widely-disseminated prayer (with variations) inc. Mane cum surrexero intende ad me, credited to St. Jerome—of which someone in Alcuin’s immediate circle made a rythmical version—is linked with the hymn inc. Ambulemus in prosperis/ huius diei luminis/ in virtute altissimi/ Dei deorum maximi; and the latter is also to be found, titled Oratio matutina but separated from the prayer, in the Mercian ‘Royal’ collection.217 The most substantial body of evidence is, however, the section De hymnis in the final book of the De laude Dei. Here Alcuin has excerpted thirty-eight or thirty-nine stanzas, excluding doxologies and two strophes of the Te Deum, from (probably) nineteen different hymns or hymn-like verse compositions, fifteen of them metrical, four (or three?) rhythmical.218 A sequence of eight of the metrical hymns in De laude can be shown, from evidently trustworthy statements in the sixteenth-century Georg Cassander’s Hymni Ecclesiastici, G. Mercati in Studi e Testi, 12 (1906), 25–8; edited from both manuscripts by Walpole, Early Latin Hymns, pp. 346–9. (I have adopted the late Ludwig Bieler’s date for Turin G. v. 38: descriptions of the manuscript—which I have not seen—leave me uncertain whether the concluding leaves are contemporary with the preceding 130 folios.) Composition at Bobbio is proposed by Curran, Antiphonary of Bangor, pp. 59–64, without any very strong arguments. Drawing on an enormous manuscriptbase down to the sixteenth century, R. Amiet, La Veillée Pascale dans l’Eglise Latine. 1: Le rite romain, Liturgie: Collection de recherche, dir. P. de Clerck (Paris, 1999), pp. 184–8, 194–226, describes the several forms of the blessing and lighting of the Paschal candle; there is no reference to Ignis creator igneus or any other hymn— except, of course, the Exultet. 217 Wilmart, Precum libelli, pp. 10–11 (where the hymn, S.-K. no. 708, is printed as prose); Kuypers, Book of Cerne, pp. 89–92 (nos 6, 7: Oratio matutinalis); ibid. pp. 211, 209–10. The most interesting variation between the two English versions is the addition of the words in doctorum prudentia in ‘Royal’. For the probable Irish origin of the hymn see P.L. Sims-Williams, ‘Thought, Word and Deed: an Irish Triad’, Ériu 29 (1978), 78–111, at 101 and idem, Religion and Literature, pp. 284–5, noting the related evening hymn ‘in the same metre but [with] singular verbs’ inc. In pace Christi dormiam (S.-K. no. 7891) in the Harleian prayer-book. 218 De Laude, Bamb. fols 150v–151v, Esc. fols 133v–135. Constantinescu asserts mistakenly (‘ “Libellus precum”’, p. 55) that the De laude’s ‘fragments de l’Hymnarium novum [sic] sont assez connus et nous jugeons inutile d’en détailler le contenu’. The full texts of the rhythmical hymns are ed. K. Strecker, MGH Poet. IV/i, pp. 453 (mutilated; not in S.-K.), 491–5, 507–10, 512–14 (S.-K. nos 946, 945, 588). They are usually dated to the seventh century, although pre-600 is not excluded; in what kind of manuscript-context they reached Alcuin is anyone’s guess.

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to have been compositions of Bede, originally a part (a major part?) of his lost Liber Hymnorum. Seven of them, and a further three known only from their sixteenth-century printed edition, are Office hymns for major feasts, from Holy Innocents to St. Andrew.219 Of the nonBedan hymns, only two figure in the ‘Old Hymnary’ as re-defined and tabulated by Helmut Gneuss, drawing on a wide range of Continental and English evidence including two Canterbury manuscripts (one lost since the fifteenth century): these are, respectively, the Ambrosian Christmas hymn inc. Intende qui regis Israel, represented here by its second, fifth and sixth stanzas; and that for Common of Martyrs inc. Aeterna Christi munera, also by Ambrose or by someone very close to him, represented by its first, seventh and eighth stanzas. There are, however, reasonable grounds for thinking that the Sedulian hymn inc. A solis ortus cardine, from which Alcuin quotes the fourth stanza (Domus pudici pectoris/ . . . / Verbo creavit filium), should be added to those used liturgically in eighth-century Northumbria.220 Of Bede’s hymnody, only the Ascension Day Vespers hymn inc. Hymnos canamus gloriae—reduced to eight stanzas, one of them not Bede’s, plus (probably) a doxology; the opening word changed to Hymnum—established itself in the ninth-century ‘New Hymnary’; but two others, the abcedarian inc. Apostolorum gloriam and inc. Praecursor altus[-ti] luminis, of which Alcuin copies respectively three and two stanzas, are ones for the Feasts of Peter and Paul and of the Nativity of John the Baptist in a small number of Continental hymnaries.221

219 M. Lapidge, Bede the Poet ( Jarrow Lecture, 1993, pp. 5–12); for Cassander and his immediate source, see ibid., pp. 7–8. The hymns attributable to Bede, together with others for which his authorship is wrongly claimed, were edited by J. Fraipont, under the misleading title Opera Rhythmica, in Bedae Opera, CCSL 122 pars iii/iv (Turnhout, 1955), pp. 407–38. This very defective edition has to be used in conjunction with W. Bulst’s critical review, ‘Bedae Opera Rhythmica?’, Zeitschr. f. deutsches Altertum 89 (1959), 83–91, repr. in Bulst, Lateinisches Mittelalter (Heidelberg, 1984), pp. 67–75, and Lapidge, Bede the Poet, cit. The eighth hymn De opere sex dierum primordialium (Fraipont no. I; S.-K. no. 12514) from which Alcuin quotes stanzas 19, 20, 28 in De laude, although didactic rather than liturgical, was similarly included in the manuscript that was Cassander’s source. 220 H. Gneuss, Hymnar und Hymnen im Englischen Mittelalter (Tübingen, 1968), pp. 10–40; compare, for A solis ortus, Bullough (and Harting-Correa), ‘Texts, Chant . . .’, in: Carolingian Renewal p. 262 n. 22. Other stanzas of Sedulius’s hymn or carmen (ed. Huemer, CSEL 10 (1885), pp. 163–8) are included in the subsequent verse-section of the De laude. For the two Ambrosian hymns see now Ambroise de Milan: Hymnes ed. Fontaine et al., pp. 263–301, 583–621, the texts at pp. 273–5 and 597–9. 221 Hymnos canamus gloriae: ed. Fraipont, no. VI (pp. 419–23), also Analecta Hymnica

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Hymns were not only sung in the liturgy of the Hours: they had a place in private devotion, and a place also in teaching, as Bede’s own De arte metrica demonstrates.222 Several features of the extracts in the De laude, however, argue strongly that Alcuin had originally copied them from a book, or perhaps from libelli, intended for liturgical use. The first is their context, immediately after the long section De antiphonario; the second is their copying in a sequence which reflects the annual festal calendar. The clearly non-Bedan inc. Laetare, caelum, desuper, of which Alcuin gives only the first stanza, subsequently figures as an Easter hymn in two central-Italian collections which diverge in other ways from the standard pattern of the ‘New Hymnary’.223 To these indications may be added, firstly, the citation of lines 20 and 21 of the Te Deum (line 21 in an unusual form which is most closely paralleled by the text in BL Harl. 7653); secondly, and much more telling, the inclusion of doxologies after the third and last of the stanzas taken from Intende qui regis Israel, al. Veni redemptor gentium, and after the unidentified sentence which immediately follows the Te Deum quotations. The further inference from the extracts must be that Alcuin’s community, albeit ‘canonical’ rather than ‘monastic’, sang a liturgy which included office-hymns; and did so from a repertory differing significantly from that of the ‘Old Hymnary’

50, pp. 103–4 (no. 82); Gneuss, Hymnar u. Hymnen, p. 64 (no. 73). For the doxology, see J. Szövérffy, ‘Hymnologische Streifzüge’, Literatur u. Sprache im Europäischen Mittelalter: Festschr. f. Karl Langosch ed. A. Önnefors et al. (Darmstadt, 1973), pp. 12–38, here pp. 13–14. Apostolorum gloriam and Praecursor altus: ed. Fraipont, nos IX (pp. 428–30) and VIII (pp. 426–7). Both are in the mid-ninth-century Prüm hymnary, Trier Stadtbibl. cod. 1245 (1418), and in the Moissac (originally St.-Martin de Montauriol) hymnary of ca. 1000 (regularly cited as Graz, Universitätsbibl. 807, but that is certainly a different book), Apostolorum gloriam also in the St.-Bertin book (s. ix, ca. 3/4: Bischoff, Katalog, 1, no. 726), Brussels, Bibl. roy. 8860–67. 222 Devotion: above, p. 201 and n. 217, and of course De laude itself; also in the ?south-Yorkshire community which is the subject of Æthelwulf, De Abbatibus, ed. Campbell, p. 45, lines 553–4, 560–1 (of Abbot Wulfsig) and p. 45, lines 659–61. Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, p. 164, interprets these last to mean that the monks sang hymns in the privacy of their cells before they came to the church for the night office, which is at least unexpected and categorically non-Benedictine (compare Reg. Ben. cc. 9, 11, and ‘Old Hymnal’, Gneuss, Hymnar, p. 24 [nos 1–5]). Teaching: De arte metrica, ed. C.B. Kendall, CCSL 123A (Turnhout, 1975), pp. 81–141, passim; Gneuss, Hymnar, pp. 35–6. 223 Ed. Fraipont, no. V (pp. 417–8); for its authorship, see Bulst, ‘Bedae Opera Rhythmica?’, pp. 88–9 (72–3). The Umbro-Roman hymnaries are Paris, BNF. lat. 1092 and Vatican BAV, Vat. lat. 7172, on which see Bullough, Carolingian Renewal, p. 266 (n. 45) and the references there.

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witnessed at both Canterbury and Wearmouth-Jarrow earlier in the century, but presumably closer to that of the northern monasteries post-Bede.

Mass-books Inevitably, the excerpts in the De laude throw almost no light on the type or types of mass-book or sacramentary with which Alcuin was familiar in his years at York; and quotations from or even clear echoes of mass-prayers in his letters are remarkably rare. His one reference to the cathedral’s liturgical books is descriptively specific, but in terms that are not easily equated with pre-800 manuscript examples: ‘do you really not have an abundance of libellos sacratorios laying down the Roman forms? you certainly have plenty of the larger sacramentaries of the old usage (veteris consuetudinis sacramentaria maiora)’ is his response to Archbishop Eanbald II’s request in 800/801 for guidance ‘on the form and arrangement of the [al. a] missalis libelli ’.224 The claim is still made, with or without the ostensible support of two passages in the ‘Dialogue of Archbishop Egberht’ referring to ‘Pope Gregory’s mass book’, that the sacramentary regularly used in eighth-century York and other Northumbrian churches was a preHadrianum Gregorian-type one.225 Scholars who hold this view, however, are surely required to explain why the direct evidence, now not inconsiderable, and the weightiest indirect evidence both point in a 224 Ep. no. 226 (only in the H manuscripts). Most modern commentators have assumed, without attempting to parse the text, that one or other of the terms was a reference to some sort of ‘unsupplemented Gregorian’; Ellard, Master Alcuin, pp. 132–3, follows a remarkable sequence of assumptions with the conclusion that they were books (unspecified) from which Alcuin had been drawing material for the Supplement for many years past! For consuetudo = (liturgical) usage, compare ep. no. 139 (p. 221 l.19); DMLBS p. 460, s. v. (secs. 1 and 2), does not offer any examples. The alternation between (liber) missalis and sacramentarium etc. in an identical sense is perfectly normal at this period: compare, for example, MGH, Capitula Episcoporum I, ed. Brommer, p. 39 (Ghaerbald of Liège) with ibid., p. 211 (Haito of Basel). 225 Given a new twist by suggestions that the pre-Hadrianum (or perhaps true Hadrianum) text is that preserved in the early-ninth-century ‘Sacramentary of Trento’, an earlier copy of which Alcuin almost certainly knew by 793/4: see below, ch. 3. For the supposed Gregorian al. Roman origin of York’s missalis (liber) see the Dialogus, Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 411 and 412: latterly dismissed, with a plausible explanation, by A. Chavasse, La Liturgie de la ville de Rome du V e au VIII e siècle, Studia Anselmiana/Analecta Liturgica 18 (Pontificio Ateneo S. Anselmo, Rome, 1993), pp. 265–6.

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contrary direction.226 The case for believing that the unique probably-Chelles-written copy (ca. 750) of the Liber sacramentorum Romanae aeclesiae ordinis anni circuli (BAV Reg. lat. 316 + Paris BNF lat. 7193, fols 41–56), the so-called ‘(Old) Gelasian Sacramentary’, is substantially a text-version that had come to Francia via England has recently been strengthened, although the precise chronology and stages of its transmission are unresolved.227 The direct evidence, in the form of sacramentary fragments attributable to England on paleographical grounds or of contemporary quotation, allows for the use there of more than one variety of ‘Gelasian sacramentary’, plus—if this was not indeed one of them—a sacramentary of Campanian (Capuan) use, which would have provided English churches with, for example, mass-sets for saints Magnus, Rufus and Priscus (at 1 September).228 A bifolium from a one-time Werden book, probably written in Northumbria before the middle of the century, has incomplete masssets for the month of February: the combination of Temporal and Sanctoral apart, the text-form is closer to that of the Vatican ‘(Old) Gelasian’ than to any other mass-book, but with some noteworthy 226 So already Bullough, Carolingian Renewal, Ch. 5 pp. 168, 211–12 (n. 27), with references not repeated here. But see also Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, pp. 137–8; and the following notes 226–229. 227 Eds. as Bibliography; Y. Hen, ‘The liturgy of St Willibrord’, ASE 26 (1997), 41–62; also Hen’s edition of The Sacramentary of Echternach (Paris BNF. lat. 9433), HBS 110 (Woodbridge, 1997) and my review in JournEcclHist, 50 (1999), 775–6. Hen’s suggestion (‘Liturgy’, pp. 51–2) that the hypothesised earlier—English—version of the ‘Old Gelasian’ was taken to Francia by Bishop Angilbert ca. 660 seems immediately contradicted by the presence in Reg. lat. 316 of masses for central-Italian (Capuan) saints, which were one of Hohler’s original reasons for supposing assemblage in England, cf. Hen, ‘Liturgy’, p. 50. Hen supposes that the distinctive threebook structure is a specifically English innovation. But its recurrence later in a small number of English or English-related sacramentaries/missals hardly proves this, and other explanations are possible; and the pre-ca. 750 Münster fragment (below) has a single sequence for Temporal and Sanctoral. Earlier scholarly debate about the pre-history and text-form of the ‘Vatican Gelasian’ is conveniently summarised (without reference to England!) by C. Vogel, Medieval Liturgy, tr. and rev. by Storey and Rasmussen (1986), pp. 64–70, 113–17 (notes). 228 The earliest texts of all three are in the ‘Vatican Gelasian’ sacramentary; the mass-sets for, e.g., S. Quintus on 5 September and S. Lupulus on 15 October are lost. The most recent accounts of the Capuan/Campanian presence in early English (or English-related) liturgical and other texts are M. Lapidge in B. Bischoff and M. Lapidge, Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 10 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 160–7 and C. Hohler, ‘Theodore and the Liturgy’, Archbishop Theodore, ed. M. Lapidge, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 11 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 222–35, esp. pp. 226–8. Neither takes account of the evidence of the calendar in Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Phillips 1869 and others related to it (for which see below, p. 207 and n. 234).

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divergences.229 Fragments of a sacramentary now divided between Berlin and Regensburg, improperly connected with St. Boniface but almost certainly also written in Northumbria, give texts of Christmasseason and Lenten prayers that are in the ‘Old Gelasian’ in association with others that are not but are equally non-‘Gregorian’, while its incomplete calendar ( July to October only) is remarkable for the number of its entries of Capuan (al. Campanian) saints.230 Although there are close similarities in the texts, the disposition of the orationes matutinae et vespertinae in the (southern English) London BL, Add. 37518 (fols 116–117) is not that of Reg. lat. 316.231 Any of these now-fragmentary books could have been examples of Alcuin’s ‘larger sacramentaries of the old rite’: at the date of his letter he would have been well aware of the deficiencies of the ‘Gregorian’ sacramentary or sacramentaries sent by the Pope to the Frankish Court. In the latter part of the century copies of one or more of the several versions of the ‘Eighth-century’ or ‘Frankish Gelasian’ sacramentary may have reached England; but convincing evidence seems to be lacking.232 The saints in the Berlin-Regensburg calendar, together with others commemorated in June, figure in the ‘Old English Martyrology’ with a reference to their inclusion in ‘the old sacramentary al. massbook’.233 All, again, are entered in either or both of the ‘Calendar (ante 728) of Willibrord’, mostly as early additions, and the Echternach ‘Martyrologium Hieronymianum’ (Paris BNF, lat. 10837, fols 1–33). Several, including Priscus (of Capua) at 1 June, entered in Willibrord’s Calendar by the so-called ‘second main hand’, as well as at 1 229 K. Gamber et al., Codices liturgici latini antiquiores. Supplementum, Spicilegium Friburgensis Subsidia 1A (Fribourg, 1988), p. 50 (no. 235); + B. Bischoff, V. Brown and J.J. John, ‘Addenda to Codices Latini Antiquiores (II)’ (Mediaeval Studies 53 [1991], p. 298), no. 1880; 799. Kunst und Kultur der Karolingerzeit, Katalog Bd. 2, pp. 485–7 (VII. 39: Eckhard Freise), with colour plate. 230 CLA VIII, 1052 (where it is remarked that the script ‘recall[s] the Durham Cassiodorus’) + B. Bischoff and V. Brown, ‘Addenda to Codices Latini Antiquiores’ (Mediaeval Studies 47 [1985]), **VIII.1052 (p. 357); compare Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen 2, 235 The mass-prayers were edited by P. Siffrin in 1930, the calendar in 1933; both were re-edited by him in Missale Francorum ed. L.C. Mohlberg, L. Eizenhöfer and P. Siffrin, Rerum Ecclesiasticarum Documenta 2 (Rome, 1957), pp. 71–9 (prayers), 79–83 (calendar). The canon missae in the newly-discovered fragment is ed. K. Gamber, ‘Das Regensburger Fragment eines Bonifatius-Sakramentars. Ein neuer Zeuge des vorgregorianischen Messkanons’, RevBén 85 (1975), 266–302. 231 CLA II, 176; CPL3 no. 1900b. 232 See, however, above. 233 Ed. G. Kotzor, Das altenglische Martyrologium, Bayerische Akad. d. Wiss, ph.hist. Kl., Abh. n.s. 88, 2 vols (1981).

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September, Quintus (as Quintinus) and Sinotus, figure in the eighthcentury Northumbrian core of a distinctive group of calendars, in which hagiological entries are mingled with ‘Plinian’ astronomical and other inherited Antique material; the fullest version for the ten months that are preserved is in a mid-ninth-century computisticastronomical codex from the ?lower-Rhine region; one for the whole calendar year in a similar mid-ninth-century Prüm manuscript is notably less full, although with strangely-neglected specifically York items. They can be used as evidence for the sanctorale of Northumbrian churches only in the light of other evidence.234 Bede’s writings contain only a very few recognisable quotations from the mass-liturgy or references to its form and content; those few, however, establish that Wearmouth-Jarrow was using a Gelasiantype book, although also raising the possibility that he was familiar with some ‘Gregorian’ prayers. Commenting on Mark’s and Matthew’s account of the beheading of John the Baptist and of the miracle of the loaves which follows it in both Gospels, Bede observes: et propterea . . . in libro sacramentorum ‘Natale’ eius quarto Kalendarum Septembrium denotatum est; the ‘Old Gelasian’ sacramentary has indeed a mass-set for John’s passio on that day (29 August)—which is also, as Bede remarks, the Martyrological date and was later the commonest liturgical one— while the Hadrianum has none (its commemoration is of S. Sabina). His homily for the day of John’s natalis or decollatio has as its text the Neapolitan and Gallican pericope Mt 14.1–12; the Gospel

234 Milan, Bibl. Ambros. M. 12 sup., pp. 26–45: ed., except for some of the supplementary material, by B. Bischoff, ‘Das karolingische Kalendar der Palimp-sesthandschrift Ambros. M 12 sup.’, Colligere Fragmenta. Festschrift Alban Dold (Beuron, 1952), pp. 247–56 (for the omissions, compare idem. p. 248 with facing plate); Berlin, Staatsbibl., Phillips 1869 (Bischoff, Katalog 1, no. 438), fols 1–11v: edited complete by A. Borst, Die karolingische Kalenderreform, MGH Schriften, 46 (Hanover, 1998), pp. 254–298, ostensibly as ‘the prototypical text of Carolingian calendarreform’ created at the Court and copied at Lorsch in 789 (with a remarkable collection of supposed sources). The earliest extant calendar in this group, Cologne, Dioz.- u. Dom-Bibl. 83 II, fols 72v–76 of 805, is unpublished. For the origins and early transmission of the astronomical notes based on Pliny’s Natural History, Bks. II and XVIII, and of the other ‘Antique’ material, see P. Meyvaert, ‘‘Discovering the Calendar (annalis libellus) attached to Bede’s own copy of De temporum ratione, Analecta Bollandiana 120/1 ( June 2002) and below, ch. 2, pp. 283–4 and nn. 100–101; for the earliest hagiological stratum and its probable northern-English martyrological origin, see my own forthcoming complementary study ‘Alcuin’s York, Bede’s Calendar and and a pre-Bedan English Martyrology’ (previously announced as ‘The eighthcentury “Schools of York” and the calendar in Berlin Phillips 1869’).

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pericope in Roman lectionaries of the eighth and ninth centuries, under 30 August, is Mc 6.17–29. In his De tabernaculo, Bede refers to ‘the pleasing custom’ of including in the preparations for baptism the characteristically ‘Gelasian’ rituals of reciting the openings of the four Gospels and explaining the figurae of the Evangelists, as part of the ‘opening of the ears’ (apertio aurium).235 Bede observes in his Retractio in Actus that et diem sacratissimam pentecosten celebrantes is said in the prayers (in precibus) for that day: because of the word-order a ‘Gregorian’ source has been claimed, the comparable prayer in the Vatican Gelasian having pentecosten sacratissimum. But since Bede’s -mam, for which there is solid manuscript testimony, has not been noted in any early Gregorian book the inference is hardly conclusive. Bede’s nos digne peragere et per haec contingere ad gaudia praestat aeterna in his homily for the Easter Vigil is properly to be compared with the (following) Easter Saturday’s Gregorian collect . . . ut qui festa paschalia venerando egimus ( peregimus in the Trento Sacramentary!) per haec contingere ad gaudia aeterna mereamur: there are no precise or even close parallels to the final clause in any other early liturgical text, although (the non-Biblical) gaudia aeterna occurs several times in Gelasian missae pro defunctis.236 A more considerable exception would appear to be the York ‘Metrical Calendar’ (better ‘Metrical Martyrology’) of the ?760s, as expounded by Dom André Wilmart. Preserved incomplete in an 235

Feast: Sacr. Gel. II. lii, ed. Wilson, p. 196, ed. Mohlberg, nos 1009–1012; Bede: In Marcum II vi, 37, ed. Hurst (CCSL 122, ii/3; 1960), p. 512; Opera Homiletica, ed. D. Hurst (CCSL 122/iii; Turnhout, 1955), hom. II 23, pp. 349–57. For the Neapolitan pericope in England, see conveniently Lenker, Perikopenordnungen, p. 366 (no. 107); the ‘Lectionary of Luxeuil’, ed. P. Salmon, pp. 186–7, and the Toledo Liber Comicus ed. G. Morin (Maredsous, 1893), pp. 270–1, both have Mt 14.1–14; for the Roman pericope: see, e.g., Klauser, Capitulare Evangeliorum, pp. 36, 82, and Lenker, cit. Baptismal rituals: De Tabernaculo, ed. D. Hurst (CCSL 119A; Turnhout, 1969), p. 89, cf. In Ezram et Neemiam, ibid., pp. 310–11, where the context is not specifically indicated; Sacr. Gel. I. xxxiv, ed. Wilson, pp. 50–1, ed. Mohlberg, nos 299–301. 236 Retractio, ed. M.L.W. Laistner, CCSL 121 (Turnhout, 1983), p. 109; compare Sacr. Grég., ed. Deshusses, 1, no. 529 (p. 228) = no. 523 (p. 226) and Sacr. Gelas. I. lxxx, ed. Mohlberg, no. 642 = I. lxxviii, ed. Mohlberg, no. 628. I would not press the point that the rubric in Gelas. is Orationes et Preces Dominica Pentecosten while that in Greg. is Die Domc. ad Sanctum Petrum; but note that concordance-tables in some recent editions of sacramentaries wrongly treat the Gelasian and the Gregorian prayers as identical. In Gelas. the text reads . . . sanctus apostolos plebemque credentium praesentia suae maiestatis implevit, in Greg. in contrast . . . sanctus apostolis innumeris (later al. in variis) linguis apparuit. Homily: II 7, ed Hurst, p. 230, compare Sacr. Grég. 1, no. 429 (p. 202) and Sacr. Gelas. III. xcv–xcvii, ed. Wilson, pp. 303–5, ed. Mohlberg, nos 1647, 1648, 1655, 1656, etc.

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early Mercian copy and complete in a twelfth-century Kentish book,237 it includes among a majority of feasts characteristic of Gelasian books (including the passio of John the Baptist), all in correct calendar order, two unequivocally ‘Gregorian’ ones and a third that is almost certainly ‘Gregorian’: namely, the commemoration of Pope Silvester (29 December) and of Euphemia on 16 September, as against the Gelasian’s 13 April, and Pancras on 12 May. Wilmart thought that this pointed to the presence at York of both kinds of Roman sacramentary. I argue elsewhere, however, that that inference was mistaken and unnecessary, and that elsewhere in his discussion of the text he had indicated the right route to follow: the ‘Metrical Martyrology’, like the oldest hagiological stratum in the calendars previously referred to, is derived from an abbreviated, partly reconstructable, northernEnglish version of the Hieronymian Martyrology (pre-Echternachtext), in which all three of the ‘anomalous’ commemorations figured.238 It is not evidence for the type of sacramentary used at York in the mid-eighth century nor, except in its inclusion of recently added feasts, for the liturgical calendar followed there.239 237 A. Wilmart, ‘Un témoin anglo-saxon du calendrier métrique de York’, RevBén 46 (1934), 41–69, the text on 65–8, from the fragmentary London BL Cotton Vespasian. B. VI (of ?805/14), fols 104r–v, with the missing opening lines from later, Continental, redactions of the text; for the latter, and for the copy in Cambridge, Trinity Coll. O.2.24 (1128) (Rochester or Christ Church, Canterbury, s. xiiin), fols 88–89v (of which Wilmart was not aware) see M. Lapidge, ‘A Tenth-Century Metrical Calendar from Ramsey’ (1984), Anglo-Latin Literature 900–1066 (1993), pp. 349–59, 345–6 (332–42, 328–9). 238 Compare for Eufimia on 13 April, the ‘Old Gelasian’, II. xv, ed. Wilson, pp. 170–71, ed. Mohlberg, nos 854–859, and Sacr. Gell., ed. Dumas and Deshusses, nos 870–4 (with a Preface not in the ‘Old Gelasian’); ninth-century and later sacramentaries and missals usually have mass-sets at both dates. The mass-set at 12 May in the ‘Old Gelasian’, II. xviiii, ed. Wilson, pp. 173–4, ed. Mohlberg, nos 873–875, is for Nereus et Acilleus fratres, although sancti Pancrati has already been added to the title. The same set is Sacr. Gell., ed. Dumas and Deshusses, nos 961–964. Here it is followed (idem nos 965–967) by a totally different mass-set for natalis sancti Pancrati, which is that of the ‘Gregorian’ in both the Hadrianum and Paduense versions, ed. Deshusses, Sacr. Greg. 1, nos 491–493. An early corrector of Cambrai Bib. mun. 164 modified its collect to read beatorum martyrum tuorum Nerei Acillei et Pancratii; while in the tenth-century English ‘Winchcombe Sacramentary’ which unusually combines the two sets (ed. A. Davril, HBS 109 (Woodbridge and London, 1995), nos 1000–1006) it is the Gelasian collect that is similarly modified. In (?)most later books the massset for the feast is the Gelasian and not the Gregorian one: see Sacramentarium Fuldense saec. X, ed. G. Richter et al., p. 106 (nos 908–11) and D.H. Turner, The Missal of the New Minster, HBS 93 (1962), pp. xv, xvii–xix. The comments on the early English cult of St. Pancras by Wallace-Hadrill, Bede Commentary, p. 135, are unfortunately wholly mis-conceived. 239 See Meyvaert’s study referred to in n. 234. Mark the Evangelist on 18 May,

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Confirmatory evidence from a geographically-wider area is to be found in the prayers in the English eighth/ninth century devotional handbooks, which although generally quite distinct from liturgical orationes often incorporate their characteristic phraseology, sometimes from more than one tradition. Edmund Bishop’s remarkable pioneer analysis of their origins and affinities has not always stood up to more recent textual criticism; and even the assertion that ‘As regards Roman material there is no sufficient ground for assuming that the writers [of prayers in the ‘Book of Cerne’] knew or used any other book than Gelas. . . . the resemblances being distributed over Gelas. as a whole’ may not be as securely based as its wording suggests.240 Bishop, moreover, was more confident than later scholars, and the trend of recent scholarship, that the contents of the volume were predominantly of eighth-century Northumbrian origin, much of them current there ‘when Alcuin was a boy’. It is not to be gainsaid, however, that one or two of ‘Cerne’s’ prayers have a pre-history in Ireland and others have a strongly Irish imprint; or that among the reflections of liturgical orationes, formulae of a distinctively ‘Gelasian’ character predominate.241 Gelasian formulae, but also possibly Gallican ones, are likewise reflected in another group of prayers from a cycle of the life of Christ, which is nowhere transmitted in its entirety but from which overlapping selections are in the ‘Royal’ book, the ‘Book however, presumably reflects liturgical observance: Bullough, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 25, 211; and to the later English calendar evidence should be added Oxford, Bodl. Libr., Digby 63, although reading sancti Maurici (ed. Wormald, English Kalendars, p. 6). Boniface of Mainz, martyred in 754, is commemorated at June 5th; for the eighth-century bishops of York who are named, see below, p. 215. No argument against a dating of the Martyrology to the 760s can be found in its inclusion of a Feast of All Saints at November 1st (for which this may be the earliest evidence anywhere): see below, p. 217 and n. 263. 240 E. Bishop, ‘Liturgical Note’, in Kuypers, Book of Cerne, pp. 234–83, the quotation from p. 283. For criticisms of and corrections to Bishop’s interpretations, and of my reliance on them in ‘Alcuin and the Kingdom of Heaven’ (original version of 1983; partly corrected in Carolingian Renewal, Ch. V), see P. Sims-Williams, ‘Thoughts on Ephrem the Syrian in Anglo-Saxon England’, Learning and Literature . . . Studies presented to Peter Clemoes, pp. 205–26, idem, Religion and Literature, pp. 302–4, 311–18. Note that the ‘canon of the Mass’ is common to all ‘Roman’ books. 241 Brown, Book of Cerne, pp. 137–8 lists ‘Prayers of Irish origin’. For the seventhcentury Lorica of Laidcenn (Brown, pp. 140–1), see M. Herren, The Hisperica Famina. II. Related Poems (Toronto, 1987), pp. 3–14, 76–89, 113–37. Some of the prayers in Brown’s list should certainly be deleted, including Book of Cerne, ed. Kuypers, no. 31 Sancte sator suffragator (which was known to and copied by the adult Alcuin), latterly attributed by Lapidge, Archbishop Theodore, pp. 276–80, to Theodore of Canterbury. For late-eighth-century Northumbrian (York-region?) ‘additions’ to Cerne associated with the hermit Alchfrith, see above, p. 179.

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of Nunnaminster’ and (as nos 38–41, 43) in the ‘Book of Cerne’: since they are absent from ninth-century Continental books, Patrick Sims-Williams has ingeniously suggested that they were composed (or at least circulated) after Alcuin had left Northumbria for Francia.242 Finally, there is the scanty evidence of Alcuin himself in his correspondence. Addressing the religious communities of the provincia Gothorum, i.e. Septimania, on the importance of confessing sins to priests and countering the view that it was sufficient to confess privately to God, Alcuin protests: ‘If sins are not exposed to priests, why are prayers of reconciliation written in the sacramentary?’ (Si peccata sacerdotibus non sunt prodenda, quare in sacramentorio reconciliationis orationes scriptae sunt?).243 Alcuin must here be referring either to the group of four prayers that figure under the rubric item ad reconciliandum poenitentem in the ‘Old Gelasian’ sacramentary (although the context is still that of public penance) and with a similar title in some ‘Frankish Gelasians’, or to its penultimate section ad poenitentiam dandam; or, just possibly, to some of the rather larger group drawn from more than one section of the ‘Old Gelasian’—all of them quite unknown to the Hadrianum and other unsupplemented ‘Gregorians’— which figure in various combinations, and at times with other prayers, in the supplementary sections of ninth-century ‘Gregorian’ sacramentaries including two from Tours which are thought to reflect Alcuin’s own ‘missal’.244 To set against this, there is only the evidence of the Gregorian ad complendum prayer with which the Temporal portion of the De antiphonario section in Alcuin’s De laude concludes, and which occurs also in ‘Frankish Gelasian’ books.245

242 Sims-Wiliams ‘Ephrem the Syrian’, pp. 209, 226, and Religion and Literature, pp. 310–12. For a different approach to this group of prayers, however, see Brown, Book of Cerne, p. 137. 243 Ep. no. 138 (discussed more fully below). 244 Sacr. Gelas. I xxxviii, ed. Wilson, pp. 65–6, ed. Mohlberg, nos 360–363, cf. Sacr. Gellon., ed. Dumas and Deshusses, nos 597–600, etc.; Sacr. Gelas. I xv and I xxxviii, ed. Wilson, pp. 14 and 65–6, ed. Mohlberg, nos 78–82, 356–362, 368 = Sacr. Grég. ed. Deshusses, 3, nos 3951–56, 3960, 3965, 3968, 3977–78. (The numbers in Deshusses, 3, omitted here are prayers peculiar to Verona Bib. Cap., cod. XCI or to one or both of the Tours manuscripts, except for no. 3957, inc. Domine Deus omnipotens propitius esto mihi peccatori, which is also in Cambrai 162+163). The disposition of the prayers in ‘Alcuin’s missal’ and in the Verona manuscript is best indicated by Sacr. Grég., ed. Deshusses, 3, pp. 121–6. Chavasse, Sacramentaire Gélasien, pp. 145–55 analyses the several groups included in the ‘Old Gelasian’ and their supposed earlier history. 245 Above, p. 197.

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It has been said that ‘in the absence of surviving liturgical texts it is difficult to determine which baptismal rite was used’ in early England: which is true only if the evidence of the ‘Old Gelasian’ sacramentary (and of Bede) is treated as irrelevant.246 The southernEnglish council of Clofesho in 747 required the office of baptism to be performed ‘in accordance with the written version acquired from the Roman church’, but gives no indication what this involved; priests, however, should be able to explain it and communicate the elements of the faith in the vernacular. The ‘Northumbrian Disciple’s’ version of Archbishop Theodore’s rulings ‘on baptism and confirmation’— the most extensive of the several versions—is largely concerned with marginal issues, historical and disciplinary, including the interesting response that it is possible for one and the same person to be sponsor ( pater) for entry into the catechuminate, baptism and confirmation, but that it is customary to have different ones.247 Sponsors were acknowledged as increasingly important in the baptism of infants during the the eighth and ninth centuries: the 786 legatine synod’s description of those who receive the little ones from the font, having renounced Satan and all his works on their behalf, as their fideiussores to God (the language of Caesarius of Arles in his sermons nearly three centuries previously) is, however, unparalleled in English texts of the period and very exceptional in Carolingian-Frankish ones.248 246 S. Foot, ‘ “By water in the spirit”’: the administration of baptism in early Anglo-Saxon England’, Pastoral Care before the Parish, ed. J. Blair and Richard Sharpe, (Studies in the Early History of Britain (Leicester, 1992), pp. 171–92, at p. 173. For the ‘Old Gelasian’ sacramentary’s baptismal rite (more accurately, rites: Vogel, Medieval Liturgy, rev. Storey and Rasmussen, pp. 165–6), see Chavasse, Sacramentaire Gélasien, pp. 155–76, Andrieu, Ordines, 2, pp. 380–7; and J.D.C. Fisher, Christian Initiation: Baptism in the Medieval West, Alcuin Club Collections (London, 1965), pp. 1–17. For certain aspects of the rite see also P. Cramer, Baptism and Change in the Early Middle Ages, c. 200–c. 1150 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 140–8, 172–7. For Ordo XI (ed. Andrieu, Ordines, 2, pp. 417–47) as a later and dependent text, see—contra Andrieu—Chavasse Sacramentaire Gélasien, pp. 166–8, and the literature cited by J.H. Lynch, Godparents and Kinship in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, 1986), p. 290 n. 7. 247 Clofesho acta, cc. 13 and 10: Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 366–7, where sponsors/ godparents are those qui [infantes] in baptismate suscipere voluerint. Theodore: Canones Theodori, II iv, ed. Finsterwalder, pp. 316–18; and note that II. iv.10 already allows ‘cross-sex’ sponsorship (compare Lynch, Godparents and Kinship, p. 161). 248 MGH Epp. IV, p. 21 (c. 2). For Caesarius’s use of that Roman legal term for a baptismal sponsor, see e.g. his sermo 200, ed. G. Morin (Maredsous, 1937), p. 811 (c. 6). Whether or not he was the first person to do so, the terminology failed to establish itself in the language of Gallic councils; compare Lynch, Godparents and

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Letters written by Alcuin in his later years have much to say about baptism and its forms; yet they include no direct reference nor clear allusion to the practices of the church in which he had been brought up. His account and interpretation of the central ceremony and its preliminaries inc. Primo paganus catechumenus fit, whether his own composition or taken over from an earlier (anonymous) writer, contains no hint of the three Lenten-period scrutinia provided for in the Gelasian book, let alone the seven described in the probably Gallicanized Roman Ordo XI; but equally it seems to assume that the candidates are adults rather than infantes.249 ‘Scrutinies’ are simply questions about the basic tenets of the Christian faith, asked at the last preparatory stage before anointing and three-fold immersion in the name of the Trinity; they have been preceded by the rituals of exorcism, for which Bede provides independent evidence. The conclusion of the rite with the bishop’s imposition of hands after the newly-baptized had made their first communion may, however, reflect early English practice.250 In early England, whatever the contemporary situation in mainland Europe—the evidence from Italy and southern Gaul is not, in this case, matched by that from Francia—there is no suggestion that the cathedral font was of special importance in the baptism of a diocese’s infants. Alcuin’s only references to the one at York are historical and ambiguous.251 Stephen of Ripon’s Life of Bishop Wilfrid reports him as ‘baptizing and also confirming [country] people by Kinship, pp. 156–9 with Jussen, pp. 143–4. For the rare early-Carolingian instances, see below, ch. 3, p. 352 and n. 69. 249 For the relationship between the Sacramentary and Ordo XI, see n. 246 above. 250 Exorcism: Bede, HE V 6 (the story of Herebald), me cathecizare ipse curavit, factumque est ut exsufflante illo in faciem meam etc.; in I Samuhelem iii, xvii 53 (ed. Hurst, CCSL 119 (Turnhout, 1962), p. 162), omnem spiritum immundum exsufflando et cathecizando abigant. Note that catechizare here does not have its familiar original meaning of ‘to instruct’ (compare almost any translation of HE and Foot, ‘Administration of baptism’, pp. 176–7) but means ‘to lay hands on’ a person as part of the ritual of exorcism, as in Sacr. Gelas. I. xlii, ed. Wilson p. 78, Mohlberg, no. 419a. For episcopal ‘confirmation’s’ place in the baptismal rite, compare Primo paganus in epp. nos 134, 137 (pp. 203, 215) with ordo XI cc. 100–4, ed. Andrieu, Ordines, pp. 446–7. 251 Euboricae celsis etiam sub moenibus urbis/ in qua tecta Deo iussit cito parva locari/ sumeret ut sub eis sacram baptismatis undam, ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 196–8; . . . Ubi bellipotens sumpsit baptismatis undam/ Eduuin rex, praesul grandem construxerat aram/. . . ./ atque dicavit eam sancti sub nomine Pauli, idem, lines 1490–1, 1493. The poeticism unda(e) for ‘water(s) of the baptismal font’, although infrequent elsewhere, may have been commonplace in early Anglo-Latin: compare Felix, Vita Guthlaci c. 42, ed. Colgrave, p. 130, sacrati fontis undis abluit. The ‘source’ is perhaps Venantius Fortunatus carm. IX, v. 9, abluit unda lavacri.

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the laying on of hands’ in (probably) south-west Northumbria in the 670s.252 The first Life of Cuthbert of Lindisfarne records that in his short time as bishop he travelled round his diocese, preaching, healing and imposing post-baptismal anointings, but not explicitly as baptizing.253 Baptism in a local rural church is implicit in Alcuin’s account of Willibrord’s beginnings, although it is not very likely that he had any specific information on the matter; of the setting of his own baptism we know nothing.254 The ‘Christianization’ of death, burial and their associated rituals was no more than partial, even when the actual entombment was in the precincts of a church or monastery.255 Nevertheless, commemorative or anniversary masses for lay persons as well as for monks and clerics were becoming a familiar phenomenon: the fullest evidence from early England is in the chapter De missa defunctorum in the ‘Northumbrian Disciple’s version of ‘Theodore’s Penitential’.256 The third book of the (Old) Gelasian sacramentary includes the appropriate Orationes post obitum hominis etc. and mass-sets; Alcuin echoed one or more of the prayers when considering his own future burial at York in ?794.257

252 C.18, ed. Colgrave, p. 38. The biographer’s villa quae dicitur Ontiddanufri is perhaps identifiable with Tidover in Kirkby Overblow: The Place-names of the West Riding of Yorkshire 5, ed. A.H. Smith, English Place-Name Society 34 (Cambridge, 1961), p. 43. 253 Vita anon. IV cc. 1–10, ed. Colgrave, pp. 110–28. Bede’s re-writing of one of those episodes (Vita Cuth. pr. c. 29, ed. Colgrave, p. 252) introduces the words nec non etiam nuper baptizatis ad accipiendam spiritus sancti gratiam manum inponeret. Bede uses the verb confirmare in his Epistola ad Ecgbertum (c. 7: ed. Plummer, p. 410) but not, apparently, the substantive. Both are found in the ‘Northumbrian Disciple’s’ text of Theodore’s ‘Penitential’: above, n. 247, also II. ii.1 (Episcopo licet in campo confirmare si necesse sit: ed. Finsterwalder, p. 313). For the importance of early English and missionary practice in the historical development of the second, post-baptismal, anointing see A. Angenendt, ‘Bonifatius und das Sacramentum initiationis’, RömQuart, 72 (1977), 133–83. 254 Vita Willibr. I, 3: ed. Levison, MGH SRM VII, 117–18. Willibrord was entrusted as an infantulus to Ripon. 255 Bullough, ‘Burial, community and belief ’ (as n. 2); idem, ‘The Carolingian liturgical experience’, Continuity and Change, ed. Swanson, SCH 35, pp. 55–7, both with references to other literature. 256 Canones Theodori, ed. Finsterwalder, pp. 318–28, esp. cc. 5 and 6. 257 Sacr. Gelas. III xci, xcii–cv, ed. Wilson, pp. 295–301, 301–13, ed. Mohlberg, nos 1607–19, 1620–95. The Gelasian orationes are analysed at length by Sicard, Liturgie de la Mort, pt.2, with summaries at 335–9, 346–8: but for their ‘origins’, compare Chavasse, Sacramentaire Gélasien, 57–61 and B. Moreton’s review in JTS 31 (1980), 231–7, esp. 232–4; also Deshusses in ALW 9 (1965), 52–58, arguing for

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New Liturgical Commemorations York, like other major churches, not only regularly prayed for members and benefactors, living and dead, whose names had been entered in some album or Liber Vitae: it also from time to time added to its calendar a more specific commemoration of the ‘Heavenly Birthday’ of its bishops and, in certain circumstances, of its monarchs, although ‘proper’ masses and offices lay in the future. Thus, Bosa who died in 706 (or 705) and Wilfrid II who died in 745, thirteen years after his resignation from the bishopric, are entered in the York ‘Metrical Martyrology’ respectively under 2 October and 29 April (in both cases apparently the only evidence for their death-days); the church’s founding-bishop Paulinus is there under 10 October, although with the epithet magister, and the controversial Wilfrid I, who died as bishop of Hexham, likewise correctly under 24 April. The depositio of Bosa’s successor, John of Beverley, on 7 May (721), which also featured in the ‘authentic’ text of the Martyrology, had been entered previously in a Northumbrian calendar of which only fragments survive and occurs later in northern-English calendars and liturgical books; one of these was presumably the source of ‘Florence’ (i.e. John) of Worcester’s correct reporting of the day in his Chronicle.258 In contrast, none of the great figures from Wearmouth and Jarrow are a Visigothic Spanish origin of Mohlberg, no. 1612. The continuation of the passage quoted above, strengthens the view that here Alcuin had particularly in mind the prayers in Sacr. Gelas. III xcvii, ed. Mohlberg nos 1610–12: but the next sentence, Et sicut unus sol omnibus lucet etc., has a quite different source. 258 ‘Metrical Martyrology’, vv. 21–3 (Wilfrid I), 24–5 (Wilfrid II), 61–2 (Bosa), 64 (Paulinus): Wilmart, ‘Calendrier métrique’, pp. 66, 68. The other early evidence for the commemoration of Wilfrid’s dies depositionis on April 24th—by no means exclusive to York—is assembled in Bullough, ‘Albuinus deliciosus Karoli regis’, p. 79(–80) n. 22: the more recent statement by P.Ó. Riain, Anglo-Saxon Ireland: the evidence of the Martyrology of Tallaght, H.M. Chadwick Memorial Lectures, 3 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 10, is misleading. For the ‘York poem’s account of Bosa and Wilfrid II, see ed. Godman, lines 847–75, 1216–48; for Paulinus, see ibid. line 210: Sic pius antistes primum Paulinus habebat. For John in the Martyrology, see Wilmart, ‘Calendrier métrique’, p. 66 app., confirmed by the texts in early Continental copies from Rheims, St.Riquier, Lyon, etc., reported by Lapidge, ‘A tenth-century Metrical Calendar’, [as n. 237], p. 346 [329]. The calendar-fragments, Munich Hauptstaatsarchiv Raritätensel. no. 108, are ed. R. Bauerreiss, ‘Ein angelsächsisches Kalendarfragment . . .’, Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens 51 (1933), 178–9 (here 178). A ninth-century calendar entry is that in Oxford, Bodleian Libr., Digby 63 (ed. Wormald, p. 6); the chronicle record is The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. R.R. Darlington and P. McGurk, 2 (Oxford, 1995), p. 176 and n. (where the calendar evidence is not cited).

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included in the Martyrology—not Benedict Biscop, nor Ceolfrith, nor Bede; although the depositio of the first-named on 12 January is one of several Wearmouth-Jarrow entries in the Phillips 1869 calendar.259 Among non-York names, however, Pope Gregory I, the commemoration of whose dies natalis had been commanded by the council of Clovesho in 747, duly appears in the Martyrology under 12 March, without an epithet, and similarly (as papa) in the Phillips 1869 calendar and its relatives. So do the two Hewalds, martyred shortly before or shortly after 700, and Boniface, martyred in 754, under the independently-documented dates of 3 October and 5 June respectively.260 Not all these saints were to become a permanent feature of the Northern diocese’s annual liturgical commemorations: Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, of course, and Bishop John are among the exceptions.261 Familiarity with and presumably the liturgical observance of the post-Gregorian feast of ‘the Presentation of Christ in the Temple’ and the three (other) feasts of Mary the Mother of Our Lord— Annunciation, Assumption and Nativity—at York in the third quarter of the century, and possibly at Wearmouth-Jarrow a little earlier, are demonstrated by the ‘Metrical Martyrology’ and the calendar in Berlin Phillips 1869. The passages referring to the Virgin Mary which were collected by Alcuin in his De antiphonario have been associated (not uncontroversially but probably correctly) with the feast of the Assumption and with another in December. Celebration of the 259 Ed. Borst, p. 255. Borst’s identification of the preceding depositio domni Iohannis pape with ‘Archbishop John II of Ravenna’ (!) is incomprehensible. This is almost certainly Pope John VI (ob. 705), who heard Wilfrid’s appeal in 704: see Bullough, ‘York, Bede’s Calendar and a pre-Bedan English Martyrology’ (forthcoming in AnBoll ?2003). 260 Gregory: ‘Martyrology’, ed. Wilmart, v. 14, and similarly in the Phillips 1869 calendar, ed. Borst, p. 263; but already in ‘Willibrord’s calendar’, by the first hand, and in all versions of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum. Boniface and the Hewalds: ‘Martyrology’, ed. Wilmart, vv. 30–2 (unexpectedly jointly with Tatberht), 63. 3 October is also Bede’s date (HE V 10: ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 482); but Willibrord’s calendar in Paris BNF lat. 10837 (facsimile and edition by H.A. Wilson, HBS 55 (London, 1918), which is earlier, has the martyrdom of the Hewalds under 4 October. Wallace-Hadrill, Bede Commentary, p. 183, is inacccurate and unhelpful; and there are better arguments for preferring 4 October than those put forward latterly by Ó. Riain, Martyrology of Tallaght, p. 7. That is also the day in the Berlin Phillips 1869 calendar and in the anomalous form Natl. scorum Eouualdi et Aldi in the related calendar in Milan Ambros. M.12 sup., ed. Bischoff, p. 254; but the latter also has, under 3 October, et duorum Heuualdorum! Neither Boniface nor the Hewalds are in the Cologne version of the calendar. 261 And not only at York itself: as Plummer noted (Bedae Opera Historica, 1, 432), in the William of St. Carilef book, Durham Cath. B. ii. 35, the section of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica relating to John (V. 2–4) is marked for eight lections.

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Assumption, the Nativity and the Annunciation at southern-Northumbrian ?Crayke in the time of Abbot Sibald (ob.771), together with a fourth feast which has been variously understood, is recalled in Æthelwulf ’s poem De Abbatibus.262 The two martyrology/calendartexts are likewise the earliest evidence for the observance of a Feast of All the Saints on 1 November, whether or not this had been imported into Northumbria from an unidentified Irish church; the arguments for its origin in ‘the other island’ are in fact much weaker than they once seemed, although it is still possible to regard it as originating in characteristically-Insular ‘private devotion’.263

Calendar and Computus The liturgical calendar of Sundays and week-day Holy Days, of Feasts of Our Lord and Commemorations of Saints, had from the start been in part determined by, but also involving, the sometimes awkward adaptation of existing secular and ( Jewish) religious calendars, that were themselves based in varying degrees on observable or measurable natural phenomena; and the different ways in which such a calendar should be constructed to establish a common date for the Church’s moveable but eventually recurrent Easter festival created difficulties in the fourth century and provoked a considerable and controversial literature in the fifth and sixth.264 The learned Spaniard Isidore summarised Antique notions of Time and its divisions in the fifth book of his Etymologies, De Legibus et Temporibus, and gave a brief account of the Easter Cycle in the following book, De Libris et Officiis ecclesiasticis. Useful for their definitions, these sections

262 See for this Mary Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 2 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 30–40, 52–61; and below, Additional Note (pp. 250–1). De antiphonario extracts: above, p. 198 at n. 209 and Clayton, pp. 55–59. 263 Bullough, ‘York, Bede’s Calendar and a pre-Bedan English Martyrology’ (forthcoming in AnBoll ?2003); and, for the strangely-neglected evidence of the comes, above, p. 19 & n. 42. The earliest Irish evidence for the 1 November feast is the ‘Martyrology of Oengus’, ed. Whitley Stokes (HBS 29, 1905), p. 232, a text now regarded as not earlier than the fourth decade of the ninth century: see P.Ó. Riain, ‘The Tallaght Martyrologies Redated’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, no. 20 (1990), 21–38. 264 Previous English-language summaries of the inherent problems and of successive attempts to resolve them have been largely superseded by Faith Wallis’s exceptionally lucid Introduction to her translation of Bede: The Reckoning of Time, Translated Texts for Historians, vol. 29 (Liverpool U.P., 1999), pp. xv–lxxxv.

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were of almost no practical value. Perhaps in Spain, certainly in Ireland already in the first half of the seventh century, didactic handbooks on the calculation (compotus, -utus) of time and the Christian calendar were being compiled from existing, although often corruptlytransmitted, texts, and from new ones that were the creation of anonymous teachers. Typically, in eighth-century and subsequent copies and re-fashionings, they were accompanied by extracts from Isidore, and by verses of Antique or more recent origin composed as aids to memory. Bede’s concise De Temporibus, the earliest of his writings on Time which collectively brought early-medieval understanding of the subject to new heights and were indispensable for centuries thereafter, was (in one of its aspects) ‘designed to eliminate students’ dependence on Irish computi and the works of Isidore’ even though these had provided him with much of his material, in conjunction with an exposition of the nineteen-year luni-solar cycle and the Dionysian Paschal table.265 Bede’s fuller treatment of the subject, the De temporum ratione written more than twenty years later, was explicitly a response to those who had complained that his previous writings were too condensed to be intelligible. But it also enabled him to introduce and explain topics that had formed no part of ‘On Times’: in particular, cosmological material that had been dealt with somewhat differently in his De natura rerum. The definitive version accompanied by a distinctive annalis libellus or (secular) calendar, of which copies were quickly made and circulated, was to be epoch-making.266 In one of the later chapters, Bede refers in passsing to what might or might not have been learnt in schola puerili; moreover, the opening chapter, devoted to finger-calculation and its ‘language’, has suggested to some commentators that he had in mind the teaching of very young pupils. There are cogent objections to that intepretation;267 certainly the bulk of the material in later chapters, with their climax in the interpretation of Easter and the Resurrection as a foreshadowing of Eternity, must 265

Jones, Bedae de Temporibus, edition at pp. 295–303, the quotation in the text at p. 132, cf. pp. 130–1. Compare D. Ó Croinin, ‘The Irish provenance of Bede’s Computus’, Peritia 2 (1983), 229–47; but, above all, Wallis, Bede: The Reckoning of Time, pp. lxiv–v. For the verses and some of their early manuscript contexts, see below, this chapter and ch. 2. 266 Wallis, Bede: The Reckoning of Time, pp. lxv–lxvii (Bede here innovatively ‘fus[es] natural history and calendar science’); Meyvaert, ‘Discovering the Calendar’, Anacleta Bollandiana 120/1 ( June 2002). 267 See Wallis’s Commentary, pp. 260–1, cf. Introduction, pp. xxxi–xxxiii.

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always have been intended for more mature minds. Whatever the nature of Bede’s own oral teaching of computus as a practical discipline and its place in Creation and the Divine purpose, to which he several times alludes, older students ‘were expected to master a few sections each year’.268 Nothing in Alcuin’s own teaching of computus in the 770s and 780s, in so far as this can be reconstructed from later evidence, or of astronomy (cosmology) to the Frankish king in the 790s269 shows unequivocally how and to what degree Bede’s teaching had been passed on to him. His reminiscent record of instruction in the subject begins only with the ‘York poem’s description of Ælberht’s achievements as magister—in the late 750s/760s, therefore. Here it is recorded that as well as instructing the young in ‘the Arts’, he paschalique dedit solemnia certa recursu.

Professor Godman’s proposed translation, ‘He regulated the time for Easter’s celebration’, is hardly adequate; and the punctuation that links it with the following reference to the ‘mysteries of Holy Scripture’ can be misleading. Recursu, although unusual, is surely a reference specifically to the now-established cycle of calendar years and their Easter Days presented in tabular form.270 But Alcuin is here apparently adapting two lines in Bishop Wilfrid (I)’s epitaph, as reported— indeed, probably composed—by Bede: paschalis qui etiam sollemnia tempora cursus ............ certa suae genti ostendit moderamine ritus.

Since Wilfrid was, to the chronicler and epitaph-author, the man who made sure that the English church adopted the ‘Roman’ Dionysian Easter-datings, Alcuin’s verse is interpretable not only as a conscious, if oblique, compliment to him but also to underline the York church’s earlier contribution to and continuing importance in the teaching of 268 Jones, Bedae de Temporibus, pp. 175–291, the reference to the schola puerilis in DTR c. 38 (here copying Bede’s undated letter Ad Helmuualdum) at p. 251; the quotation ibid., p. 135. 269 Below, ch. 3. 270 ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, line 1447, with p. 115. Compare Aldhelm’s De virginitate metr. line 1577 (ed. Ehwald, p. 418), Hic pater illustris celebrans solemnia paschae; and the same scholar’s reference to the old Roman 84-year cycle, defended by the Irish at Whitby but subsequently almost everywhere abandoned (MGH Epp. IV, Ad Gerontium: ed. Ehwald, p. 483) as iuxta Sulpicii Severi regulam, que lxxxiiii annorum cursum descripsit.

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the subject, without slighting Bede.271 There is no evidence that Alcuin was aware of Bede’s letter of 708 suggesting, without actually stating, that Wilfrid had once let him down by not defending him against unjustified criticisms by members of his community who were ‘in their cups’.272 It is very likely that a range of simple mnemonic texts, such as the ‘Pachomian verses’ inc. Nonae Aprilis norunt quinos which gave the date of the Easter full moon and a ‘ferial regular’ for each year in the nineteen–year cycle and Ausonius’s Eclogue on the zodiacal ‘Signs of the twelve Months’ as modified by Bede so that it began with Aries and April—both of them neumed in some later manuscripts so as to provide simultaneous instruction in cantus—were common currency in the eighth-century York scola. But not even their presence (un-neumed) in manuscripts that apparently preserve parts of ‘Alcuin’s computus’ conclusively demonstrates this. It is also possible, but again unproven, that Alcuin’s allusion, when trying to ‘explain’ the calculation of epacts to the king in 797, to boys who ‘recite [a table] from zero by elevens’ is a reminiscence of York as much as of the Frankish Court.273

‘Grammatica’. The Practice of Writing and Reading Pueri and adolescentes who were wrestling with texts like Bede’s had obviously passed well beyond the rudimentary stages of learning 271 Bede, HE V 19 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 528–30); Bede’s authorship of the epitaph was argued by Jaager, Bedas Metrische Vita Cuthberti, pp. 50–1 For a rather different, but surely unnecessary, reaction to its evidence, see Ó Cróinìn, ‘Irish provenance’, Peritia 2, 232–3. 272 Epist. ad Pleguinam, ed. Jones, Bedae de Temporibus, pp. 307–15, esp. at p. 315. For substantial criticisms of the generally-accepted translation and interpretation of this section of the letter, see D. Schaller, ‘Der verleumdete David’, in: Literatur und Sprache im europäischen Mittelalter. Festschrift für Karl Langosch, ed. A. Önnerfors et al. (Darmstadt, 1973), pp. 39–43. 273 Nonae Aprilis: S.-K. no. 10525, ed. Strecker, MGH Poet. IV, pp. 670–1, using neither of the related manuscripts, BAV, Pal. lat. 1448 (pt. iii) and Pal. lat. 1449 (for their Alcuinian elements, see below, Ch. 2), where the verses are at respectively fol. 71 and fol. 11; compare Jones, Bedae de Temporibus, pp. 32–3. Respicis Apriles: S.-K. no. 12589, Bede, DTR c. 16 (sicut quidam veterum etiam versibus explicavit heroicis), ed. Jones, Bedae de Temporibus, p. 213. For their neuming see W. Irtenkauf, ‘Der computus ecclesiasticus in der Einstimmigkeit des Mittelalters’, Archiv f. Musikwissenschaft, 14 (1957), 1–15. Epacts: ep. no. 126 (p. 186), where decantatur means ‘is recited’ (compare memoriter decantare consuescas in De temporum ratione, c. 22, Jones, Bedae de Temporibus, p. 223), although earlier in the letter (p. 185) it means ‘is declared, is asserted’.

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Latin. How they did so and what texts they used, in Alcuin’s day and for some time afterwards, seems to be largely irrecoverable. The calendarial and other mnemonic verses no doubt helped; but more varied and substantial fare was needed. In the ninth century the Disticha Catonis, a substantial late-Antique collection of moral maxims each consisting of two syntactically simple hexameters, as: Plus vigila semper nec [al. neu] somno deditus esto Nam diuturna quies vitiis alimenta ministrat,

came to be used widely in elementary teaching. It may have reached Carolingian Francia via Spain.274 Aldhelm and Bede show no knowledge of it. The elderly Alcuin was thoroughly familiar with one version of it, since he uses it extensively and freely in his own Praecepta vivendi per singulos versus; the evidence that he knew it already when he was composing his ‘York poem’ is, however, very thin.275 The Epigrammata of Prosper of Aquitaine, whose concise renderings of selected sententiae of St. Augustine happily combined elementary ‘grammatical’ and moral instruction, may have established itself in northern school-rooms somewhat earlier. Both Aldhelm and Bede cite verses from it in their works on metre and elsewhere; and Alcuin includes more than twenty excerpts in his florilegium De laude Dei.276 Whatever the form of oral instruction, whether ‘question-andanswer’, reading aloud with accompanying exposition (lectio) or dictating 274 Ed. M. Boas, rev. H.J. Botschuyver (Amsterdam, 1952), here pp. 35–6 ‘It is a better thing to be awake than given over to sleep; prolonged rest gives nourishment to vices’. It is one of the texts in the ‘Spanish anthology’, Paris BNF. lat. 8093 fols 1–38 + Leyden Voss. lat. F.111, written in Visigothic script at or near Lyons at the very beginning of the ninth century. The only pre-800 manuscript is the small (35 fols) verse anthology from the Verona area, Verona Bib. cap. CLXIII (150) (CLA IV, 516) of s. viii2. But the initial distich Si deus est . . ./ . . . mente colendus is among the Visigothic marginalia ( probationes) of the Spanish manuscript Autun Bibl. mun. 107 (S.129) (CLA VI, 729). Spain might, however, be the source of only one branch of the tradition. 275 MGH Poet. I, pp. 275–81 (carm. lxii; S.-K. no. 5960); compare M. Boas, Alcuin und Cato (Leiden, 1937). ‘York Poem’ ed. Godman, lines 155–6, certainly seem to echo Disticha I 1: but Alcuin could easily have encountered this separately, cf. last note and S.-K. no. 15020; and he would have found pondere pressus (line 127) in e.g. Aldhelm, De virginitate metr., line 2401. 276 Epigrammata ex sententiis: CPL3 no. 526; the one pre-800 manuscript (Paris BNF. lat. 11326; CLA V, 609) is an Italian-origin libellus (at Fleury in the ninth century) of thirty-seven folios, in which the only other item is Augustine’s sermo CL. For the Liège manuscript (Antwerp, Mus. Plantin-Moretus Museum 17.4), see below, ch. 2. For Aldhelm’s use, see Aldhelmi Opera ed. Ehwald, p. 545; for Bede’s, see his De arte metrica, ed. C.B. Kendall, CCSL 123A (Turnhout, 1975), pp. 59–141, with CCSL 123C (Turnhout, 1980) and ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, p. lxviii. For the De laude Dei excerpts, see below, ch. 2, pp. 277–8 and n. 79.

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an exercise, the written word was both its well-spring and outcome. The process by which pueri in monasteries and cathedrals acquired and developed the necessary minimum skills is broadly known; the painful physical effort involved, still deplored by mature scholars however good it might be for their souls, was a commonplace that Alcuin shared with others.277 The sloping writing-desk may already have been a normal feature of a well-organized ninth-century scriptorium, and of the space allocated to an established scholar; school-pupils, and probably most notarii and amanuenses, continued to rest their writing-surface, in the form of a waxed or other tablet, on their knees.278 On this and on related topics Alcuin says disappointingly little, even when praising scribes. His one allusion to writing in wax, and a doubtful figurative allusion to tabulae, are not in the context of schooling: but it is possible that the unique and puzzling reference to ‘playing with litterali tessera’, previously quoted, belongs here.279 It is none the less likely that Alcuin’s earliest writing-exercises were phrases based on the Psalter, such as omnium inimicorum suorum dominabitur (from Ps.[Vulg.; Ro. = Ga.] 9.26), which is a probatio in a Mercian manuscript c. 700 and commonly thereafter; and perhaps subsequently the penning of ‘school’ or secular verses previously memorized by oral repetition. The writing of opening lines by a master, which less-skilled copyists then try to imitate, is a feature of 277 W. Wattenbach, Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter (ed. 3; Leipzig, 1896), pp. 264–89; B. Bischoff, Latin Palaeography (Engl. ed.; Cambridge, 1990), pp. 38–42. The three distichs in two Tours Bibles (carm. lxv/4: ed. Dümmler, MGH Poet. I, p. 284) Nauta rudis pelagi ut sevis ereptus ab undis/ in portum veniens pectora leta tenet/ Sic scriptor fessus calamum sub calce laboris/ Deponens etc. are reputedly Alcuin’s own version (cf. ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1649–53, where the nauta rudis returning safely to his home-port is the poet) of a prose scribal topos current at least as early as the seventh century (Wattenbach, Schriftwesen, pp. 279–80): they were very soon copied or adapted by others, contemporaneously with independent poetic versions of the simile. For benefit to the soul see carm. xciv (ed. Dümmler, MGH Poet. I, p. 320, S.K. no. 6704; a good English translation is in Godman, Poetry, p. 139), lines 11–14—with Mt 20.1,8 presumably in mind. 278 The upper of two pen- and wash-drawings on fol. 1av of the tenth-century Tegernsee (Froumund) manuscript Munich clm. 19437 (a small-format copy of Alcuin’s De dialectica) has been claimed as a representation of Alcuin writing in this way— because the lower seated figure is labelled KAR/OLUS and because a later folio (19v) has an illustration of Alcuin standing before the king. It is almost certainly a weak copy of a Carolingian-period Evangelist-picture, perhaps specifically Mark. 279 Ep. no. 28, quoted above, p. 42 n. 93; non in membranis tantum calamo, sed etiam in tabulis cordis carnalibus Dei spiritu scripta: comm. in Apoc. IV 6 (v. 14), PL 100, 1127C; ep. no. 215, and above, p. 110 n. 273. For late-medieval waxed tablets and iron stylus found at York (but also not from a scola), see S. O’Connor, D. Tweddle, ‘A set of waxed tablets from Swinegate, York’, Bibliologia 12 (Les Tablettes à écrire. . . .) 1993, 307–22.

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several late-eighth-century and early-ninth-century books.280 The young Alcuin necessarily learnt the recently-created additional letters for sounds peculiar to his English vernacular, if only for use in personaland place-names in his correspondence. Unsurprisingly, when in 797 he made marginal indications in a manuscript he had recently read, he used the letter-forms of the ‘Insular minuscule’ he had been taught to write at York.281 To a whole range of scholars writing in the past two decades, private reading in this period is hardly to be envisaged: Ambrose the silent reader is a wholly abnormal phenomenon; early- and highmediaeval reading (it is asserted) is a shared and public act; and the private, and silent, reading of recent centuries had its beginnings only in the later Middle Ages.282 Alcuin himself, however, is testimony that such a reading (in another sense) of the evidence is not wholly satisfactory. Much of what he wrote, including many of the letters, was undoubtedly intended to be read aloud; and the effect of aging on eyesight may cause what had previously been private to

280 Probationes: Würzburg Univ. bibl. M. p. th. q. 2 (the ‘Cuthswith ms.’; CLA IX, 1430a: incorrect on this feature) on fols 1, 113v. Model lines: D. Ganz, ‘Temptabat et scribere: Vom Schreiben in der Karolingerzeit’, Schriftkultur und Reichsverwaltung unter den Karolingern ed. R. Schieffer, Abhandl. der Nordrhein-Westfälischen Akad. der Wiss. 97 (Opladen, 1996), pp. 13–33, at p. 19. 281 In the Tours-origin book Paris BNF lat. 1572: Bischoff, ‘Aus Alkuinsleerdentagen’, MaSt 2, 12–19 and pl.I. The additional English letters are, for the voiceless dental spirant (th), and ‘wyn(n)’, the earliest manuscript evidence for which is the ‘Épinal Glossary’ of ca. 700, Épinal bibl. mun. 72, fols 94–107 (complete facsimile with introduction by B. Bischoff et al., The Épinal, Erfurt, Werden and Corpus Glossaries; EEMF 22 [Copenhagen, 1988]; cf. Ker, Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, p. 152 [no. 114]); for the use of the ‘wyn’ in English manuscripts of Alcuin’s letters even for non-English names, see above. At least one commentator (F.C. Gardiner, The Pilgrimage of Desire (Leiden, 1971), p. 61) has supposed that the opening lines of ep. no. 43 include an allusion to the script in which a letter from York had been written. I can see no justification for such an interpretation: in the phrase pacificam inscriptionis seriem the word series is, as frequently in Pope Gregory I’s letters and elsewhere in Alcuin, ‘content’, and inscriptio ‘that which has been written down’ in contrast with allocutio ‘that which is spoken, verbal exchange’; while the plural litterae means simply (as already in Antiquity) ‘text, the written word, epistle’. 282 Rooted in modern, post-Derrida, critical theory, key stages in the historicist application of that notion are the original (1977) version of Susan Noakes’s ‘A sketch of a fragment from a story of reading’, in: Timely Reading: between Exegesis and Interpretation (Cornell U.P.; Ithaca-London, 1988), pp. 14–37 and Brian Stocks’s The Implications of Literacy (Princeton, 1983). For recent re-statements (‘new readings’!) see Noakes, Timely Reading, and J. Boyarin (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading (California U.P.; Berkeley-Oxford, 1993), esp. pp. 10–37 (D. Boyarin, “Placing Reading: Ancient Israel and Medieval Europe” and 58–79 (N. Howe, “The Cultural Construction of Reading an Anglo-Saxon England”).

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be shared.283 But the contents of the De laude Dei (for example) were in the first instance for personal and private use; and it cannot be assumed that prayers once written down were thereafter ‘recited from memory’. Bede contrasted ‘ruminating [on the mysteries of the Resurrection] by murmuring them with our mouths’ with ‘recollecting them in the inner recesses of our hearts’. Alcuin used related language in the prefatory letter to his opus geminatum of the ‘Life of St. Willibrord’, sent to the abbot of Echternach (and bishop of Sens) Beornred. The prose version, he explained, was designed ‘to be read publicly to the brethren in church’; the shorter verse text, addressed to the so-called ‘fictive reader’, was to be ‘ruminated on among your pupils in a private place’—the latter identifiable as the dormitory or an oratory, in contradistinction to the school-room.284 Private reading has a normal place in the religious life, and is perfectly compatible with the mumbled articulation of what is being read.285

Biblical Study The stage in their lives at which clerici and monks, already formed in ‘cantus, grammatica and computus’,286 were first exposed to the 283 In ep. no. 170 (pp. 280–1), Alcuin complains that whether he was by the Loire or in the Aachen region his vision was now cloudy: nostros oculos . . . caliginare (sic) facit. But for someone who in spite of oculos caligantes could still read in his sixties or even seventies, see Wulfstan’s Vita Æthelwoldi (of Winchester), ed. M. Lapidge and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1991), c. 35 (pp. 52–4). 284 Bede: Homil. II 7, ed. Hurst (CCSL, 122), p. 231. Alcuin: ep. no. 120; MGH SSRM VII, ed. Levison, 113. The language of the letter, in secreto cubili inter scolasticos tuos tantummodo ruminare (al. -ari ) debuisset, has invariably been understood as a reference to an enclosed space or room and generally (because of scolasticos) as the monastic school-room. Secreto . . . tantummodo fits ill, however, with the notion of shared instruction: compare, therefore, Isidore, Etym. XV iii (De habitaculis), 9, which begins with Cella dicta quod nos occultat et celat and concludes with Cubile autem cubandi locus est. Secessus quod sit locus secretus . . .; and Bede, HE IV 25 (the account of Coldingham), domunculae quae ad orandum vel legendum factae erant nunc . . . sunt inlecebrarum cubilia coversae. But in his ?794 letter to York, ep. no. 42 (p. 85), Alcuin uses cubilia metaphorically, ‘the secret recesses of my mind’ (compare the Bede passage). Was he, in his letter to Beornred, trying to combine the literal and a metaphorical sense? Note that athough ruminare, -atio are now particularly associated with monastic study, the figurative usage is in fact pre-Christian and not a feature of any early Rule nor (I think) of Cassiodorus. 285 The tenth-century John of Gorze commented that the murmur of his lips in the private recitation of the Psalms resembled the buzzing of a bee! PL 137, col 280. 286 C.W. Jones (in e.g. Bedae Opera Didascalica I (CCSL 133A; Turnhout, 1975),

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continuous texts of Old and New Testament Books and to the commentaries of the Fathers, is not (so far as I know) stated explicitly in any eighth-century text. Even the most ‘biographical’ of Vitaauthors speak of their hero’s absorption of spiritalia dogmata only in a very general way, loosely associated with their years of adolescence. Alcuin is characteristically vague on this topic when describing Willibrord’s life at Ripon until he was twenty (in 678) and subsequently in Ireland.287 His own progression to that stage is indicated indirectly, in the account of his remembered experience when reading the Fourth Gospel to his teacher and fellow-pupils.288 Much of Bede’s substantial corpus of ‘works unravelling the mysterious volumes of Holy Scripture’,289 even when apparently incorporating elements of his oral teaching and shortening and clarifying the writings of his predecessors, assumes a good previous grounding in the subject. In the dedicatory letter—to Bishop Acca of Hexham— of the first version of his commentary In Genesim he claimed that it would instruct the beginner and be a stepping-off point for the learned; but as the work progressed and was extended, not without signs of haste, it was increasingly directed to the eruditi. His exegesis of Gospel pericopes in his homilies, whether these had been preached or not, is markedly simpler, with almost no direct citation praef., pp. vi ff.) and others have latterly emphasised this triad as the basic earlymedieval ‘educational programme’: but for a different, specifically York, teachingtriad see above, p. 170 and n. 122; and for alternative ‘programmes’, compare further ch. 2 ad init. 287 Igitur in sacris eruditionibus et in omni sobrietate morumque honestate beatissimo usque ad vicessimum aetatis suae annum adoliscente proficiente: ed. Levison, MGH SSRM 118 (c. 4), and cf. ibid. c. 3. According to Boniface’s biographer Willibald (c. 2), ‘the fiery passions of youth and the fleshly lusts which at first made violent assaults on him lost their power through his assiduous enquiries into the meaning of Sacred Scripture’, although it was only after he had moved to Nursling in his mid/late twenties that he became ‘proficient . . . in the literal and spiritual exposition of the Bible’: Vitae sancti Bonifatii ed. W. Levison, MGH SSRG (Hanover-Leipzig, 1905), p. 8. 288 Above, p. 173. 289 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1306–8. For the words Plurima . . . opuscula . . . edidit, compare ep. no. 216 (written nearly two decades later, referring to opuscula which Bede sermone simplici sed sensu subtili conposuit. Opuscula is not a diminutive, as in Classical usage: it reflects Isidore’s definitions De generibus opusculorum in Etym. VI. viii, where he generalises Jerome’s categorizing of Origen’s exegetical works in the preface to his translation of that Father’s homiliae in Ezechielem (PL 25, 585A; new ed. by W.A. Baehrens, in GCS 33 = Origenes Werke, 8 (Leipzig, 1925), p. 318); or possibly Jerome himself, since a letter to Alcuin from Gisla (ep. no. 196 (p. 324), badly mis-translated by S. Wemple in: A History of Women, ed. Klapisch-Zuber, 2, 199) speaks of Jerome’s dedication to women in propheticas obscuritates opuscula.

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of ‘authorities’.290 A letter of Jerome’s to one of his female disciples, quoted by Bede and possibly known elsewhere in eighth-century England, recommended that her (young) daughter should follow the Psalter with, successively, the Proverbs of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Job and New Testament books, but the Song of Songs only at the end of her programme of reading.291 In the opening section of his commentary on Ecclesiastes (whose inclusion in the Old Testament needed some explanation, as he subsequently acknowledged), Jerome claims— following Origen—that Solomon wrote Proverbs for the instruction of children, Ecclesiastes to remind adults of the transitoriness of worldly things and the Song of Songs for those approaching death; and with only slight verbal changes Alcuin began his own commentary, written in the last years of his life and substantially based on Jerome’s, similarly.292 Earlier in the century, Bede had commented on Proverbs. A mid/late-eighth-century Insular-written two-part codex, possibly but not certainly from a Northumbrian scriptorium, in common with others of that period contains the four Solomonic books plus Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), with extensive corrections added through (apparently) many decades and, in places, guide-notes for a rubricator.293 Alcuin’s own early acquaintance with the ‘Wisdom books’ of the Latin Vulgate is suggested by the forms in which he recalls and cites them. Although they are very unevenly distributed through the correspondence, over half of all the quotations of Old Testament passages, excluding the Psalter, are taken from the four Sapiential Books 290 Libri IV in Principium Genesis, ed. C.W. Jones, CCSL 118A (Turnhout, 1967), pp. 1–2. For the homilies (ed. Hurst; CCSL 122, pp. 1–378), compare L.T. Martin’s brief but pointed remarks in the Introduction to his and D. Hurst’s translation of Bede the Venerable: Homilies on the Gospels 1 (Kalamazoo, 1991), xi–xxiii. Bede’s techniques and purpose in his commentaries are interestingly discussed by R. Ray, ‘What do we know about Bede’s Commentaries?’, RTAM 49 (1982), 5–20. 291 Epist. 2, ed. Hilberg, CSEL 55 (1912/1996), no. cvii. For its supposed ‘popularity’ in the early Middle Ages, see Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, p. 196, with references to Laistner, etc. It was certainly known to Bede (one of six or seven Jerome letters quoted by him); the only pre-800 (or s. viii/ix) manuscript in which a copy will be found, however, is the unusually-comprehensive Épinal, BM 149 (68) CLA VI, 762, written at Tours in 744/45 but in the early-ninth century already elsewhere (Bischoff, Katalog, 1, no. 1169a). 292 S. Hieronymi presbyteri commentarius in Ecclesiasten, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 72 (Turnhout, 1959), pp. 247–361, here p. 250; PL 100, 668–9. For a probably Northumbrian copy of Jerome’s commentary, see ch. 2, pp. 264–5 and n. 38. 293 London, BL Egerton 1046, CLA II, 194a, b. Marsden, Text of the Old Testament, pp. 262–304, is now the fullest description: for its codicology and palaeography, see esp. pp. 262–9, 304. But for its non-York and possibly non-Northumbrian (even Continental) origin, see below, ch. 2, p. 259 and n. 23.

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and preponderantly from Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), which Alcuin commonly credits to Solomon. The very first quotation (scriptum est) in what is probably his earliest extant letter combines clauses from those two Books, with minor differences from the standard Vulgate text; and it is repeated in the same or slightly variant form in later letters.294 Elsewhere conflation and misquotation are frequent.295 When, some months after his move to Tours, Alcuin included in a long letter to the Frankish king an exhortation to the encouragement of learning at the Court, he introduced it with a catena of appropriately-adapted quotations from Proverbs.296 Conversely, the quotations in his letters have a notable lack of overlap with the lections from Libri Sapientiae (mostly, in fact, Ecclesiasticus) listed in ‘his’ lectionary.297

‘Vita quidem qualis fuit magistri’: Bede and Egberht The mature Alcuin, like his ‘biographer’, was declaredly interested in teachers and the teachers of teachers. A thirty-line excursus on Bede in the ‘York poem’ includes a shorter digression on Abbot Ceolfrith of Wearmouth-Jarrow; and Ceolfrith and his predecessor, the founder Benedict Biscop, were in turn commended as models to later abbots and their congregations.298 Alcuin’s customary epithets for Bede, in poems and letters, are praeclarus magister, ‘outstanding teacher’, and magister noster, ‘the teacher of our time’ or ‘of our land’; and he names him more than once as the latest in a succession of Fathers of the Church that began with Hilary of Poitiers or Ambrose.299 294 Sir 5.8, Prv 27.1: in epp. nos 1, 131 (p. 196) (both Ne tardes), 34 (pp. 76–7) (Noli tardare); also Prv 27.1 in ep. no. 105. 295 Thus, (iuxta sententiam Salomonis) Thesaurus invisus et sapientia abscondita, quae utilitas in utrisque? in ep. no. 289 (p. 448) and (quod Salomon ait) Thesaurus occultatus [al. occultus] et sapientia abscondita, quae utilitas in utrisque? in Gisla’s letter to Alcuin, ep. no. 196, are incorrect versions of Sir 20.32 sapientia absconsa et thesaurus invisus quae utilitas in utrisque? or Sir 41.17 sapientia enim abscondita et thesaurus occultus etc.’ Salomone dicente Frater si a fratre adiuvatur, civitas firma in ep. no. 17 (p. 47) is a mis-rendering of Prv 18.19; in ep. no. 29 iuxta Salomonem filius sapiens gloria est patris, and again in ep. no. 61 in conjunction with benedictio parentum filios exaltat, are seemingly misquotations of ?Prv 13.1 and Sir 3.11; and Alcuin gives a version of Ecclesiastes 11.6 in ep. no. 121. 296 Ep. no. 121. 297 Wilmart, ‘Lectionnaire d’Alcuin’, pp. 151–64, 165–8. 298 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1288–1295, 1301–1318, summarising Bede’s monastic career and writings, lines 1296–1300 on Ceolfrith’s death and translation; epp. nos 67, 19, 282, etc. 299 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 685–6, 846, etc., also praeclarus doctor in line 1306;

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With the help of the remarkable library assembled by the first abbots of the monastery and his own qualities of mind, Bede had made a major contribution to Latin Christian learning in little over thirty years. His admirers (which means almost every medievalist) are reluctant to acknowledge that he apparently failed to establish any scholarly tradition in his own communities. The deacon Guthbert, later abbot of Jarrow, composed the vivid and moving account of Bede’s death which circulated widely; in the earlier of his two surviving letters, written to Lul in 764, he describes himself as discipulus Beda presbiteri, with whom he had spent seventeen years, and refers to the recent scribal activity of his pueri; with the second he sent a copy of Bede’s ‘On the Temple’.300 There is not much else from his community. It is possible that some of the many, usually short, texts derived from Bede’s writings and/or transmitted under his name from the early-ninth century onwards were in fact ‘created’ at Wearmouth or Jarrow after his death; but even if they could be proved to be Northumbrian, it is equally possible that they originated in some other house that flourished in the eighth century and disappeared in the next (Hackness, Lastingham and Whitby among them). How much of Wearmouth-Jarrow’s learning—Bede’s writings, books or text-copies—passed to York and by what stages will never be known. Boniface’s assumption in the late 740s that Egberht’s church would be able to supply him with copies of Bede’s writings (unspecified) and his subsequent request for others, ‘especially his commentaries on the lectionary for the cycle of the year and on the Proverbs of Solomon’, stand alone.301 It is none the less legitimate to claim that the midcentury cathedral community had taken over from Bede a concept of carm. lxxii (MGH Poet. I, pp. 294–5): Baeda magister . . . nostrae cathegita terrae; epp. nos 19, 216, 284 etc.; also epp. nos 203, 213. Ray’s assertion, art. cit. p. 6 that in ep. no. 216 Alcuin ‘put [Bede] among the five fathers of the Church’ is mistaken. 300 Epistola de obitu Bedae, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 580–6; MGH Epistolae selectae 1, ed. Tangl, nos 116, 127, cf. the letter from Lul to him, idem, no. 126. The deacon is commonly referred to in modern literature as Cuthbert, which is not in fact the same name; and the consistent use of the Gut(h)ber(c)t form in all four letters (in contrast with Cuthuuin and St. Cuthbert) makes the identification with the abbot not so much probable as certain. 301 Epist. select. 1, ed. Tangl, nos 75, 91. Bede’s list of his writings in HE V 24 includes both Omeliarum evangelii libros II and Capitula lectionum of Books of the Old Testament and In totum novum testamentum, excepto evangelio. The character of these ‘summaries of readings’ or ‘summaries of chapters’ has been definitively established and many of the capitula identified in manuscripts by P. Meyvaert, ‘Bede’s Capitula Lectionum for the Old and New Testaments’, RevBén 105 (1995), 348–80. (The Capitula lectionum de circulo anno of, e.g., Würzburg Univ. bibl. M. p. th. f. 62 (CLA IX, 1423 a; s. viii1) fol. 2v is something quite other, namely, a listing of Mass epistle-pericopes.)

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Christian education memorably characterised as ‘the only serious and successful attempt to put into practice the principles of Augustine’s De doctrina christiana’, and proceeded to develop it in directions for which there were few, if any, recent precedents.302 The corollary of Alcuin’s reverence for the presbyter eximius meritis was an early dependence on his writings, in four or five different fields, and unusually frequent references to them in his letters; and he was not really falsifying the record when he spoke of Bede as someone who had taught him, although he was dead before Alcuin’s schooling began. His reading of Bede must surely have helped him to develop a prose-style largely free of the elaboration and affectations associated with Aldhelm, and adopted in part by the young Boniface and some of his English correspondents. But what above all Bede seems to have done for the young Alcuin was to provide a standard by which he could measure himself, to have given or confirmed the sense of purpose underlying the most immediately practical parts of a Christian education and, by implication, to have drawn attention to some of the areas (in exegesis, for example) where his work required supplementation. Most of what Alcuin knew of ‘the master’ other than through his books presumably came from Egberht, who had himself received instruction from Bede both in person and in writing. Contrary to what might have been expected from the affectionate reminiscence in the Vita Alcuini, previously quoted, Egberht is never mentioned by name in surviving letters nor even referred to indirectly except in so far as he is included among the antecessores of late-eighth-century archbishops.303 The Egberht of the ‘York poem’ is an admired but essentially political figure, not very different from the skeletal picture provided by the two sets of ‘northern annals’.304 Bede’s own letter They cannot be the subject of Boniface’s request, which in spite of the ambiguity of lectionarium anniversarium—a term apparently peculiar to himself—is evidently for the Homiliary (ed. Hurst, CCSL 122, pp. 1–378; cf. Bieler’s review in Scriptorium, 10 (1956), 323–4). 302 The quotation is from a lecture by Gerald Bonner, the published text of which I have failed to trace; but see his similar remarks in ‘Bede and medieval civilization’, ASE 2 (1973), 72–90, at p. 87. As always, of course, one has to say ‘if only we knew more about Spain . . .’. 303 When William of Malmesbury gave short extracts from ep. no. 121 in his Gesta regum Anglorum, I 65 (ed. Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, p. 96), he erroneously introduced the words Egberti archiepiscopi after magistri mei. 304 I.e. the Continuation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 572–76, ending with Egberht’s death in 766) and the ‘Northumbrian (?York) Annals’ incorporated (via Byrhtferth) in pseudo-Symeon, Historia Regum, ed. Arnold, 2, 31–43.

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to Egberht, written in his last year, touches on ‘learning’ only as an introduction to a succession of admonitions to the then new bishop; he had already expressed his teaching-philosophy in the autobiographical section of the Historia Ecclesiastica.305 The earliest of the three extant manuscripts of the letter suggests, but hardly proves, subsequent dissemination from York. The limited ‘literary’ heritage of Egberht himself belongs to a very different tradition from that which has given Bede his fame. The substantial authenticity of the Dialogus ecclesiasticae institutionis, with the possible exception of its concluding Interrogatio de jejunio Quatuor Temporum, has been generally accepted, even though the only complete text is in a post-1066 Salisbury manuscript.306 In the form in which it has come down to us, it consists of sixteen ‘questions and answers’ (interrogationes, responsiones) preceded by a short explanatory preface, which has some unusual vocabulary but not of a kind to throw serious doubt on its supposed date. The preface can be interpreted as being directed by the unknown questioner (not necessarily a cleric!) to the archbishop, who had perhaps previously answered the queries orally but is now invited to confirm or modify his answers, or else as an invitation by Egberht to a fellow-bishop to approve or comment on the suggested responses. Many of the problems are concerned with churchmen’s relations with a brutal and litigous secular society,307 and the answers are often agreeably pragmatic. The second interrogatio is: Can a cleric testify to a layman’s ‘last words’ in which he disposes of his possessions (de rebus suis: but perhaps relating to moveables only)? ‘yes’ is the answer, but better have two or three present, since relatives will be only too ready to challenge a single witness! The thirteenth is: Can married couples agree to divorce and one of them then re-marry? no, but account has to be taken of the consequences of ill-health, and sepe namque temporum permutatione, necessitas legem frangit! Overall, the questions and answers mingle secular and church law, in much the same way as Frankish royal capitularies half-a-century and more later.

305 Letter ed. Plummer, Bedae Opera Historica, 1, 405–23. Plummer knew only two manuscript-sources, one of which (BL Harl. 4688, a Durham ms. of s. xii in) he dated much too early. P. Lehmann located a third in Den Haag, Kon. Bibl., 70 H.7 (pt. iv), fols 45–58—this part of s. x in—where it follows Cuthbert’s Epistola de obitu Bedae in a distinctive version (ed. by N.R. Ker in: Medium Aevum 8 (1939), 40–4) and precedes Alcuin’s letter of 792/3 to Offa. 306 Above, p. 135 and n. 22. 307 Above, p. 135.

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What canon-law sources were used here is quite uncertain, even the most recent computer-generated concordances proving surprisingly unhelpful. At least two of the interrogationes and their replies, however, suggest knowledge of a selection of Pope Gregory I’s letters: which may, on the evidence of a letter from Boniface to Egberht, indicate a dating post-746/7 for the Dialogus.308 The one surviving copy of a major collection that is almost certainly Northumbrian, although it was on the Continent at an early date, is the book now Cologne (Diözesan- u. Dombibl.) cod. 213. Textually, this is a version of the so-called Collectio Sanblasiana, the exemplar of which is likely to have been of Italian origin. Unusually for a law-book, it is quite elaborately decorated: recent art-historians’ attribution to Lindisfarne or its orbit—for presentation to another church?—is shared by qualified palaeographers, with Echternach as the only serious alternative.309 In the Northumbrian Disciple’s version of Archbishop Theodore’s comprehensive and particularized rulings on the remedies or medicine of penance,310 only Liber Primus is strictly a penitential. 308 Parts of intt. xiv and xv, Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 409–10 seem to depend on Greg. Reg., ed. Ewald and Hartmann, II 37, IV 26, ed. Norberg, II 31, IV 26, with the first of these reading (probably) poenitentiam vel curiae aut cuilibet conditioni obnoxium, and the second being the only other letter to refer to curia. In a letter of 746/7, Boniface told Egberht that ‘I have sent you copies of letters of Saint Gregory which I have obtained from the Roman church’s archive (scrinio), which so far as I know have not reached Britain (non rebar ad Brittaniam venisse); and I will send some more if you so request, since I have obtained many others’: Epist. select. 1, ed. Tangl, no. 75 (p. 158). 309 CLA VIII, 1163; for the content, see Maassen, Geschichte, pp. 504–12. The discussion of Cologne 213 by R. McKitterick, ‘Knowledge of canon law in the Frankish kingdoms before 789: the manuscript evidence’, JTS n.s. 38 (1985), 110–14, is not helpful, and neither it nor the more summary account in N. Netzer, Cultural Interplay in the Eighth Century: the “Trier Gospels” and the making of a scriptorium at Echternach (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 8, 38–9 and nn., is entirely correct. The Sigibertus scripsit entry is not a colophon or part of one, and is penned with a ductus and in a script (and ink!) quite different from any in the text-part. There is no ‘inscription . . . indicat[ing] that the book was at Cologne by the eighth century’ or even in Archbishop Hildebald’s time (compare another canon-law manuscript, Cologne, Dombibl., cod. 212, Bischoff, Katalog, 1, no. 1946a). Its presence in the Middle-Frankish region by ca. 800 is, however, suggested by the isolated OHG. gloss chelactrot (as well as a single OE one): J. Hofmann, ‘Altenglische u. althochdeutsche Glossen . . .’, Beiträge zur Gesch. der deutschen Sprache u. Literatur 85 (1963), 42; R. Bergmann, Mittelfränkische Glossen, Rheinisches Archiv 61 (Bonn, 1966), pp. 89–90; Bischoff, MaSt 3, 75. 310 ‘Prefatio libelli ’, Canones Theodori, ed. Finsterwalder, p. 287: . . . ad remedium temperavit pentitentiae . . . propriae animarum medicis . . . Fomenta quod sequitur medicaminis . . ., etc. The character and origins of the various versions, and especially of that for which the self-styled ‘Northumbrian Disciple’ was responsible, have been notably clarified by T. Charles-Edwards, ‘The Penitential of Theodore and the Iudicia Theodori’, in: Archbishop Theodore, ed. Lapidge, pp. 141–74.

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‘Book II’ is a distinctive collection of canons: that is, regulations and guidance for both clergy and laity ‘without any specification of a penance, or indeed any penalty at all’, and subsequently recognised as such in early copies. These range very widely, from what should happen when churches—typically wood-built—are demolished or moved to a new site, and the right of bishops to ‘confirm in open country (in campo) if it is necessary’, to what spritual remedies are available to those who kill themselves when ‘vexed by the devil’ and the proper treatment of carrion-flesh.311 Many, perhaps a majority, of the topics are not known to have figured previously in Western canons; and they often reflect evolving practice or local conditions, including (probably) popular, pre-Christian, ‘taboos’, such as the fate of bees which have stung a man to death.312 It is, however, in the Disciple’s ‘Book I’, not ‘Book II’, that quotations from the canonical collection in Cologne 213 have been discerned.313 It has been suggested that the Disciple and those who taught him were associated with York cathedral. If so, the limitations of its schooling in the early part of the century are indicated by the comment that ‘our Disciple has too much literary ambition, and too infirm a grasp of Latin grammar, to be able to write lucid prose’.314 The early manuscript tradition is exclusively Continental; the indirect evidence does not include Alcuin, in his letters or elsewhere. Both Books of the Northumbrian Disciple’s version or the corresponding chapters of other versions are, however, a major source of the Penitential attributed to Egberht. Here, common material is substantially re-ordered, often chaotically, and many passages are slightly 311 Charles-Edwards, ‘Penitential of Theodore’, p. 147; ‘Discipulus umbrensium’, II i, 1–5, II ii, 1, X and XI, Canones Theodori, ed. Finsterwalder, pp. 311–12, 313, 324–6. 312 The bees should be killed but the honey may be eaten: II. xi, 6, Canones Theodori, ed. Finsterwalder, p. 325; for bees in early Continental law-codes and societal attitudes, see the references in Bullough, Friends, Neighbours and Fellow-drinkers, p. 2 n. 4. The early-eleventh century Burchard of Worms’s citation in his Decretum of more than thirty of Theodore’s canons (together with nearly twenty passages from Bk. I) provides a convenient partial test of their originality or uniqueness: see H. Hoffmann and R. Pokorny, Das Dekret des Bischofs Burchard von Worms, MGH Hilfsmittel 12 (Munich, 1991), ‘Quellenregister’, p. 271. 313 See M. Brett, ‘Theodore and the Latin canon law’, in Archbishop Theodore, ed. Lapidge, p. 136. But they must almost certainly have been taken from the lost exemplar of the Cologne copy, not from the existing manuscript. 314 Charles-Edwards, ‘Penitential of Theodore’, p. 148. The York connection was proposed by W. Levison in his review of Finsterwalder’s Canones Theodori, repr. in: Aus rheinischer und fränkischer Frühzeit (Düsseldorf, 1948), p. 301.

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adapted or shortened. Penances for drunkenness which constitute the first chapter in the Disciple’s text are the subject of ‘Egberht’s’ chapter eleven; while (lay) fornication, covered at length in ‘Theodore’, second chapter, is a very small part of ‘Egberht’s’ chapter four, titled in some manuscripts De cupiditate ceterisque flagitiis. ‘Egberht’s’ twelfth chapter De eucharistia omits the positive aspects of Theodore’s corresponding chapter De communione eucharistiae vel sacrificio.315 But prescriptions about polluted foodstuffs and liquids and the penances due for their consumption are in some respects more detailed than any version of Theodore’s rulings, although with omissions also; the additional matter is drawn from the Penitential of Cummian and at least one later penitential.316 A noteworthy change, for which there is no obvious explanation, is ‘Egberht’s’ substitution of iuramentum (here with the sense of ‘false oath’) for Theodore’s periurium, together with more varied penances.317 Its lengthy Prologue depends on a different range of source-texts, in combination with some apparently ‘original’ material; and this, with its title Excarpsum de canonibus catholicorum patrum vel paenitentiale ad remedium animarum domni Ecgberhti archiepiscopi Eburacae civitatis or a variant, was subsequently to enjoy a partially-independent history of transmission in late Anglo-Saxon and early Anglo-Norman England.318 It begins with a distinctive elaboration of the comparison between 315

Canones Theodori, ed. Finsterwalder, pp. 288–92, 305–6; Penitential ‘of Egberht’, Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 426–7, 420, 427–8. 316 ‘Egberht’ ch. xiii, cc. 2–6, 9, 10, Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 428–9; Paenitentiale Cummeani, (ix) x, 3 and 16, (xi) xii, 12–18, ed. Bieler, Irish Penitentials, pp. 124, 126, 130; ‘Discipulus’, I. vii, 6–12, cf. II. xi, Canones Theodori, ed. Finsterwalder, pp. 299–300, 326–7. The Disciple’s cc. 7, 9, 10 and 12 in I. vii have no counterpart in the other versions. L. Körntgen, Studien zu den Quellen der frühmittelalterlichen Bussbücher (Qu. u. Forsch. zum Recht im Mittelalter, Bd. 7; Sigmaringen, 1993), pp. 170–7 provides some indication of the extremely complex development and inter-connections of ‘alimentary’ regulations in eighth- and ninth-century Insular and Continental penitentials. 317 ‘Egberht’ c. vi, Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 423; ‘Discipulus’, I. vi, Canones Theodori, ed. Finsterwalder, pp. 297–8. Iuramentum in Charlemagne’s capitularies seems always to mean ‘(valid) oath’ and similarly periurium for ‘false testimony’. 318 R. Aronstam, ‘The Latin Canonical Tradition in late Anglo-Saxon England: the Excerptiones Egberti ’, Columbia University [N.Y.] Ph.D., 1974; P. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, 1 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 213–19. An early example of the Prologue totally dissociated from the Penitential proper is the English pontifical (with benedictional), Paris BNF. lat. 10575, which has accordingly acquired the illegitimate name ‘the Egberht pontifical’: ed. H.M.J. Banting, Two Anglo-Saxon Pontificals, HBS 104 (London, 1989), the Egberht prologue at pp. 5–7; but for a dating ca. 1000, see D.N. Dumville, Liturgy and the Ecclesiastical History of Late Anglo-Saxon England, Studies in Anglo-Saxon History 5 (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 85–6 (with references).

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soul-doctoring and medical treatment of the body which had been taken over from the early Latin Fathers, and perhaps from Caesarius of Arles, by both Columbanus (who is quoted verbatim) and Cummian in their penitentials, and from them very succinctly by Theodore’s ‘Northumbrian Disciple’, and by the ?early-eighth-century compiler of the so-called Excarpsus Cummeani.319 Unusually, however, ‘Egberht’ interposes a further comparison with the practice of ‘judges of secular cases’. After a long section attacking those who are inadequately prepared to heal wounded souls or be shepherds of their flocks, it lists the books with which priests should arm themselves to fulfil their responsibilities; and it continues with a detailed instruction to take account of age, rank or status and wealth when dealing with misconduct.320 Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Egberht’s authorship of the Paenitentiale has been almost unanimously rejected by Continental scholars, although intermittently defended by others, particularly in Britain and North America. The principal arguments have traditionally been the presence in the text of anachronisms, real or supposed, such as the list of prescribed liturgical books, and of words for which the early testimonies are exclusively ‘Continental’ (Frankish); and the widespread early dissemination of versions in which it is combined

319 Compare ‘Egberht’s’ penitentiale ad remedium animarum . . . Institutio illa sancta que fiebat in diebus patrum nostrorum . . . quae statuta erunt penitentibus . . . medicamenta salutis eterne, Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 416, and the corresponding phrases in the Discipulus umbrensium Prologue, with Cummian’s Prologus de medicinae salutaris animarum. De remediis vulnerum secundum priorem patrum . . . antea medicamina [al.-enta] conpendi[ i] ratione intimemus, ed. Bieler, Irish Penitentials, p. 108 = ‘Excerpta Cummiani’, ed. H.J. Schmitz, Die Bussbücher und das kanonische Bussverfahren (Düsseldorf, 1898), p. 597. Egberht’s, quia diversitas culparum diversitatem facit penitentibus medicamentorum vel sicut medici corporum diversa medicamenta . . . solent facere contra diversitatem infirmitatum . . ., Haddan and Stubbs, cit., corresponds with Columbanus’s Paenitentiale (B): Diversitas culparum diversitatem facit paenitentiarum; nam et corporum medici diversis medicamenta generibus conponunt. Aliter enim vulnera . . ., ed. Bieler, Irish Penitentials, p. 98 = ‘Exc. Cummiani’, ed. Schmitz, cit. For the structure and transmission of Columbanus’s Penitential, T.M. Charles-Edwards, ‘The Penitential of Columbanus’, Columbanus Studies, ed. Lapidge, pp. 217–39 is essential reading. A new edition of the Excarpsus is being prepared by Dr. F.B. Asbach (Regensburg); the oldest manuscript is Copenhagen Kong. Bibl. Ny. Kgl. Saml. 58 8o, which can hardly be later than mid-eighth century. J.T. McNeill, ‘Medicine for sin as prescribed in the Penitentials’, Church History 1 (1932), 14–26 has not been superseded, although subsequent studies occasionally correct and amplify McNeill’s account. For the pseudo-Augustine sermo 254, inc. Hortatur nos saepius, sancta Scriptura ad medicamenta confessionis, see below, ch. 3. 320 Consultation of CETEDOC showed no very close parallels to the wording of any of these passages!

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or conflated with the (Continental-origin) Penitential attributed to Bede. To these have latterly been added the apparent use of the Paenitentiale Remense, also supposedly of eighth-century Frankish origin.321 The transmission of the Penitential under Egberht’s name and see begins already ca. 800, with two manuscripts in (Continental) Anglo-Saxon minuscule respectively from the Main region and from an unlocated scriptorium; and it is difficult to imagine the circumstances in which a writing-centre in Francia would attribute a newly-composed penitential to an ill-documented northern-English bishop—unless, conceivably, in the circle of (Arch)bishop Lul of Mainz.322 The possibility of early Continental interpolation of a text that had originated in 321

R. Haggenmüller, Die Überlieferung der Beda und Egbert zugeschriebenen Bussbücher (Europäisches Hochschulschriften, Bd. 461; Frankurt-Bern-New York-Paris, 1991), reviews the literature on pp. 27–48. The history of the text of ‘Egberht’ is summarised idem, pp. 187–95; for the use of the Paen. Rem. (F.B. Asbach, Das Poenitentiale Remense und der sogen. Excarpsus Cummeani, diss. Regensburg; Regensburg, 1979), see idem, p. 194 and passim. The list of books ( psalterium, lectionarium, antefonarium, missalem, baptisterium, martyrologium, ?homiliary and computus) is claimed to be taken from an ‘Aachen conciliar decree of 802’; but this is in fact a Liège episcopal decree of 802/9, MGH Capitula Episcoporum 1, ed. Brommer, pp. 39–40, which omits antefonarium, baptisterium, homily and computus. These are, however, all included in a comparable list in a near-contemporary Basel episcopal decree, idem, p. 211; but both synods are almost certainly later than ‘Egberht’. ‘Frankish’ lexica include caraios ‘soothsayers’ in ‘Egberht’ viii. 4, Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 424 (compare Concilia Galliae, A. 511–A. 695, pp. 256, 265 and Pirmin, Scarapsus, c. 22. ed. G. Jecker, Die Heimat des Hl. Pirmin (Münster i. W., 1927), p. 54); catto in ‘Egberht’ xiii. 4, Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 428, replacing Cummian’s muriceps, Bieler, Irish Penitentials, p. 130 (for the word-history of cattus—this being the earliest place?—see MeyerLübke, REW. p. 170 [no. 1770]); and perhaps causa but hardly iuramentum, cf. DMLBS s. vv. Another possible ‘Continental’ feature is laici tres dies sine vino et carne al. sine cervisa vel vino et carne in ‘Egberht’ xi. 10 and 4, Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 427, in place of Theodore’s laici sine cervisa (compare Alcuin’s complaint in ep. no. 8), Discipulus umbrens.’ I. i. 6, Canones Theodori, ed. Finsterwalder, p. 289; but Cummian speaks of both wine and beer. 322 Because the only two letters (other than Bede’s) addressed to Egberht and the two surviving letters exchanged between his successor, under his bye-name Koaena, and Lul (none of them, it should be noted, naming York) are included in ninthcentury letter-collections, component elements of which were assembled at Mainz in Lul’s lifetime (+786) and possibly not long after 773: see Tangl’s introduction to his edition in Epist. Select. 1 and Levison, England and the Continent, pp. 235, 280. Familiarity with Alcuin’s ‘York poem’ would have been required for a fuller knowledge of Egberht. The manuscripts are Vienna Nat. bibl. cod. lat. 2223 and Vatican BAV Pal. lat. 554: for the former, see Bischoff, ‘Panorama’, in MaSt 3, 27–8 (Engl. transl., p. 43), Haggenmüller, Überlieferung, pp. 114–15 (with extensive bibliography); for the latter, see CLA I, no. 95; Bischoff, Lorsch2, pp. 57–8, 124, Haggenmüller, Überlieferung, pp. 108–9 (again with extensive bibliography). For Pal. lat. 554, Bischoff did not exclude an origin in ‘England selbst’ as an alternative to ‘einem deutschangelsächsischen Skriptorium’.

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York before 766 still seems to me an alternative explanation of the evidence;323 but in view of the uncertainty, it is impossible to rely on the ‘Egberht’-penitential as evidence for York learning, episcopal teaching or attitudes to ‘handling sin’ in Alcuin’s adolescent years.

Master and School The scola of a religious community, whether Bede’s WearmouthJarrow or Egberht’s York, is before all else the continuous apprenticeship of a younger generation in its common worship and the skills associated with it. But these lead almost imperceptibly to the scola as a context of formal instruction in the more advanced grammatica and mathematica of that worship, and of a programme of access to the ‘spiritual knowledge’ which, through thoughtful reading, underpinned and justified it. The organization of such a ‘school’ is hardly possible until a cathedral community reaches a certain size, with a regular intake of boys of varying ages whose education can no longer be left entirely to the bishop. That development seems to have occurred at York in the later years of Egberht’s pontificate; linked with it was the naming of the archbishop’s relative Ælberht, already in priest’s orders and defensor of the clergy (according to Alcuin) and with a reputation for learning, as magister.324 Without Alcuin, Ælberht would be little more than a name, the writer of a single letter to Lul of Mainz and the recipient of one from him.325 Because we can see him through the eyes of a devoted pupil who succeeded him as teacher at York, and because cathedral schools and their magistri are commonplace in the High Medieval centuries, it is easy and customary to see nothing unusual about the early York school except its achievement. Yet it was clearly exceptional and perhaps even unique in its day. We shall look in vain for 323 Rob Meens seems to hold a similar view: see his ‘The frequency and nature of early medieval penance’, Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, ed. P. Biller and A.J. Minnis, York Studies in Medieval Theology 2 (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 35–61, at p. 52 n. 77. 324 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1427–31. For the significance of defensor (clero omni)—a rhetorical or a technical term?—compare Godman’s commentary and references, ed. cit., p. 112: but add Alcuin, De rhetorica c. 16, ed. Heil, p. 533, ed. Howell, p. 92. 325 As n. 322.

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anything comparable in continental Europe, on both sides of the Alps. The original version of Chrodegang’s Rule for Metz, unlike the later expanded version, makes no specific provision for the instruction of the young; indeed, its only reference to teaching is when it prescribes that the archdeacon and the primicerius should have the appropriate qualities ut possint docere clerum in lege divina and the canonical way of life. The magistri who figure intermittently in Italian charters and inscriptions, including one recently discovered at the cathedral of Narni (north of Rome), have no obvious teaching function. The Lucca cathedral magister scholae recorded in mid-century is in charge of its cantores, and may indeed not have been fully literate; even at the turn of the century, the compilation of a miscellaneous manuscript there (including one of the earliest copies of an Alcuin letter outside the primary collections), written by clerics in a variety of scripts reflecting their individual teachers, was apparently under the personal supervision of the bishop—a local man, yet writing a Visigothic-influenced hand. The books produced between ca. 770 and 810 by members of the cathedral community at Freising (S. Germany), including a probably Northumbrian Peregrinus, offer no evidence for a dominant ‘master’, either in their scripts or their contents.326 It has been said that the passage in the ‘York poem’ that comes closest to true inspiration (which is unfair only to a small number of other passages) is that in which Alcuin gives a character-sketch of the man who influenced him most deeply during his late teens and twenties, and in so doing ‘was effectively sketching a portrait of himself in later years’. This was his most intense attachment before Arn: on Ælberht’s death in 780, Alcuin (according to the Vita) ‘wept for him as if he had lost a mother and yet would not be comforted (nolebat tamen consolationem recipere)’—an allusion to Matthew’s quotation of a familiar line in Jeremiah, which could so easily be a hagiographic commonplace but apparently isn’t. ‘My master’, ‘my beloved master’ is recalled at least nine times in the letters of Alcuin’s

326 Metz: Regula c. 25, ed. Pelt, pp. 20–1. Narni: G. Binazzi, ‘Appunti su di una singolare iscrizione imprecatoria Narniense’, Rivista di Archeologia Cristiana 67 (1991), 337–45. Lucca: L. Schiaparelli, Il codice 490 della Biblioteca Capitolare di Lucca, Studi e Testi 36 (Città del Vaticano, 1924); CLA III, 303; H. Schwarzmeier, Lucca u. das Reich bis zum Ende des 11. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1972), pp. 85–7; for the magister scholae, cf. Bullough, ‘Le scuole cattedrali’, p. 114. Freising: Bischoff, Südostdeutsches Schreibschulen, 1, 60–4, 71–94.

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last eight years, always warmly but only once with the addition of his name.327 Neither the reminiscences in the letters nor the secondor third-hand references to Ælberht’s time as teacher in the Vita Alcuini provide precise chronological indications. Alcuin’s assertion in the epitaph he composed for him that ‘he initiated me in the liberal arts during my tender years’ is equally imprecise, and any argument based on the assumption that Alcuin became Ælberht’s pupil in his (early) teens is simply circular. The letters of Boniface, martyred in 754, never name Ælberht; and even if, as is not excluded, Ælbercht was corresponding with Boniface’s successor at Mainz, Lul, before his own promotion to bishop, this is neither certain nor of much help. Dating the beginning of his mastership to sometime in the mid/late 750s (even a slightly later date being possible) is as precise as we can hope to be.

A New Régime and a Wider World Quite apart from the emergence of Ælberht as ‘my teacher’, the years 758/9–61 could be seen subsequently, not least by Alcuin himself, as marking a caesura in his adolescence. They also constitute an unmistakeable turning-point in the history of his patria. The ‘York poem’, although continuing until the death of Bishop Ælberht (780), names no Northumbrian king after Eadberht. In 758 he had handed over the kingdom to his son Oswulf and become a cleric, dying at York ten years later;328 but in late July of that same year or (more probably) the next year, 759, Oswulf was murdered by his household. Nine or ten days afterwards, on August 5th, Eadberht’s onetime patricius Æthelwald Moll, ‘chosen by his following (a suo plebe)’ 327 Vita c. 8: ed. Arndt, p. 189; epp. nos 112, 114 (where uniquely he is also named), 116, 121 (p. 127), 143, 148 (p. 239), 200 (p. 332), 233, 271. For William of Malmesbury’s misquotation of nos 114 and 121, see ASE 22, 118 n. 82 and above, n. 303. For the Vita’s nolebat etc. compare, however, Bede’s exegesis of Ier 31.15 (= Mt 2.18, part of the Gospel reading for 28 December) in his Homiliary, I 10 (ed. Hurst, CCSL 122, p. 69): ‘the Church bewails the removal of the saints from this world, but she does not wish to be consoled in such a way that (non ita velle consolari ut) those who have been victorious over the world by death should return once again to bear with her the strife of the world’ and so on; and compare further Alcuin’s comments in his carm. ix, lines 208–11 (MGH Poet. I, p. 234), on those killed at Lindisfarne in 793. 328 HR ed. Arnold, 2, 41 and 44. Having already been included in the ‘Lindisfarne’ Liber Vitae list of kings and dukes at twenty-third place, he is also fiftieth in its list of abbots, as Eadberct rex: Gerchow, Gedenküberlieferung, pp. 304, 306.

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according to the Historia Ecclesiastica Continuation, formally assumed the kingship of Northumbria. The date, recorded by the ‘Northumbrian (?York) Annals’, is surely not mere chance. It was the ‘Heavenly birthday’ of the seventh-century Northumbrian king and eventually martyr-king, Oswald, entered as such in Willibrord’s personal calendar and in the early calendar or calendars underlying those in the manuscripts Berlin Phillips 1869 and Milan Ambr. M. 12 sup.; and Æthelwald almost certainly lacked royal blood.329 The annalistic Continuation goes on to say that in the second year of Æthelwald’s reign there was a distressing outbreak of ‘pestilence’ which lasted for nearly two years, the population suffering from sicknesses of various kinds but especially the wasting-effects of dysentery.330 Æthelwald’s rule, moreover, was not unchallenged: in 761 an unidentified Oswine (from a royal line? a patricius?) was killed in open warfare. The winter of 763–4 was an exceptionally hard one all over north-west Europe, like no other in living memory, so that trees and plants withered and ‘marine animals’ were found dead; later in the year towns in several kingdoms, including southern Northumbrian Doncaster and York, were devastated by fire.331 In 765 Northumbria 329 Cont. Bedae, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 574; HR ed. Arnold, 2, 41. Calendars: of Willibrord, ed. Wilson, pp. 10 and 36 (‘apparently by the original hand’); Phillips, ed. Borst, Karolingische Kalenderreform, p. 281; Ambr., ed. Bischoff, p. 253. August 5 was a Saturday in 758, a Sunday (Pent. VIII) in 759. We do not know what massset would have been used on that day, but it is probable that the Gospel-lection for Pent. VIII was Mc 8.1–9 (‘the Feeding of the Four Thousand’). Janet Nelson’s notable studies of royal inauguration rituals in the eighth and ninth centuries, conveniently brought together in Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London and Ronceverte, 1986), pp. 239 –360, do not (I think) consider the evidence for Northumbrian practice before Eardwulf ’s consecration in 796: but see generally ‘Inauguration Rituals’, ibid., pp. 284–7, and her arguments for the presence in the royal ordines in the earliest English pontificals of Insular material of very much earlier date: ‘The earliest surviving royal ordo’, ibid., pp. 341–60, and esp. pp. 350–9. 330 Cont. Bedae, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 574–6. For mortalitas’s semantic shift in early Christian texts and their early-medieval successors, see Herren, Hisperica Famina 2, 114, noting that in ‘the Book of Cerne’ (‘Lorica of Laidcenn’, Kuypers, Book of Cerne, p. 85 and pl.) the OE gloss is wòl. But in the seventh and eighth century it does not necessarily or only refer to bubonic plague (cf. Herren, cit., WallaceHadrill, Bede Commentary, p. 131): in the ‘Vatican Gelasian’ sacramentary’, the masses in Bk. III xxxviii–xli (ed. Wilson, pp. 255–7, ed. Mohlberg nos 1377–92) with the heading Orationes tempore quod absit mortalitatis are followed (III xlii: ed. Wilson, pp. 257–8, ed. Mohlberg nos 1393–97) by Orationes pro mortalitate animalium. 331 For annalistic references to the long and bitter freeze-up see, e.g., the ‘Northumbrian Annals’ in HR ed. Arnold, 2, 42, Ann. Ulst., ed. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, p. 216 (nix magna .iii.bus fere mensibus) and Ann. s. Amandi, ed. Pertz, MGH SS I, p. 10, which gives the precise dates 14 December (763) to 16 March. See also the letter from the abbot of Jarrow, Epist. Select. 1, ed. Tangl, no. 116.

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experienced what seem to have been severe electrical storms. This is very much the conjunction of disasters that the anonymous Irish author of the ‘Twelve Abuses ’ associates with the Unjust King, and the ?Englishman Cathwulf summarises from an intermediate source, with a listing of some of their opposites, when writing to Charlemagne in the mid 770s.332 At the end of October Æthelwald abdicated; the location, the unidentified Wincanheale where two Northumbrian church councils were subsequently held, in conjunction with Irish evidence for his clerical tonsuring, strongly suggests that in his case this was involuntary.333 His successor was a previously undocumented Alchred, ‘sprung, as some say, from the stock of King Ida’ via a father Eanwine: which suggests that his royal ancestry was at least dubious, but accords with other indications that his territorial connections were with the Bernician north, rather than (as were Æthelwald’s) with the Deiran south. In spite of Æthelwald’s manifest failure as a ruler, later evidence—all of it circumstantial but cumulatively powerful—suggests that Alcuin none the less identified himself and his primary loyalties thereafter with the deposed king’s line, not that of Eadberht or any other claimants to the throne, although with increasing reservations: and this gives added point to his remark in a letter to Æthelwald’s son nearly thirty years later (the earliest of his ‘admonitory letters’ addressed to a king) that anyone reading the Holy Scriptures and reflecting on Histories of older days and considering how things turn out in the World ‘will find that kings have lost kingdoms and peoples have lost their homeland’ for their misbehaviour.334 Whether Alcuin’s attachment reflects an earlier family connection with the patricius as its lord or unrecorded favours to the young cler332 De XII Abusivis, ed. Hellmann, pp. 51–3 (fuller details below, ch. 2, pp. 275–6 and n. 71; MGH Epp. IV, p. 503, with the recent comments of J. Story, ‘Cathwulf, kingship and the royal abbey of Saint-Denis’, Speculum, 74 (1999), 3–21, esp. 7–11, 20–1, and M. Garrison, ‘Letters to a king and biblical exempla: the examples of Cathuulf and Clemens Peregrinus’, Early Medieval Europe 7/iii (1998), 305–28. 333 HR ed. Arnold, 2, 43: for Wincanheale, cf. idem, 51 (also ASC ‘E’ s.a. 788, which is not to be confused with the legatine synod of 786), 59–60; Annals ‘of Tigernach’, ed. W. Stokes, in Revue Celtique 17 (1896), p. 262: Moll rì Saxan clericus eficitur. 334 Ep. no. 16 (only in the ‘English collections’, and apparently therefore—since it was written in Francia—the ‘recipient’s text’), p. 43. For the language, compare ‘York poem’, lines 110–12: eventus venientis dicta probavit/ hospitis: occubuit statim rex ense nefando/invidus imperii vitae simul illius atque; and the two OT passages Gn 41.13,14, postea rei probavit eventus . . . ad regis imperium eductum, and Sir 18.33 . . . in saeculo (so a majority of early testimonies, including the pre-Alcuin Tours manuscripts and the Alcuin Bibles, for the correct in sacculo) eris enim invidus tuae vitae.

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icus by the king is not now determinable. It is certainly arguable that that same attachment is one of the reasons why in the composition of his ‘York poem’, and particularly if this is (as I believe) a work of the 780s rather than of the 790s, Alcuin pays so much attention to the miraculous powers of Oswald’s relics, both soon after his ‘martyrdom’ and more recently. The almost fifty-line account of two visions and the subsequent death of an unnamed young man who ‘deeply influenced my boyhood with his advice’—the only such allusion anywhere in his writings—with which, as a contrived afterthought, he finally brings his poem to an end, seems to be modelled on the account of one such miracle which figures only in one branch of the Historia Ecclesiastica tradition. (The second vision, but not the death, was also recalled in the letter of 794 quoted at the beginning of the present chapter, where he is called puer noster Seneca.)335 This putative loyalty, the introduction of the anchorite Echa in the ‘York poem’ narrative where a reference to Alchred might otherwise have been expected, and Alcuin’s age at the time are, collectively, powerful reasons for doubting whether he could have played any part in the compilation of ‘genealogies’ intended to strengthen the new king’s claims to the Northumbrian throne.336 In a brief civil war during 757/8, as the Northumbrian Annals record, Offa, grandson of his murdered predecessor’s long-dead cousin Eanwulf, had imposed himself on the Mercian kingdom. He was to rule it for thirty-eight years: whatever the basis of his authority— and sheer ruthlessness seems to have been a major factor—its superficial stability in those years and the achievements that that made possible were in sharp contrast with Alcuin’s own patria, duly reflected in his writings. By the date of the ‘York poem’, two decades of 335 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 302–406, predominantly but not entirely from HE III 12 and 11; ibid., lines 1600–48, with which compare HE IV 14 (in ‘Mtype’ manuscripts only) and Godman’s commentary at pp. 130–1. Note, however, that the declared reason for including the story in the poem is that some months previously Seneca had been granted a vision of what is now commonly called ‘the provisional Heaven’. 336 The genealogies are those in the multi-part manuscript London BL Cotton Vespasian B. vi, fols 104 ff. (Mercia, 805 × 814 [?812]), which also include the text of the ‘York metrical martyrology’ (above, pp. 208–9 and n. 237), as ed. and expounded by D. Dumville, ‘The Anglian collection of royal genealogies and regnal lists’, ASE 5 (1976), 23–50 (of which there is a reprint with supplementary notes which I have not seen). ‘A close connection’ between the collection and Alcuin was proposed by P. Wormald, The Anglo-Saxons, ed. Campbell, p. 117, although he also notes the omission of Æthelwold Moll, etc.; and see further, below.

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strained relations between the two kingdoms were close to ending, if they were not already in the past: Alcuin provides there, briefly, the only pre-800 record of Offa’s benefactions to Oswald’s tomb at Bardney (Lincolnshire), without actually naming the place.337 In his maturity, Alcuin exchanged letters with the Mercian king, with members of his family and with courtiers and former courtiers; he was in touch with bishops and with religious houses in widely-separated regions of the Mercian kingdom; and he seems for a time even to have had authority over an unidentified monastery there. Whether any of these connections derived from early encounters in the Northumbrian ‘capital’, and if so when, is unknown and unknowable; equally, there is no unambiguous evidence in the letters or elsewhere for contact with or visits to the Mercian Court and ‘capital’ (i.e. Tamworth [Staffs?]) before the year 786.338 In the light of Alcuin’s later expressed dismay that kings ‘of ancient stock’ were hardly to be found in England, it is not excluded that he was the instrument of the transmission of the ‘northern’ collection of genealogies to Mercia, from which the earliest manuscript copy comes, and thence to Wales; but there is unfortunately no supporting evidence.339

From York to Rome—and Places Between Because of Ælberht’s relationship by blood (although only a distant one?) with the Northumbrian king who was murdered in ?759, his political loyalties, and conversely his sources of patronage, could have been very different from Alcuin’s; and this finds some support in his 337 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 388–91. King Æthelred of Mercia (abd. 704, ob. 716) had been a benefactor, then abbot, of Bardney; for the possible political significance of this, see D. Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1989), p. 121. 338 Correspondents: see Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, pp. 115–20, and the earlier ep. no. 70; also ep. no. 61, to Offa’s son Ecgfrith. Alcuin’s monastery: the monasterium In Mercum (which I take to be a locative form of the English regional name, like Bede’s In Feppingum, HE III, 21, cf. Eddius’s monasterium eius quod in Undolum positum est, Vita Wilfr. c. 65), which in ep. no. 62 (p. 106) he appears to be saying had been unfairly taken from him by the Mercian rulers. For the 786 visit, see below, ch. 3. 339 Ep. no. 129 (p. 192) of 797, included in his ‘personal’ collection. His involvement in the transmission of the genealogical collection, which is also included in the ninth-century historical miscellany associated with the name of Nennius, is suggested by Wormald, The Anglo-Saxons, ed. Campbell, pp. 116–7; but cf. n. 336 above.

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advancement from the mastership to the (arch)bishopric of York after Alchred had replaced Æthelwald, although only after almost a year’s interregnum in the see, and his later resignation during the first reign of Æthelwald’s son.340 That the warm and sometimes distinctivelyphrased letter from King Alchred to Lul of Mainz in 773 was composed by a York cleric is highly likely, but tells us nothing about the political stance of others at the cathedral or in the town.341 Whatever may have been the immediate context or prompting, Ælberht spent a part of Æthelwald’s discomforting reign on an extended Continental journey. In doing so, he introduced his disciple, then in his early twenties, to a wider world, well beyond the Humber. Alcuin’s account of Ælberht in ‘the York poem’ says that while still a teacher and before he became bishop ‘he travelled devoutly to the city of Rome . . . visiting holy places far and wide’. Characteristically of the poem, no autobiographical statement is linked with that passage: but in his earlier epitaph for Ælberht, probably written not long after his return from another journey to Rome (781) and as much about himself as about its nominal subject, he recalls how he had eagerly followed his master wherever he went, and notably to ‘universally-honoured Rome’ and the ‘flourishing kingdom of the Franks’.342 Stages on the journey are the subject of remarks in two much-later letters; a third may provide the one explicit reference to that first visit to the Papal City. In a letter of unknown date which he preserved in his ‘personal’ collection Alcuin recalls how, ‘following in the tracks of his master’, he had once visited Murbach and greatly admired its monastic life-style: indeed, he would (he claimed) have liked to share it!343 A 340

See ch. 3, ad init. Epist. select. 1, ed. Tangl, no. 121. The king’s assurance that Lul’s name and the names of others he had sent in cunctis monasteriis nostris dicionibus subiunctis perpetuis litterarum monumentis commendantur, and remembered in daily prayers, interestingly anticipates Alcuin’s request (ep. no. 302; cf. ASE 22, 117 n. 81) to the probably Mercian Ealdorman Ardbertus that nostri nominis memoriam per ecclesias . . . ditionis vestrae deprecor ut iubeatis fieri. But the closing formula Divina maiestas indefesso certamine pro Christi ecclesia desudantem (!) te conservare dignetur will not be found in Boniface’s, Lul’s or Alcuin’s letters; and Alcuin does not use the salutation-formula nobis perpetuali amicitia copulato. 342 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1458–9 (imitating both Paulinus of Nola and Venantius Fortunatus: but loca sancta is his own phrase, and in his letters seems generally to be used of monasteries); carm. ii, MGH Poet. I, pp. 206–7, in which Alcuin is effectively the subject of eight out of fourteen lines! For the transmission of the epitaphium, see below, ch. 2. 343 Ep. no. 271, with the title Ad fratres Corbeienses in both H manuscripts, although 341

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journey to or from Italy via Murbach, founded little more than thirty years previously in a side-valley approachable only from the east, suggests—without conclusively establishing—the travellers’ use of the Great St. Bernard pass and the Val d’Aosta to enter Italy, and perhaps of the river Rhine.344 A letter to the Frankish king, in which Alcuin specifically refers to the Roman journey made when he was a young man (adolescens) and which is closely datable (799, Febr.-Mar.), is in some other respects very problematic; it has also prompted extraordinary fantasies in otherwise reputable scholarly literature. Alcuin here recalls that while he was lingering for some days in the Lombard capital Pavia, the grammarian Peter (of Pisa) engaged in a dialogue (disputatio) with an otherwise unrecorded Jew whom he names as (?)Iulius, and that he heard that their exchanges were recorded in writing; he goes on to suggest that the king should ask Angilbert whether Peter had ever told him anything about it. Alcuin does not say (as most modern accounts assert) that he had been present at the debate. But if this is implied, then the further implication—from his suggestion that Angilbert should be consulted—is that he recalled little or nothing of it. Could the truth be that the adolescent Alcuin was there and simply failed to understand what the disputants were saying?345 In a letter to the king a year previously, in which he reported the explanations given to his Tours pupils of the terms Septuagesima, Sexagesima, Quinquagesima (substantially correct ones), Alcuin adds that sub protectione beati Leodegarii episcopi shows that its destination was in fact Murbach. (The next letter in the manuscripts, ep. no. 237, is to filio carissimo Antonio, identifiable as Abbot Adalhard of Corbie. The semi-literal use of vestigia here and in the dedicatory preface of the Vita Richarii (vestrae pietatis [sc. Karoli ] vestigia ibidem prosecutus: ep. no. 306; MGH SSRM IV [ed. Krusch], p. 389) contrasts with the metaphorical veterum vestigia patrum . . . secutus (of Bede’s life) in ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1313–14, and similarly of the York book-collection in id., line 1536. Paul Meyvaert has noted that it was a favourite expression of Bede himself (Famulus Christi, pp. 62–3 n. 7); and Alcuin’s lines 1535–7 seem to be echoing verses attributed to Bede in their unique late manuscript source (Leland). 344 For Alcuin’s subsequent use of the Rhine river-route to visit the Frankish Court, or less plausibly on a second journey to Rome, see below, Ch. 2; for early Carolingian use of the route via St.-Maurice d’Agaune, Mons Iovis and Ivrea, through the Val d’Aosta, which could be approached from the north-west or north, see e.g. ARF s.aa. 773, 801, 804: ed. Kurze, pp. 36, 114, 116, 119. 345 Ep. no. 172 (p. 285), a letter with an unusually complex manuscript-transmission; a detailed critique in Bullough, ‘Reminiscence and Reality: Text, Translation and Testimony of an Alcuin letter’, JournMedLat 5 (1995), 174–201, esp. 177–92. That the disputatio referred to is reflected in a question-and-answer commentary on Daniel in the early-ninth century Court-related manuscript Brussels Bib. roy. II 2572 is suggested idem, 193–200.

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‘while he was at Rome’ he had heard ‘certain teachers’ assert that Orientals fasted for nine weeks, Greeks for eight, Romans only for seven, but he did not know the authority for such a claim.346 Unfortunately this could equally well have been during his visit in (780–)781, when he was almost certainly in the city on Septuagesima Sunday (February 11th); but the fact that ‘my master of blessed memory’ is included with the king and his family in the letter’s unusually-elaborate exordium perhaps points to the earlier occasion. It is possible, finally, that the journey with Ælberht also took in a visit to the court of King Pippin, although this cannot safely be inferred from the language of the epitaph; and if the reported exchange of gifts between Pippin and King Eadberht has a basis in fact, it would have been too early (because not later than 758) to be linked with the Roman visit.347 The impact on Alcuin of his youthful introduction to both Francia and Rome seems in many ways a muted one. The only Roman churches mentioned in the entire corpus of his poems and letters are those of St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s; and the first of these is named only because ‘it is said to have been sacked by treacherous hands’ (i.e. the Lombards?).348 In Alcuin’s extended verse-lament on the destruction of Lindisfarne in 793, where this occurs, the city had previously provided him with a type of a once great place, like Jerusalem, ‘city of David’, now ruined and desolate; and writing to Adalhard of Corbie in 799, he associates Rome with being ill!349 Against this, however, must be set other evidence in the poems: the 346 Ep. no. 143 (p. 225). The standard eighth-century—Roman? Frankish?—understanding of the length of the Lenten fast is presumably that stated in OR XV c. 82, ed. Andrieu, Ordines, 2, 115: Greci autem a LX ma de carne levant ieiunium, monachi vero et Romani devoti vel boni christiani a L ma levant, reliquus vulgus a quadragesima. The words bracketed are unique to the text in Montpellier, Bibl. Univ. (Fac. de Médécine), 412, written at Tours or in its vicinity, possibly in Alcuin’s lifetime: could they be a local addition? 347 Above, p. 238 and n. 328. 348 St. Peter’s: carm. ix, lines 73 ff. (MGH Poet. I, pp. 230–1), Iam domus alma Dei, princeps qua corpore pausat/ Petrus. . . ./Perfidiae manibus fertur vastata fuisse. Ep. no. 180, the author of which had planned to visit Rome et ad sanctissimum Petri sepulchrum calidis buccis oscula in pavimento figere, has nothing to do with Alcuin; and ep. no. 127 (p. 189) is a letter from Pope Leo III to the Mercian king. St. Paul’s: epp. nos 150, 156 (in the light of the king’s letter to Angilbert, ep. no. 92). 349 Carm. ix, lines 37–40 (MGH Poet. I, p. 230), concluding with Lutea pars tegetum sola videtur iners; ep. no. 175 (in the ‘personal’ collection): prohibuit me Romanus comes . . .; si illius insurgat me praelium, in hoc ego sperabo, quia virtus ex infirmitate perficitur. The illness seems to have been malarial.

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conventional praise of Rome as potens, caput orbis al. mundi, mundi decus and so on already in the Lindisfarne lament as well as in his epitaph for Pope Hadrian (796), and in several poems written in the last years of the century, among them one addressed to ‘David’, the Frankish king.350 The only hint that he may have followed one or more of the ‘pilgrim itineraries’ round the city is his description of it, in a letter closely linked to the Lindisfarne poem, as ‘surrounded by a circle (corona) of holy apostles and innumerable martyrs’. It is none the less likely that Alcuin’s later use of Roman epigraphic verseformulae reflects direct acquaintance with its Christian epitaphs as well as familiarity with manuscript copies and with Venantius Fortunatus’s poetry; and it is possible also that his interest in acquiring relics, a prominent feature of later correspondence, began with his first Roman journey.351 Perhaps most significantly, when in his De ratione animae (of 801 or later) he wished to illustrate how the Soul (or Mind) formed images of things seen and then ‘stored in the treasure-house of memory’, Alcuin took as his example enim qui Romam vidit. Whenever subsequently such a person ‘hears or recalls the name Rome’, he observes, his attention immediately turns to the memory where he has the image of Rome stored away’, in contrast with the mental image of Jerusalem, which he has never seen: whereas Augustine, in a passage of the De Trinitate which is evidently Alcuin’s model (although developing a quite different argument about images formed and held in the mind) names Carthage and Alexandria.352 350 Carm. ix, line 37; Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, pp. 182–3, compare idem. pp. 181, 183–91; carmina xxi, xxv, xlv (MGH Poet. I, pp. 241–2, 245, 257–9), with carm. xlv, lines 31–2, Roma caput mundi primi quoque culmen honoris/ In qua gazarum munera sancta latent. Gazae ‘treasures’, both material and figurative, occurs frequently in the ‘York poem’; there, potens is an epithet of the Saxons and some of their kings and (once: line 427) of the Cross. A rare prose example of Roma orbis caput is Vita Willibrordi I. 32, ed. Levison, MGH SSRM VII, 139, which I would date ca. 797. 351 Ep. no. 20 (793). Corona is, of course, also ‘the martyr’s crown’; the context excludes that meaning here, but the word’s other associations can hardly have escaped him. For knowledge of older epigraphic verse, see below, ch. 2, p. 278 at n. 82; and compare the later Fulda-written Einsiedeln cod. 326, pt. iv, which contains successively a sylloge of inscriptions, an itinerary and OR XXIII, ed. Andrieu, Ordines, 3, 265–73. Relics: see below, ch. 2, ad fin. A reminder of relics promised and not forthcoming is a feature of what may be one of his earliest extant letters, ep. no. 28, to Paulinus of Aquileia: diu dilectionis tuae exspectavi promissa, hoc est vivificae crucis Christi vel aliarum reliquiarum patrocinia; noli me, obsecro, tanto fraudare munere nec te veritatis mercede! 352 De ratione animae, PL 101, 642A (c. vii), ed. Curry, pp. 48 f. (c. iv); Augustine, De Trin. VIII 5–6, ed. Mountain and Glorie, CCSL 50 (Turnhout, 1968), pp. 281–2.

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There may be a salutary warning here against assuming a consistency in Alcuin’s responses to places, people and events which did not exist, and certainly against building too much on silences in surviving letters to shape a fuller portrait of the young Alcuin.

York Consecrations, 767 767, the second year of King Alchred, was a notable one for the church of York and its clergy and, in the event, for Alcuin himself. After vacancies of several months in the two sees, bishops of York and of Hexham were consecrated on April 24th.353 Alchmund of Hexham’s background is unknown, although he later enjoyed a local cultus. Alcuin records that the new bishop of York, the magister Ælberht, was a kinsman of his predecessor; but he also asserts that he was made bishop populo rogitante, which if true and not merely a poeticism would seem to have been highly unusual in eighth-century England.354 The date and day are abnormal, which is evidently why the Annalist recorded it: it was a Friday and in the post-Easter season when fasting was traditionally suspended. There can be little doubt that it was chosen because it was the heavenly dies natalis of Wilfrid I of York and Hexham. A ‘proper’ mass for that day did not exist; but April 24 in the year 767 was feria VI in Easter Week, for which the ‘Old Gelasian’ mass-set is the distinctive (coll.) Deus qui ad caeleste regnum, (praef.) UD Qui secundum promissionis suae, which was presumably the context of the ordination ceremonies.355 If the canonical For Augustine’s conception of memoria, see the neat summary by R.A. Markus in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy ed. A.H. Armstrong (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 370–3. 353 ‘Northumbrian Annals’ s.a., HR, ed. Arnold, 2, 43; without the date also in Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘D’ text, ed. Classen and Harmer, p. 18 (= ‘E’ text, ed. Plummer, Two Saxon Chronicles, p. 51), which are here using a lost variant of the ‘Northumbrian Annals’ with Whithorn connections (below, n. 357). 354 ‘York Poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1429, 1468; C. Cubitt, ‘Wilfrid’s “Usurping Bishops”: Episcopal Elections in Anglo-Saxon England, ca. 600–ca. 800’, Northern History 25 (1989), 18–38, at 26 where, however, Alcuin’s remark on the ‘election’ is not noticed. Note that King Alchred (765–74) had a son (ut dicunt quidam) Alchmund who was murdered in 800: ‘Annals’, s.a. HR ed. Arnold, 2, 63. The ‘Lindisfarne’ Liber Vitae Nomina regum vel ducum [34] Alchmund seems more likely to be the Mercian dux of that name temp. Offa than the Northumbrian king’s son. 355 For the evidence for Wilfrid’s dies depositionis, see above, n. 258. The massset is Sacr. Gelas. I li, ed. Wilson pp. 94–5, ed. Mohlberg nos 489–93 (similar but

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requirement of three bishops for the consecration of the archbishop was followed, as it certainly was thirty years later, these must necessarily have been the bishops of Lindisfarne, Candida Casa and (presumably) ‘Mayo of the Saxons’. Subsequently, perhaps in the weeks after Pentecost, a more remarkable episcopal consecration took place. The Northumbrian Aluberht returned to York from Utrecht, where he had been helping Willibrord’s successor Abbot Gregory, to be ordained ‘bishop to the Old Saxons’. The Vita prima Liudgeri which describes the background, and although written only in the 840s embodies obviously good traditions, reports that he was accompanied by two young men, Sigibod and Liudger, who were then ordained priest and deacon respectively.356 Formally, such actions could have been regarded as a challenge to the authority recently exercised in missionary areas by the bishop of Rome or a Frankish arch-bishop recognised by him. At the time, however, the Papacy was in no position to protest and there was probably no recognised successor to Boniface; consecration by the bishop of the church from which he had earlier gone ‘with permission and advice’ was Aluberht’s own request; and his status thereafter was that of corepiscopus to Gregory. If the Northumbrian Annalist’s eodem tempore, coming immediately after the account of Ælberht’s consecration, is to be interpreted strictly, he could be indicating the Saturday and Sunday immediately following April 24th, highly irregular though this would be in a non-fasting season; the next Ember Saturdays and recognised ordination days were June 13th (in both Roman and Gallican usage) and September 19th. Episcopal consecrations are not linked to the quattuor tempora, although with very few exceptions they were on Sundays (following fasting Saturdays); and the English evidence shows an overwhelming preference for what the ‘Frankish Gelasian’ sacramentaries and the Gregorian Supplement (but not the ‘Old Gelasian’ sacramentary) call dominicae post Pentecosten, even when consecration at an earlier date would have been possible.357 A more not identical, Sacr. Gellon., ed. Dumas, nos 778–83); Gelas.’s collect is given as an alternative to the standard Gregorian one for feria VI in the late-tenth-century Sacramentarium Fuldense, ed. Richter and Schönfelder, no. 774. 356 HR ed. Arnold, 2, 43; Vita prima Liudgeri, ed. Pertz in MGH SS II, p. 40, ed. Diekamp (Münster, 1881), pp. 15–17; Bullough, ‘Albuinus deliciosus Karoli regis’, pp. 78–9. 357 At Canterbury (the one see in the southern province for which there is evidence), the only exception is Jaenberht’s consecration on 2 Febr. 765 (f. d. (H)Ypapanti Domini or Presentation in the Temple). In the northern province the fullest evidence

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obvious political statement was the consecration at the same time of a bishop of Lindsey, in the person of Ceolwulf. In a previous entry, the Annalist had recorded that, following the death of Aldulf, Ceolwulf electus et consecratus est: is the implication that the latter had been chosen within his own diocese but then, whether for personal or political reasons, turned to the northern metropolitan for consecration? or was he a Northumbrian-backed candidate? Whatever the circumstances in 767, by 777 at latest Ceolwulf was regularly in attendance at the Mercian king’s court.358 Later tradition recalled that Aluberht and his companions remained in York for a further year before returning to Utrecht—in the same calendar year as that in which the Frankish king Pippin died and was succeeded by his two sons Charles and Carloman, the one-time Northumbrian King Eadberht died in clericatu at York, a new bishop of Mayo was consecrated, and King Alchred married.359

comes from Whithorn (Candida Casa) because of the use by ASC ‘D’ and ‘E’ texts of a version of the ‘Northumbrian Annals’ with additional Whithorn material: Frithowald was consecrated ‘on Ceastre(-um)’(apparently York, although this usage is not noted in EPNS Yorks. 6 [1970], 275 ff.) 15 Aug. = Pent. XIII 734 (Ceolwulf ’s ‘sixth year’ if he succeeded Osric between 9 May and 15 Aug. 729; contra Cont. Bedae, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 572) and died 7 May 763; Pehtwine was consecrated at Elvet 17 July = Pent. VIII 763 (cf. Watt, Series Episcoporum, p. 22) and died 19 September 776; Æthelberht was consecrated at York 15 June = Pent. IV 777, cf. Handbook of British Chronology, ed. 3, pp. 222–3. In the metropolitan see, Eanbald II was consecrated hastily and in the monastery of Sochasburg on 14 Aug. = Pent. XII 796; and (accepting the reliability on this point of Symeon of Durham’s Libellus: ed. Arnold, Symeonis Opera, 1, 52) Eanbald II and his fellow-bishops consecrated Egberht as bishop of Lindisfarne on 11 June, which was Pent. I in 803. For Ember Days and the English evidence, see Pt. I. 358 Absent from the witness-lists of the earliest Mercian charter or charters after his election/consecration, Sawyer nos 106 (of 767), 108 (of 772), Ceolwulf is thereafter (references in n. 11) consistently in fourth place, until he moves up to third, behind the incumbents of Canterbury and Lichfield. The proper interpretation of a letter from the Frankish king Charles, composed by Alcuin, to Bishop Ceolwulf and Archbishop Æthelheard of Canterbury in ?794–6 (ep. no. 85) asking them to intercede with King Offa seems to require more knowledge than we have of relations between the Frankish king and his Mercian counterpart after the resolution of the tensions in 789/90 (below, ch. 3). 359 All, except the names of Pippin’s successors, recorded by the ‘Northumbrian (?York) Annals’ for 768: HR 2, ed. Arnold, 44.

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  ADDITIONAL NOTE ‘Marian feasts’ in late-seventh/eighth-century Northumbria

Clayton, Cult of the Virgin Mary, here esp. pp. 28–40, is an excellent and comprehensive account of the origins of the ‘four Marian feasts’ in the Latin West and their adoption in the liturgy of early England. But it may be that Clayton pp. 52–60 is over-cautious about the distinctive character of some of the eighth-century Northumbrian evidence for an evolving Marian cult; certainly the Ambrosiana and Phillips calendars, and the hypothesised breviate of an English text of a Hieronymian Martyrology which underlies them, have a little to add to that evidence. Milan Ambr. M. 12 sup (not, however, Berlin Phillips 1869 or Bede etc.) has et dep. scae Mariae as the second of its three entries for 18 January, thus confirming the evidence of ‘Willibrord’s Calendar’s’ et adsumptio sanctae Mariae that the lost breviate recorded the ‘Gallican’ feast on that day: at that time and in this context adsumptio meant no more than ‘death in the flesh, admission into Heaven’. Whether the feast had a proper liturgical celebration— a mass-set is no. XII, Siffrin nos 94–105, in the ‘Missale Gothicum’, BAV Reg. lat. 317—in late-seventh-century Northumbria is a question I cannot answer. The ‘Marian’ feasts are necessarily lacking from the earliest known version of the Roman epistle-lectionary, that in Würzburg, Univ. bibl., M. p. th. f. 62 (CLA IX, 1417). Clayton p. 37, following its editor Dom Morin, characterises it as ‘reflect[ing] the state of the Roman liturgy before . . . c. 650’. Chavasse (Sacramentaire Gélasien, passim, and elsewhere) proposed pushing its date back to the end of the previous century, to find room for the comes associated with Alcuin (above, p. 19 n. 42), the original form of which—he believed—left Rome not long after 626/7. This, however, introduces an immediate complication, since it includes three of the four feasts, the one missing being apparently the Assumption on 15 August (assuming, from its place in the comes, that the in festivitate sanctae Mariae is the Nativity on 8 September—in contrast, therefore, with the evidence of De laude Dei, as Clayton, p. 61). If, therefore, Alcuin was responsible for the adding of the ‘Marian’ feasts as well as the masses for All Saints and for the Vigil of St. Martin it is hardly possibly to describe the Roman source-text as only ‘slightly corrected’ by Alcuin (as some recent commentators have done); and Wilmart’s ‘un document sui generis de la fin de la VIIIe siècle’ (Lectionnaire d’Alcuin, p. 139) certainly seems more appropriate. This still leaves undetermined whether Alcuin’s supposed contributions were ‘early’, i.e. at York, or ‘late’, presumably at Tours. One argument against Alcuin’s responsibility for adding the ‘Marian’ feasts is the De laude Dei’s unusually long sequence of office antiphons (cf. below). It should be added that the ‘Sergian’ feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is not in the comes ‘of Alcuin’ but has an entry in both the Ambrosiana and Phillips calendars and a mass-set (II. lvi, Mohlberg nos 1023–5) in the ‘Vatican Gelasian’ sacramentary.

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In Pope Sergius’s conception, of course, the feasts of 2 February and 25 March were not Marian feasts but feasts of Our Lord. The Ambrosiana and Phillips calendars naturally reflect this: for the former feast, Phill. has Beata Maria dnm.nrm. ihm.xpm. offerebat in templum. YPAPANTI id est susceptio, Ambr. Beata Maria Christum offert in templo . . . Ypapanti, the last word preceded by Tironian notes for quidam libri habent and a later addition Purificatio scae. Mariae. et repraesentatio in templo! The comes and the ‘York metrical martyrology’ are here similarly conservative, the latter having et quartus nonas Christus templo offerebatur (ed. Wilmart, p. 66). On the other hand, for the feast of 25 March Ambr., Phill. and comes all have Adnuntiatio [archangeli] ad Mariam, while the ‘metrical martyrology’ stays with Octavas merito gaudet conceptio Christi. The eighth-century re-focussing and re-naming of two of the ‘Sergian’ feasts was surprisingly credited by Chavasse, Sacramentaire gélasien, pp. 375–402, to the (early) Carolingian period, for the Feast of 2 Febr. esp. 376–7. But Bede, Dtr. c. 12 (ed. Jones (1943), pp. 207–8, CCSL 123B (1977), pp. 348–9) not only shows familiarity with the feast of the Purification as an essentially Marian one, but is also in no doubt that it originated in Rome: on this see the helpful note in Wallis, Bede: the Reckoning of Time, p. 149 n. 147. It is inevitably not possible to say with any confidence what mass-sets and Old Testament/Epistle readings were used for these feasts in mid-century York: the ‘Old Gelasian’ sets are quite distinct from the corresponding ‘Gregorian’ ones, and the first and third of the Old Testament readings for (e.g.) the Feast of the Nativity are different from any used later (although all from Wisdom books), see Wilmart, ‘Lectionnaire’, p. 161. The officeantiphons De antiphonario in the De laude Dei are still the best evidence for the form and character of the ‘Marian cult’ that Alcuin experienced as a boy and young man at York—evidence also of what a ‘secular’ cathedral in northern Europe could include in its chant, whether or not it owed all or most of it to Rome (on this, see Clayton, pp. 59–60).

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CHAPTER TWO

NORTHUMBRIAN ALCUIN: ‘DISCIT UT DOCEAT’ On the first Sunday after Pentecost, users of ‘Gelasian’ mass-books prayed that: Timentium te domine salvator et custos averte ab ecclesia tua mundanae sapientiae oblectamenta fallaciae, ut spiritus tui eruditione formandos prophetica et apostolica potius instituta quam filosophiae verba delectent, ne vanitas mendatiorum decipiat, quos erudicio veritatis inluminat . . . .1

The seventh-century Irish-origin (but credited to Augustine) Quattuor necessaria sunt . . ., ‘There are four things essential to God’s Church’, suggests a structure of Christian education appropriate to such a petition: ‘The Divine Canon, in which the future life is related and foretold; History, in which past events are related; Number, by which what is to come and Divine celebrations are reckoned up; Grammar, by which the science of words is comprehended . . . the four foundations of Scripture, as it were’. The same passage is to be found in various contexts in Carolingian-period computus collections; and in a mid-century south-German manuscript, it is one of several short texts accompanying Alcuin’s De vera philosophia and De grammatica.2 1

Sacr. Gelas. I lxxxiv, ed. Wilson, p. 129, ed. Mohlberg, no. 676; Sacr. Gellon., ed. Dumas and Deshusses, no. 1062; Sacr. Sangall., ed. Mohlberg, no. 844: also in the tenth-century English ‘Winchcombe Sacramentary’ ed. A. Davril, HBS 109 (London, 1995), no. 639. For the language of the collect, compare Col 2.8: Videte ne quis vos decipiat per philosophiam et inanem fallaciam—the only instance of philosophia in the Vulgate and in an unequivocally pejorative sense. 2 De computo dialogus, PL 90, col. 647D; incorporated in the Irish De ratione conputandi, ed. M. Walsh and D. Ó. Cróinin (Toronto, 1988), p. 117. A characteristic Carolingian example, with the rubric De laude computi, is in the Pacificus of Verona computus in Florence, Bibl. Medicea Laurenziana pl. XVI, 39, ed. G.G. Meersseman and E. Adda, Manuale di Computo con ritmo mnemotecnico dell’Arcidiacono Pacifico di Verona (Padua, 1966), p. 104. Accompanying Alcuin-texts, with the heading Augustinus ait, in Munich clm. 6404 (Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 12, p. 118), fol. 30; also in the slightly later clm. 6411, fol. 56v, without a heading and immediately after the title of Priscian’s De institutione de nomine . . . . C.D. Wright, The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 55–7 and passim, lists several early-Irish quaternities, but not this one. For History, i.e. the ‘literal sense’, as a fundamentum of Scriptural understanding, compare Jerome’s epitaphium sanctae Paulae = epist. cviii,

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Other early Irish scholars had, with the help of Isidore’s Differentiae, worked out a categorization of Knowledge ( philosophia without pejorative connotations) different from the late-Ancient World’s ‘Seven Liberal Arts’, in which logica and physica were further divided, the latter embracing seven (or six) disciplines: it was familiar to Aldhelm and, ca. 800, to the circle around Alcuin at Tours.3 When, however, Alcuin composed an epitaph for Archbishop Ælberht of York in ?781, he recalled particularly his teaching of artes liberales, ‘the Liberal Arts’; and the sixteen lines of the ‘York poem’ in which he illustrates how, as magister, Ælberht had ‘watered parched hearts with learning’s diverse streams and studies’ varied dew’ are the first medieval description of a programme of instruction based on that scheme.4 The concept and the term were ones that Alcuin and his teacher could have found in Isidore, or in Cassiodorus if the Second Book of his ‘Principles of Divine and Secular Learning’ were available to them: they would not have encountered them as such in Aldhelm’s writings.5 The strongest argument for believing that the poem provides an essentially authentic, if schematized and idealized, record of what and how Ælberht had taught the York community’s adolescents is that it provides the pattern for Alcuin’s later pedagogic writings: these would, accordingly, reflect early experiences that were built on

26.1 (ed. Hilberg, 2, 344), and the ?Isidoran text later annexed to Alcuin’s Inst. et resp. in Genesin, which begins (PL 100, col. 559A) Prius historie fundamenta ponenda sunt ut aptius allegorie culmen priori structure superponatur. 3 B. Bischoff, ‘Eine verschollene Einteilung der Wissenschaften’ [1958], MaSt 1, 273–88; for Aldhelm cf. note 5. 4 Alcuin, carm. ii, MGH Poet. I, p. 206, on which see below, ch. 3; ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1432–3 (influenced, like line 5, by Fortunatus, Vita S.Martini, i.131), 1434–49. 5 Isidore, Etym. I ii.1 says De septem liberalibus disciplinis. Disciplinae liberalium artium septem sunt, which he did not take directly from Cassiodorus, although the latter uses the term in Inst. II iii.19 (ed. Mynors, p. 129). It is generally supposed that this work of Cassiodorus was unknown in pre-Carolingian England. Aldhelm in the prose De virginitate uses liberales adjectivally of studia, litterae and disciplina, but never of artes, although here and elsewhere he refers to particular disciplines as artes: see the excellent indices, s.vv., to Ehwald’s masterly edition (MGH AA XV). Bischoff ’s observation (‘Verschollene Einteilung’, p. 276 n. 13) that Aldhelm’s apparent listing of the subjects of the trivium is a modification of the authentic text in a group of English tenth-century manuscripts (to which Salisbury Cath. 38 should be added; and Brussels Bib. roy. 1650 is a late, not an early, member of the group) has been generally overlooked: historians of early-medieval learning and education continue to ‘discuss’ Aldhelm’s familiarity with trivium and quadrivium, following Roger rather than the texts.

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and extended in his adult years, as his master’s helper and then successor. ‘My master often said to me’, he told the Frankish king in 798, ‘“They were the most learned of men who found out about the nature of things; it is a great shame if we let those arts die in our own time”’.6 The verses begin conventionally and unambiguously with the first two subjects of the Trivium, Grammar and Rhetoric. The poem’s next line reads, in the unique medieval copy, Istos iuridica curavit cote polire: whether or not Alcuin himself wrote veridica, there is little doubt that the reference is to Dialectic, which in Isidore’s words ‘teaches us in several kinds of questions how to distinguish the true from the false by argument (disputando vera et falsa diiudicentur)’.7 Without any obvious break, Alcuin now passes to Music, which seems to cover practice as well as theory and which he, unusually, links with the teaching of versification. Three or more lines devoted to Astronomy (for which Alcuin later preferred the word astrologia) are extended by a brief account of Ælberht’s teaching of ‘natural history’, perhaps under the influence of the recent treatises De natura rerum.8 A single line covers both Arithmetic and either numerology, which played a greater part in Alcuin’s thinking than is commonly acknowledged, or Geometry, the other art in the standard seven: numeri . . . varias figuras;9 and this is followed by a one-line description of Ælberht’s teaching of a special and practical aspect of ‘number’, Easter-calculation. Alcuin concludes with a reference to the bishop’s exploration of ‘the mysteries of Holy Scripture’: to this all the other studies are preparatory, although necessary if the truth of Scripture is to be fully revealed; and in turn, as Alcuin remarks subsequently, the sacred texts are a means of instruction in other disciplines.10

6

Ep. no. 148 (p. 239). The specific context is the study of the Heavens and arithmetica, quam necessaria ad cognoscendas scripturas divinas! 7 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, line 1436 app. and comment; Etym. I. ii, 1. See also Tatwine of Canterbury’s est felix mea qui potuerit cognoscere iura for a riddle on Philosophy in his Enigmata, ed. F. Glorie (CCSL 133; Turnhout, 1968), p. 168. 8 Below, p. 269 at n. 50. 9 Compare, for example, Quaestiones in Gen., Int. et Resp. 25 (PL 100, col. 519C): Cur Deus senario numero mundi creationem perfecit?—Quia ille numerus perfectus iuxta arithmeticae disciplinae rationem legitur esse . . .—which is not, like the immediately preceding answers, taken from Bede—and the quotation from ep. no. 148 in n. 6. For medieval numerology see H. Meyer, Die Zahlenallegorese im Mittelalter (Munich, 1975). 10 ‘York poem’, lines 1448–9 (wrongly punctuated), 1452–3. Compare the interpretation of Alcuin’s carm. lxix, proposed below (ch. 3).

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It is when we try to flesh out this skeletal account that the problems begin. There is a single letter from Ælberht when he was already bishop, addressed to Lul of Mainz and preserved, with a later one to him from Lul, among the latter’s collected correspondence. Six lines of verse appended to it, the third, fourth and sixth adapted respectively from Fortunatus (and Dracontius?), Bede’s Vita S. Cuthberti ( poet.) and Sedulius, give some substance to one part of Alcuin’s description and point to an element in his own education.11 The York ‘metrical martyrology’ in the earliest form in which it has come down to us, perhaps composed collectively and surely intended as a mnemonic text, may well be (but cannot be proved conclusively to be) of the 760s.12 The listing of the authors of books ‘that the illustrious master energetically collected’ on his travels abroad, or more locally, and which Alcuin always insisted had been bequeathed to him—the misnamed ‘York library list’ or ‘book-list’13 —are dubious evidence for Ælberht’s teaching years: the letter to Lul concludes with regrets that some of the books he had been asked to send had not yet come to hand, and that he hadn’t been able to get copyists (scriptores) for ones that were available.

York Books? The manuscript evidence that will provide direct testimony to what was taught and what was read in privileged monasteries and cathedral schools in the Carolingian regna14 is almost wholly (perhaps 11 Epist. select. 1, ed. Tangl, nos 124, 125 (the latter apparently not prompting Ælberht’s letter and, despite Tangl. p. 262 n. 4, almost certainly written after 773, when the pallium was sent to the bishop of York). The former’s v. 3 is also ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, line 138 (of Paulinus); idem, line 1121 adapts in part, but more closely, the same line of Bede as v. 4. Lul’s letter uses the noteworthy phrase quia moderni principes novos mores novasque leges secundum sua desideria condunt to explain why the church suffers daily. 12 Above, ch. 1, pp. 199–200, with nn. 211, 212. There are no good grounds for connecting the text specifically with Alcuin. 13 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1533–57 and notes (pp. 121–7); M. Lapidge, ‘Surviving booklists’, p. 45, with commentary pp. 45–9. 14 Compare, most notably, D. Ganz, Corbie in the Carolingian Renaissance, Beiheft der Francia, 20 (Sigmaringen, 1990). The earliest-known encyclopedic handbook of ‘the liberal arts’, with heavy emphasis on grammatica and a short section on computus, is the manuscript Paris BNF. lat. 7530 (CLA V, 569), written at Monte Cassino during the last years of Paul the Deacon: see L. Holtz, ‘Le Parisinus Latinus 7530, synthèse cassinienne des arts libéraux’, StudMed ser. 3, 16 (1975), 97–152.

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totally) lacking for mid-eighth century York. Hopeful ascriptions to it have often been ‘mere conjectures without evidence’, as for example of the fragments of Bede’s Vita Cuthberti metrica now at Budapest and Berlin.15 Most of the rest are inferences, of varying degrees of plausibility, from the evidence provided by Alcuin’s own writings after his peregrination from Northumbria, supported by the authornames in his versified ‘book-list’. A possible starting-point is none the less offered by the codex Durham Cathedral B.II.30, containing an abbreviated text of Cassiodorus’s massive Expositio psalmorum, and a textually- and palaeographically-related leaf at Düsseldorf, from the archives of the former abbey of Werden.16 The 260 eighth-century leaves of the former are the work of six different scribes, two of whom write what the late Julian Brown called ‘phase I minuscule’ and the rest ‘phase II minuscule’ (‘compressed half-uncial’ according to other palaeographers); the last of these was responsible for only four leaves and, unlike his fellow-scribes, ‘signed’ his quire with a cross in the top left-hand corner of the first recto (fol. 261). The Düsseldorf leaf is the work of a seventh scribe, with marginal annotations by yet another hand; and although its text is a part missing from the Durham book, it is unlikely that it once formed part of it.17 Lowe himself was never inclined to localize the script-home of either manuscript more precisely than ‘a Northumbrian centre’ or date them more closely than the first half of the eighth century. Julian Brown dated the Durham 15 CLA XI, 1589. Lowe, with Bernhard Bischoff ’s support, judged their script to be a neat and expert variety of minuscule which seems rather to have been practiced in southern England and in German centres under Anglo-Saxon influence; Fulda is not excluded (Bischoff, pers. comm.). There is likewise little merit in the supposition (A. Grabar, C. Nordenfalk, Early Medieval Painting from the Fourth to the Eleventh Century (Lausanne, 1957), pp. 120, 122) that the Evangelist-picture and canon-tables which now precede the (incomplete) ‘Maeseyck Gospel-book’, CLA X, 1558, or the Gospel-book itself, are products of ‘the school of York’: on this manuscript see most recently Netzer, Cultural Interplay, pp. 7–8, 13–32, 56–62 and passim. 16 CLA II, 152; CLA XI, 1786 (formerly in the Düsseldorf [Haupt] Staatsarchiv, deposited in the Universitätsbibliothek, but missing in 1982 and apparently not subsequently traced); R.N. Bailey, R. Handley, ‘Early English manuscripts of Cassiodorus’ “Expositio Psalmorum”’, Classical Philology, 78 (1983), 51–5. 17 Bailey and Hadley, ‘Early English manuscripts’, the cross signature noted at p. 53. Other early English examples are known (ibid., n. 12); but it is a far more common feature of Greek manuscripts, cf. E.A. Lowe, ‘Greek symptoms in a 6thcentury manuscript of St. Augustine’, Palaeographical Papers ed. L. Bieler (Oxford, 1972), 2, 466–74 (whose account of early Greek practice is strangely wrong) with G. Garitte in Le Muséon, 56 (1943), 47–8 and J. Irigoin in Scriptorium, 12 (1958), 223.

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book ‘early in the eighth century’ and at different times associated it, in general terms, with manuscripts from Lindisfarne and from Wearmouth-Jarrow. Art-historians, who predominantly favour a ‘second quarter of the century’ dating for the book, have similarly wavered over its place of origin; and an alternative claim for York gains no obvious support from the palaeography of inscriptions, including that on the Coppergate helmet.18 Werden was a foundation of Alcuin’s early pupil Liudger, but there is nothing to show when the book from which the leaf was taken entered its library. To the mature Alcuin, Cassiodorus was ‘an outstanding interpreter of the Psalms’ whose work provided a text for his own discussion of how Man was redeemed by Christ’s death on the Cross, and who had (probably) helped him consolidate his notion of the Seven Penitential Psalms.19 Bede, who described Cassiodorus’s work as egregia, was almost certainly familiar with the full text, or at least with one that was substantially complete, by at latest c. 725.20 The anonymous (Northumbrian?) epitomator has generally omitted entire sections of the commentary, to produce a text which retains a degree of coherence, even where its overall sense is significantly different from Cassidorus’s original: at other times, the excisions create a series of unconnnected obiter. The defects of existing editions and the lack of a complete collation of the ‘Durham epitome’ text make precise comparisons difficult and provisional.21 There are none the less arguments for believing that substantial sections of Alcuin’s commentary on the

18 A Palaeographer’s View: Select Writings of Julian Brown, ed. J. Bateley et al. (London and New York, 1993), pp. 108, 189, 210, cf. 273 (summarizing Koehler’s views); J.J.G. Alexander, Survey 1: Insular Manuscripts 6th to the 9th Century (1978), no. 17; R.N. Bailey, The Durham Cassiodorus ( Jarrow Lecture, 1978: Jarrow, 1979), favouring a later date and possibly a Wearmouth-Jarrow origin. For the helmet inscription and York’s epigraphic palaeography, see Elisabeth Okasha’s contribution to Tweddle, Helmet from Coppergate, at pp. 1012–15. 19 Ep. no. 307 (pp. 468–9), quoting in Ps 110.9, ed. Adriaen, p. 1018; Bullough, ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 173, 216–17 (nn. 42–3). 20 R.N. Bailey, ‘Bede’s text of Cassiodorus’ Commentary on the Psalms’, JTS n.s. 34 (1983), 189–93. 21 For the ‘Durham epitome’ text and the inadequacies of Adriaen’s edition, see Halporn, art. cit. in ch. 1, n. 156; also Bullough, ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ in: Carolingian Renewal, pp. 173, 216 (n. 41) (which require correction). A supposedly related text is the epitome-fragment (Pss 73–88 only) which now constitutes pt. 1 (fols 1–33v) of Halle, Univ.- u. Landesbibl., Qu. cod. 76 (s. x; ?north Germany): see J. Fliege, Die Handschr. der ehemaligen Stifts- u. Gymnasialbibl. Quedlinburg in Halle (Halle, 1982), pp. 49–50. This may be so; but Adriaen’s apparatus would be a poor basis of comparison, and the connection has not (to my knowledge) been demonstrated.

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Penitential Psalms, and several parts of those on Psalm 118 and the Gradual Psalms, are taken from Cassiodorus’s Expositio, in an abbreviated version represented most completely by the Durham book (D). The comments on Psalms 6 and 31 are particularly instructive. For Ps 6.6, D has retained almost all the original commentary on its first half, including quotations from Isaiah and Paul: Alcuin seizes on five words in the Isaiah quotation and creates a new short text emphasising that it is the living who will praise God. On the second halfverse, the epitome has omitted a long parenthesis emphasising the importance of compassion in the world; Alcuin repeats exactly the shortened passage and omits all that follows. In v. 7 the epitome has shortened Cassiodorus’s comments on all three clauses; Alcuin reduces those on the first and second still further, copies verbatim the first part of the comments on the third, and omits the rest. In Ps 31.4, Alcuin’s rubric includes the Gallican configitur mihi spina, although D and other early manuscripts of Cassiodorus have the Roman confringitur spina:22 he none the less copies the first part of the D-text comment up to comprimeret (in place of imprimeret), only to abandon it completely thereafter, glossing spina quae configitur (sic) as ‘the goad (or prick: stimulus) of a sinner’s conscience’. At the end of the next verse, 5, although Alcuin (in the printed text) gives the Gallican version, his comment is on the Roman version, which is that of the epitome. There are many places in the comments, even on the Penitential Psalms, where Cassiodorus is not Alcuin’s main source; but I have noted none where the form of his text indicates use of a fuller version than that represented by the ‘Durham book’. The possibility that this or a very close copy was read and excerpted by Alcuin in his early adult years is a strong one, and would indicate the existence at York of a sizable scribal community before mid-century: it is not proven. Lowe’s suggestion of a palaeographical association between D and the combined codex of the Sapiential Books and Canticum Canticorum, now BL Egerton 1046, can hardly be sustained. The most recent and detailed analysis of this complex manuscript favours a somewhat later date for the ‘hybrid-minuscule’ Part II (Wisdom; Sirach prol. I.1–35) than for the ‘set-minuscule’ Pts. I + III, although always within the eighth century, with emendation of the second of these ‘a continuous process . . . lasting for several generations’; and extensive cor22

Bullough, ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, p. 217 n. 44, is erroneous.

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rection was demanded because both components had been ‘produced in a context of poor latinity and inaccurate copying’. In the light of other (admittedly, rarely unambiguous) evidence York, even though beset by political disturbances and their probable consequences from the late 760s, is unlikely to have been that context.23 Certainly, Alcuin’s later citing and exegesis of the Old Testament books included in the Egerton manuscript have only occcasional links with its text forms and corrections.24 Even if the two incomplete leaves of a copy of the Roman historian named in the ‘York list’ as Pompeius (the Augustan Pompeius Trogus, whose substantial work reached the Middle Ages in an epitome by M. Iunian(i)us Iustinus ( Justin)) are correctly credited paleographically to Northumbria in mid-century, arguments for an origin at York rather than some other centre are completely lacking. It is, however, likely that the book to which they once belonged was at the Frankish Court in Alcuin’s lifetime and became the archetype of the entire later northwestern-European tradition, whether or not it was also the copy given by the former Court librarian Gerward to Lorsch in the later ninth century.25 There 23 CLA II, 194a, 194b; Marsden, Text of the Old Testament, pp. 262–304. Lowe (and, by implication, Bischoff who characterised the script of fols 17–31 as ‘compressed half-uncial’: Latin Palaeography (1990), p. 91) believed that the hands were Northumbrian; and Marsden posits his detailed analysis of the text and its subsequent corrections (pp. 269–304) on a Northumbrian origin of both parts. But the late Julian Brown, in his unpublished Lyell lectures, maintained that the—in his terms—‘Phase II hybrid minuscule’ and the minuscule of other folios were southern; and Dr. Michelle P. Brown, who generously ‘excavated’ in the lecture drafts for his comments, suggested that features of the sections written in ‘cursive minuscule’ make ‘a continental origin in an ultimately Bonifatian milieu . . . likely’ and observed that the guide-notes are ‘an extremely unusual feature for this period’ (letter of 30 November 1993). 24 Marsden, Text of the Old Testament, loc. cit., does not refer to Alcuin in this connection. For quotations from Proverbs and Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) in non-standard forms in the letters, see above, ch. 1; for some very brief remarks on Alcuin’s Ecclesiastes text, see my ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, Carolingian Renewal, p. 217 (n. 45). The non-Vulgate form of the quotation of Ecclesiastes 11, 6 in ep. no. 121 (pp. 177–8), Mane semina semen tuum etc. (Vulg. = Am. mane semina sementem tuam) is that of both Eg. and of the Tours Bibles, but also that of many other testimonies: Marsden, Text of the Old Testament, p. 280. 25 CLA IX, 1370 (formerly Weinheim, E. Fischer Samml.; currently untraceable) + London BL Harley 5915 fol. 10; Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, pp. 197–9 (Reynolds); Julia Crick, ‘An Anglo-Saxon fragment of Justinus’s Epitome’, ASE 16 (1987), 181–96, with pl. viii. Cf. Bischoff, Lorsch2 (1989), pp. 23, 65, whose revisions of his 1974 edition do not include a reference to the newly-identified leaf or its publication. The later tradition begins with the north(-east) French manuscript Paris, BNF. lat. 4950, ca. 800. Crick seems to have been mistaken (so P. Rusche in Scriptorium, 48 (1994), 143) in doubting whether the Northumbrian book could have been the

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are no grounds of any sort for linking an early-eighth-century Northumbrian copy of a part of Pliny’s Naturalis historia with either York or the Frankish Court library. It is certainly not excluded that fragments of Chrysostom, De compunctione cordis, etc., which on palaeographical grounds are attributed to mid-eighth century Northumbria, were once part of a book that Liudger had taken from York: seven of the leaves came from the bindings of books from a monastery near Werden. But, again, this attractive notion has no worthwhile evidence to support it, and the book could easily have reached Werden later.26

‘Veterum Vestigia Patrum’ John Chrysostom’s name is the very last in the six lines devoted to Christian auctores with which the ‘York poem’s’ ‘book-list’—better, ‘author-list’—begins. Since it there accompanies Cassiodorus, it is tempting to suppose that what Alcuin had in mind here was a copy of the thirty-four homilies Ad Hebraeos translated from the Greek at Cassidorus’s Vivarium: Bede may have known them, at least in part; Alcuin was familiar with a full or almost full text by 797 and possibly some time before that date.27 But inference from letters and archetype, because of supposed textual differences; but this does not affect her argument (‘Fragment’, p. 190) that, if the record in the Gerward book-list in BAV, Pal. lat. 1877 (fols 33v–34) is of a single codex in which Justinus was the last of six different works, it is highly improbable that the Insular leaves come from it. The standard edition, based on a very extensive manuscript-collation, is O. Seel’s of 1972 (Teubner). 26 Pliny: Leiden, Voss. Lat. F. 4 (CLA X, 1578), containing—with large gaps— Books 2–6; for Pliny at York, see below. Chrysostom fragments: CLA VIII, 1187; Barker-Benfield, ‘The Werden “Heptateuch”’, p. 53 with n. 43. The work’s (very limited) ninth-century tradition suggests that the Frankish Court may have been a staging-point. 27 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1546–7. For the translation, by Mutian, see Cassiodorus Inst. I. viii, 3: the only accessible edition is still that in PG 63, cols 237–456; compare (also for manuscripts, etc.) E. Riggenbach, ‘Historische Studien zum Hebräerbrief ’, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Neutestamentliches Kanons, ed. T. Zahn, 8 (Leipzig, 1907), p. 11, and A. Siegmund, Die Überlieferung der griechischen christlichen Literatur in der lateinischen Kirche bis zum zwölften Jahrhundert (Munich, 1949), p. 98. Bede’s knowledge is asserted by Laistner, ‘Intellectual heritage’, p. 141. A passage from Chrysostom’s second Homily is quoted in Alcuin’s Contra haeresim Felicis, c. xlix, ed. Blumenshine, p. 83—demonstrating incidentally that the later Continental tradition was not entirely dependent on a post-800 papal gift to Charlemagne, as supposed by Bischoff, ‘Hofbibliothek’, MaSt 3, 152 (n. 17) (Engl. transl. p. 59 n. 17), cf. Bullough ‘Charlemagne’s Court-Library Re-visited’ (forthcoming); and see also Bischoff ’s ‘Die Bibliothek im Dienste der Schule’, MaSt 3, 230 (Engl. transl. ‘Libraries and Schools

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other writings of his later years, valid in the case of liturgical usage, is hardly compelling; and a bare author-list, without the persuasive evidence of either contemporary manuscripts or citation, constitutes a poor basis for reconstructing a man’s reading over twenty or thirty years. The text of the ‘York poem’, especially if it is essentially a work of the early 780s, provides a few hints; and accepting that the De laude Dei is essentially a compilation (florilegium) from Alcuin’s time at York, its non-Biblical excerpts do considerably more to fill the gaps. To their evidence can cautiously be added the texts used in the compilation of his Interrogationes et Responsiones in Genesin if it is, as I am inclined to believe, a pre-790 work; and, even more hesitantly, some of those (but which?) cited in the letter Alcuin composed for the Frankish bishops at the Frankfurt council of 794.28 The two passages that follow the New Testament extracts with which De laude’s Book III begins are from the fourth and tenth books respectively of Eusebius-Rufinus, the first of them declaredly De historia ecclesiastica. Unless this work, and presumably also Jerome’s version of the Chronicle, is notionally among the historici veteres, neither Eusebius nor the Latin continuator is included in the ‘York list’.29 The first four names there are Jerome, Hilary (of Poitiers), Ambrose and Augustine. It is impossible to imagine Alcuin without Augustine. But how much of the Doctor’s massive oeuvre he read over his lifetime is only dimly recoverable from his own writings; and how far he had followed or endeavoured to follow the sophisticated argumentation of Augustine’s major treatises is hardly clearer. The final leaves of De laude Book III are taken up by extracts from three works of his, beginning with the Confessiones. Isidore had adapted or paraphrased scores of passages from it, with a minimum of verbal citation, predominantly in his Sententiae: collectively they provide a generalized picture of spiritual ascent. Bede included nine quotations from Bks. I, VIII–X and XIII, some of them quite long, in his Collectio of passages in Augustine’s works on Paul’s Epistles. in the Carolingian revival of learning’, p. 110) for Dungal’s St.-Denis copy in Milan, Ambr. A. 135 inf. 28 For the origin of the De laude, see above, ch. 1; for the citations in the letter (MGH Conc. II, pp. 143–57), see Bullough, ‘Alcuin before Frankfort’, pp. 583–4, and below, ch. 3. 29 De laude: Bamb. fol. 145v, Esc. fols 121–121v, the first being the prayer of the martyr Polycarp as in Eusebius-Rufinus’ Hist. Eccl. IV 15, 33–4, ed. SchwartzMommsen p. 349, the second Verba cuiusdam confessoris contra philosophum, ibid. X 3, p. 962.

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Alcuin’s compilation, in contrast, proceeds methodically through all thirteen Books, selecting passages, mostly quite short and almost all verbatim, that make up a sequence of laudatory and confessional ‘invocations’; reflections of some of them are recognisable in later prayers and other writings. Some sections have a contextual coherence, even though the extracts are widely separated in their source, while others do not; but ‘biographical’ allusions of any sort are avoided.30 The extracts from the opening passages of Augustine’s Soliloquies that follow are likewise discontinuous. The influence of this and other sections of the same work are apparent in several ‘private prayers’ in ninth-century books; it has yet to be convincingly demonstrated that Alcuin was the author any of them. Alcuin concludes the Third Book of his De laude with a text of the oratio with which Augustine ended his massive De Trinitate—not in itself good evidence that he was familiar with the work as a whole, but he was already quoting it in his earliest anti-Adoptionist writings.31 Alcuin’s familiarity in his York years with all or a substantial part of Augustine’s De civitate Dei, and its consequent influence on his thinking about kingship and emperordom, has been widely assumed. There is no early English manuscript testimony to help us, except for the texts of the Sibylline prophecies extracted from Bk. XVIII ch. 23 in a southern-English manuscript of the second half of the eighth century—where, however, they are in reverse order and with addi30 The extracts from Books VIII–XIII have dropped out of the Bamberg copy. For different degrees of coherence, compare, for example, the first three extracts from Book I: Magna es domine et laudabilis valde: magna virtus tua et sapientiae tuae non est numerus.—Da mihi [mss. and ed. add domine] scire et intelligere utrum sit prius invocare te an laudare te.—(I 2/ii) Non enim [mss. and ed. ergo] essem deus meus non omnino essem nisi esses in me. An potius non essem nisi essem in te: ex quo omnia, per quem omnia in quo omnia. Etiam sic domine, etiam sic quod [sic; mss. and ed. quo] te invoco cum in te sim. Constantinescu’s claim (‘ “Libelli precum” ’, p. 31 n. 44) that Alcuin’s Confessions manuscript ‘était de la meme famille que le Vat. lat. 5756’ lacks any real textual evidence, although it certainly seems to have belonged to the ‘vulgate’ tradition of the work. For Isidore’s use of the Confessiones, see P. Courcelle, Les Confessions de Saint Augustin dans la Tradition Littéraire, Études Augustiniennes (Paris, 1963), pp. 235–54. Alcuin’s name does not figure here or in other surveys of the heritage and influence of Augustine’s work. 31 Constantinescu, ‘ “Libelli precum”’, pp. 33–6, has an intricate series of arguments about the textual relationships of Soliloquia I and ‘Alcuinian’ and other prayers; but his claims for Alcuin’s authorship rarely if ever stand up to critical examination. The extract from the De Trinitate is Lib. XV, 26, inc. Dominus Deus noster credimus (ed. Mountain and Glorie, CCSL 50A (1968), pp. 533–5), ending in Esc. with the words domine Deus une Deus trinitas. For citations in Alcuin’s anti-Adoptionist writings, see below, ch. 3.

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tional material, making it improbable that they were copied directly from a fuller text.32 In the previous century Aldhelm knew at least two of the later Books, for which the pre-tenth century manuscript tradition is less good than that of Bks. I–XVI; and Bede quoted extensively from Bks. XIV–XXII, as well as from Bks. X and XI.33 A long verbatim extract from Book XV, exceptionally with a specific attribution, and other anonymous quotations are included in the Interrogationes et Responsiones in Genesin. Substantial extracts from Augustine’s Quaestiones in Heptateuchum I (Gen.) are another element in that dialogue-commentary.34 It is also very likely, although it has been doubted, that Alcuin was acquainted with the De doctrina christiana in his homeland: a letter written not long after his return to Francia in 793, and probably before he had rejoined the royal Court, includes three linked quotations from Bk. I.35 For Augustine and Jerome, the direct evidence of Alcuin’s surviving florilegium and the indirect evidence of his early writings do not stand quite alone. Alcuin observes in his De ratione animae, in a rare ‘dated’ reference to past reading, that:

32 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 173 pt. ii (CLA 2, 123; Budny, Manuscript Art at CCCC, pp. 75–87), the principle text in which is Sedulius’s Carmen Paschale. The ‘extracts’ conclude with a second version of the verse-prophecy, inc. Iudicii signum sudavit rupada tellus which is not from Augustine and seems not to have been recorded elsewhere. 33 J. Hillgarth, ‘L’influence de la Cité de Dieu de saint Augustin au Haut Moyen Age’, SE 28 (1985), 5–34, at 20–1. 34 Examples above, ch. 1 n. 188. The only extant pre-800 manuscript of Augustine’s Quaestiones is Paris BNF lat. 12168, from Corbie (C ). Accepting that Fraipont’s stemma (CCSL 33, p. xii*) is at least partially correct, this was not the ancestor of any of the extant Carolingian-period manuscripts. These come, inter alia, from North Italy (two manuscripts, one of them a Pacificus of Verona book), from St. Gallen, from Lorsch (Oxford, Bodleian Libr., Laud misc. 130, wrongly dated and placed by Fraipont: see Bischoff, Lorsch2, pp. 49–50) and from St.-Amand—a pattern of origins that may point to a Court archetype. Beeson indeed thought that he could detect ‘Insular influences’ in the texts of the earliest manuscripts (Mélanges Mandonnet, 2, 1930, 7–13); but he was clearly wrong in crediting them to C as well as to the other branch of the tradition, as pointed out already by D. De Bruyne in Miscellanea Agostiniana 2 (Rome, 1931), 339–40, cf. Fraipont p. xi* (n. 25). 35 Ep. no. 19 (p. 53), Chase Two Letter-Books II/2 (p. 45); for the date, see below, ch. 3. Ilona Opelt, ‘Materialien zur Nachwirking von Augustins Schrift De doctrina christiana’, Jahrb. Ant. Chr. 17 (1974), 64–73, at 68, makes no mention of Alcuin and asserts that it was unknown to Bede, although the work is included in Laistner’s listing of ‘Bede’s library’ (‘The library of the Venerable Bede’, Intellectual Heritage, p. 146). Opelt, pp. 68–9, notes the extensive use of the De doctrina by Alcuin’s pupil Hrabanus Maurus. For Alcuin’s use of the Enchiridion in 793–4, see below.

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  The blessed Augustine wrote to blessed Jerome about the origin of the soul, wishing to know what that great scholar might declare on the subject. If that book is available to you, read it . . . Augustine presented, I believe (ut arbitror), some four opinions in that discussion; and blessed Jerome replied to him in a very brief but most perceptive letter. I read the little book in my homeland (in patria) but do not have it here [sc. at Tours], nor the letter written in reply to it.

He goes on to say that Augustine, according to his Retractiones, produced four other short treatises ‘On the nature of the soul’, which he proceeds to name: ‘these I have not yet come upon’ but they are perhaps to be found in the Court library.36 (When and where Alcuin had first encountered the Retractiones is indeterminable.) The identification of the letters exchanged between the two Fathers and their manuscript-base presents no great problems, except for uncertainty whether Alcuin had read one or two letters conveyed to Jerome in 415, of which only the first has the rubric De origine animae hominis. Jerome’s reply (416) is found in early manuscripts, separate from all other letters of either, both in association with Augustine’s two letters and with his first letter only.37 It is, in fact, dismissive rather than perceptive; and it is clear from Alcuin’s words and their context that in spite of his interest in the subject he remembered very little of what either scholar had said! That before his first departure from Northumbria Alcuin had read other letters of Augustine and of Jerome is possible for the former and near-certain for the latter—perhaps in more than one manuscript collection. A letter written from England in 790 includes a substantial passage based on part of Jerome’s epistola no. 3 (ad Rufinum); and the proverbial amicitia quae deseri potest numquam vera fuit (‘friendship which can be dissolved was never true’), quoted in a possibly 36 PL 101, col. 645; Alcuin, ‘De ratione animae’: a Text . . ., ed. J.J.M. Curry (Ph.D. diss., Cornell Univ., 1966; University Microfilms), pp. 58–9. 37 Epistolae Augustini, ed. Goldbacher, CSEL 44 (1904), nos 166, 167, 172 (= Epistolae Hieronymi, ed. Hilberg, CSEL 56 (1918), nos 131, 132, 134). The most recent discussion of the exchange and of the views of the protagonists is A. Fürst, Augustins Briefwechsel mit Hieronymus, Jahrb. für Antike u. Christentum, Ergänzungsbd. 29 (Münster/Westf., 1999), pp. 185–206. In Bullough, ‘Alcuin and the Kingdom of Heaven’, Carolingian Renewal, p. 215 n. 38, I supposed that Alcuin would have seen a manuscript containing only the one Augustine letter. But this no longer seems to me a sound assumption; and the possibility that he had read both is strengthened by a quotation of ep. Aug. no. 167 (ed. Goldbacher, p. 598) in the form nihil hac sapientia. . . . theosebeia [sic]’ (from memory? from a not very accurate extract?) in his Disputatio de rhetorica, ed. Halm, p. 550, ed. Howell, lines 1304–7.

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earlier letter (?787–8) and subsequently repeated or paraphrased on a number of occasions, may be taken from the end of the same Jerome-letter.38 But even where Alcuin’s demonstrable familiarity with other letters in later years coincides with Bede’s, this is not evidence that can be pressed.39 The same must be said of Alcuin’s knowledge of Augustine’s sermons. Recent studies have suggested that approximately sixty of these, in more than one of the ancient collections, were used by Bede in his exegetical writings and homilies. The partsource of the condemnation of usurious wealth in the 786 English synodal decrees, sermo 8 (transmitted by ‘Italian’ collections), is not one of them.40 It is unlikely that Alcuin would not have encountered some of the mostly brief exegetic, dogmatic and other texts circulating 38 Ep. no. 10, Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/6; ep. no. 28 (for its date and some of the textual problems, see below, ch. 3). Compare the former, particularly from O si mihi translatio to ita venire ad te, and the slightly different version which begins Alcuin’s ep. no. 193 (also to Arn of St.-Amand and Salzburg), with Jerome epistola 3, ed. Hilberg, CSEL 54 (1910), p. 13; ita venire ad te, and probably also the spelling Abbacuc, show that Alcuin’s source-manuscript belonged to the ‘vulgate’ tradition of this and presumably other letters (see Hilberg’s apparatus ad loc.). In most manuscripts the concluding proverb (ed. Hilberg, p. 18) has the reading desinere; Alcuin quotes it in ep. no. 28 and elsewhere in the same form as in ep. no. 10, sometimes in association with Amicus fidelis diu quaeritur, vix invenitur, difficile servatur (e.g. in ep. no. 18 [p. 49]), but also paraphrases it. 39 Alcuin shows knowledge of Jerome’s epist. no. 53 in his Bible-poem, carm. lxix, which I would date c. 792–4 (below, ch. 3); and that is not one that occurs in the same early collections as epist. no. 3. According to Laistner, ‘Library of Bede’, Intellectual Heritage, pp. 130, 132, Bede used Augustine’s epistolae (ed. Goldbacher) nos 147, 167—also to Jerome, on the Soul—and 205, Aldhelm ‘appears to have known’ Jerome’s epistolae (ed. Hilberg) nos 22 (ad Eustochium) and 64, and Bede quoted his nos 53, 71, 107 (ad Laetam), 108 (epitaphium sanctae Paulae) and 112: Bede would seem to have been using a collection of the type of Zürich Zentralbibl. Rheinau 41, although this lacks epist. no. 112. Augustine’s epist. no. 205 (ad Cosentium) circulated independently of the major letter-collections: for its inclusion in BL Cotton Tiberius A. xv, see above, Pt. I. 40 F. Dolbeau, ‘Bède, lecteur des sermons d’Augustin’, Filologia Mediolatina 3 (1996), 105–33; F. Biggs, ‘Bede’s use of Augustine. Echoes from some sermons’, RevBén 108 (1998), 201–13; but see also C. Lambot, ‘La tradition manuscrite anglo-saxonne des sermons de Saint Augustin’, RevBén 64 (1954), 3–8. In the 786 synodal acta cap. 17, the words Augustinus quoque ait (MGH Epp. IV, p. 26) introduce a part-paraphrase the concluding words of which, lucrum in arca, damnum in conscientia are not in the received text, Sermones de Vetere Testamento, ed. C. Lambot, CCSL 41 (Turnhout, 1961), pp. 78–99, at pp. 87–8. A.I. Doyle, identifying the fragmentary Ushaw College Library 44 as parts of ‘an eighth-century Northumbrian Office book’, which he suggested might be an ‘enriched lectionary’ (in Words, Texts and Manuscripts: Studies presented to Helmut Gneuss, ed. M. Korhammer (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 11–27) correctly established the presence there of the genuine sermones 194 and 369, for the Christmas office, but in a note (p. 12 n. 6) confused the former with the spurious no. 194, which is probably eighth century.

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with a false ascription to the Father; it is even more likely that the York book-collection, as that of Wearmouth-Jarrow earlier, included a selection of Jerome’s exegetical works. The Hebraicae quaestiones in Genesim, the Liber interpretationis Hebraicorum nominum and, above all, the commentaries on Ecclesiastes and Matthew are the most convincing candidates.41 Granted the nature of the sources, this is a not-unimpressive record of early reading, although certainly modest in comparison with Bede. What it does not provide is any insight into how, within a few years of his having left York for Francia, Alcuin emerged as an articulate if not always comprehending defender of Trinitarian orthodoxy—except, perhaps, for a conviction that the proper counter to ‘new propositions’ was to follow unswervingly ‘the footsteps of the Fathers’. Immediately after the De laude’s extracts from Eusebius-Rufinus are ones De martirologio, interrupted by passages from Gregory in Ezechielem (saints of January and February, then August and September). These are followed in turn by several from the Verba seniorum, translated from the Greek by the Roman deacon Pelagius and the subdeacon John (both subsequently Popes): the longest of them was to have an independent history in ninth-century Continental libelli precum.42 Alcuin’s frequent references later to Gregory’s Regula pastoralis are suggestive but no proof of early acquaintance: its text has little to offer for a collection De laude Dei. Among the Fathers named in the York poem’s author-list where the influence of Venantius Fortunatus’s similar listing is very evident, and who make no appearance 41 ‘Pseudo-Augustine’: e.g. Gennadius of Marseilles’s Liber sive definitio ecclesiasticorum dogmatum, CPL3 958, cited as Item in expositione catholicae fidaei after genuine works of Augustine in the Frankfurt Epistolae episcoporum, MGH Conc. II, p. 150, composed by Alcuin (below, ch. 3). Jerome: for the use of the Quaestiones and the Liber interpretationis in Alcuin’s ?earliest exegetical writings, see below, ch. 4. For the influence of the Ecclesiastes commentary, see above, ch. 1: a ‘probably Northumbrian’ copy is Kassel, Landesbibl. Theol. fol. 21, CLA VIII, 1134 (combined with Ambrose’s Apologia prophetae David; from the Fulda library), an imported copy in southern England earlier in the eighth century is Würzburg, Universitätsbibl. M. p. th. q. 2, CLA IX, 1430, the ‘Cuthswith(a) book’, on which see esp. Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, pp. 190–1. A copy of the commentary on Matthew ‘written probably in a Northumbrian centre’ is known only from fragments, rescued by the merest chance in 1960: CLA Supplement, 1760. 42 Bamb. fols 145v–146v; Esc. fols 123–123v (very incomplete). See Constantinescu, ‘“Libelli precum”’, pp. 25–7 (martyrology), 27–30 (s.v., with an edition of the prayer inc. Misericors et miserata Dominus at pp. 29–30. The full Latin text is PL 73, cols 855–1024 (from Rosweyde); for the Greek ‘original’, compare CPG no. 5570. I am unclear what kind of text or what existing collection of extracts was Alcuin’s source for these passages; the excerpts in Vatican City BAV Pal. lat. 556 (German-Insular region, s. ix in), fols 38v–41 are a different selection, see CPG no. 4090 B.

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in the De laude, are Athanasius, Basil and Fulgentius. No trace of Basil’s Hexaemeron in a Latin translation (used by Bede), nor of the Admonitio ad filium spiritalem which circulated widely as a work of his, has been identified in any of Alcuin’s writings.43 Latin versions of genuine Athanasian works as well as falsely-attributed ones are cited in Alcuin’s polemical and dogmatic writings of the 790s and later, usually with a title as well as the author’s name; and Fulgentius’s Ad trasimundum al. De fide, which was already known to Bede, similarly in a late letter.44 Orosius, following Fortunatus, also figures in the author-list between Athanasius and Popes Gregory and Leo. This must none the less be a reference to the Historiae adversum paganos, which Alcuin cites by author and Book in a very contentious context in 801/2 and from which, in his verses on the destruction of Lindisfarne in 793, he had taken his examples of ‘kingdoms’ and their great cities that are now no more. The same work, with other ‘ancient histories’ or ‘historians’ which surprisingly remain unidentified, provided him with exemplars of the good and the bad in public life: particularly intriguing is the account of doctors’ responses to pestilentiae lues which ‘we have read in secular histories (in saecularis litteraturae historiis)’, with which he begins the first of his dogmatic works in the 790s.45 It may be relevant here that fragments of a plausibly 43 CPL3 no. 1155a: ed. P. Lehmann, Erforschung des Mittelalters. Ausgewählte Abhandlungen und Aufsätze, 5 (Stuttgart, 1962), pp. 200–45. 44 Athanasius: Siegmund, Die Überlieferung, pp. 49–51; citations in ep. no. 23 (p. 63) = Liber contra haeresim Felicis, XVII, ed. Blumenshine, p. 62, from Acta concilii Ephesi, vers. lat., ed. Schwartz, ACOE 1. 3 (1929), p. 69; in Liber contra haeresim Felicis, LVIII, ed. Blumenshine, p. 89 (pseudo-Ath.?); in ibid. LXI, ed. Blumenshine, p. 90 (ad Potamium: preserved only here but probably genuine); in Adv. Elipandum, III 16, PL 101, col. 281A, from Acta concilii Ephesi, vers. lat., ed. Schwartz, p. 69. Fulgentius (of Ruspe): writings listed CPL3 nos 814–35, pre-800/810 manuscripts indexed CLA Supplementum, p. 75; cited in ep. no. 307 (p. 468) of ?802/3; cf. the dedication-letter of the ‘Seven Books against Felix’, ep. no. 203 (and in the text, passim). The contrast with Theodulf ’s practice in the Opus Caroli Regis (Libri Carolini ), where only the four Doctors of the Church (but not Isidore or Bede) and three secular scholars are named as ‘authorities’ and book-titles rarely given, is remarked on by Ann Freeman in the Introduction to her edition: Opus Caroli, Einleitung, pp. 50–2. 45 Ep. no. 245 (p. 397); MGH Poet. I, pp. 229–30 (lines 30–40), with the notes to the edition and translation in Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, pp. 128–9. Spain as a land of tyrants ut in veteribus legitur historiis in ep. no. 200 (p. 331) (similarly in id. no. 137 [p. 212]) is a reference to Adv. paganos V, 23. Compare qui veteres revolvit historias in ep. no. 16, also epp. nos 123 (for clementia regis), 149 (for conduct towards opponents in war), 308 (from Vitruvius!). Cassiodorus, Inst. I xvii De historicis christianis (ed. Mynors, pp. 55–7) is of no help here, except perhaps in the prominence given to the Jewish Josephus ( paene secundus Livius) and the recommendation of both Orosius and Marcellinus. The doublet pestilentiae lues occurs in HE

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Northumbrian-written copy of Orosius, with glosses, of the second half of the eighth century are among those preserved at Düsseldorf, for which a Werden provenance is certain or likely.46 The clumsy last line in the list devoted to Christian authors, after Aldhelm and Bede—the only two Anglo-Latin writers worth remembering—is more than usually intriguing: quae Victorinus scripsere Boethius atque.

The conjunction of names suggests that the first of these is Marius Victorinus, not as a grammarian but as an author of theological works. Before the end of the century, Alcuin very unusually ‘owned’ the complete corpus. It is not excluded that York also had a copy of Victorinus’s Ars grammatica, which was copied ca. 800 at both Lorsch and St.-Amand, probably from the same late-Antique exemplar, at that time perhaps part of the Court book-collection. (The ‘Victorinus’ quoted by Bede in his De arte metrica is, however, a different author and a different work.)47 Remarkably, the line of the poem is the only reference to Boethius by name in Alcuin’s entire oeuvre; other authors

III 27 (cf. Orosius II 12.3,4 and Isidore, Etym. IV vi. 18, which have both words but separately), of the plague in 664 but with no reference to doctors or medicine; and Prof. R.A. Markus tells me that neither Augustine nor Bede uses historia saecularis. Alcuin’s Legimus etc. is Contra haeresem Felicis i, ed. Blumenshine, p. 55. 46 CLA Supplement, 1687, Gneuss, ‘List’, no. 820 (formerly Düsseldorf Staatsarchiv HS Z. 4 no. 2, now Hauptstaatsarchiv Fgm. K 19 Z 11–2, but deposited in the Universitätsbibl. with an alternative call-number!; and Fgm. K 16 Z 4–2 is apparently the new HStA. call-number of CLA Suppl., 1688). The manuscript’s testimonia—it is a substantial fragment—have not been reported, but seem to include a number of distinctive ones which should help to establish its place in the early tradition; the (contemporary) glosses explain, e.g., that conss is for consules and write out in full the numerals A.U.C.—to make easier reading aloud? 47 Victorinus’s theological corpus: Ars Gramm.: ed. I. Mariotti, Ars grammatica (Florence, 1967). The two manuscripts of the latter are the early Lorsch BAV Pal. lat. 1753 (Bischoff, Lorsch2, pp. 32, 76–7, 130–1) and the St.-Amand (Arn-period) Valenciennes Bibl. mun. 395 (378); for their archetype, see W.M. Lindsay, ‘A new clue to the emendation of Latin texts’, Classical Philology 11 (1916), 270–7, who supposed, probably wrongly, that the Valenciennes manuscript was copied from the Paris one. (For that reason Mariotti did not collate it: his second manuscriptwitness is the later Corbie book, Paris BNF. lat. 7539, whose copyist’s attempts to unravel the notae antiquae has produced (Bischoff, MaSt 3, 57) ‘ein Text voller Entstellungen’.) Bede’s citation of ‘Victorinus’ in De arte metrica I xiii, CCSL 123A (ed. Jones), p. 121, is from the De ratione metrorum of Maxim(in)us Victorinus, ed. Keil, GL 6, 219: despite the entry in Jones’s ‘Index Auctorum’, CCSL 123C, pp. 781–2, nothing in Bede’s text shows familarity with either the genuine grammatical writings of or the works mistakenly credited to Marius Victorinus.

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fare considerably better!48 What works of his were included in the York book-collection is hardly determinable. At different times, the Opuscula sacra—the medieval manuscript tradition of which effectively begins at Tours—some of the logical works, and the Consolatio philosophiae have been proposed. Alcuin certainly knew and had been excited by the Consolatio by 795–6 at the latest; but attempts to demonstrate knowledge of the text in pre-Carolingian England are generally reckoned to have failed.49 A passage in the ‘York poem’ overlooked by commentators on either text both supports this negative conclusion and strengthens the internal arguments for the poem’s ‘early’ dating (i.e. c. 782–6). Lines 228–30, apostrophising the death of the incomparable King Edwin at the hands of rebels, read: O res caeca nimis terreno fidere regno, quod praeceps Fortuna rotat, fatisque malignis vertitur et variis semper mutatur in horis.

Professor Godman’s very full apparatus of ‘principal sources and nearest analogues’ offers nothing at this point.50 The reference to ‘fickle Fortune turning her wheel’ immediately suggests Boethius in the Consolatio, where earlier Patristic proscription of the image is conspicuously ignored and which provided a rich source for poets, artists and others from the ninth century onwards.51 Alcuin’s language here, however, is unique in his writings and apparently in the eighth century; and Boethius surprisingly never uses praeceps as an epithet of Fortuna nor links Fortuna with the verb rotare. (Nor is the phrase 48 In the Opus Caroli (above, n. 44), Boethius is among the select group of Theodulf ’s named ‘authorities’, testimonia, the other two secular writers being Aristotle and Apuleius. 49 M. Gibson, ‘The Opuscula Sacra in the Middle Ages’, Boethius: his Life, Thought and Influence, ed. M. Gibson (Oxford, 1981), pp. 214–34, at p. 215; Godman’s edition of ‘the York poem’, p. 124 (comm. ad l. 1548); P. Courcelle, La Consolation de Philosophie dans la Tradition Littéraire (Études Augustiniennes; Paris, 1967), pp. 32–47; F. Troncarelli, Tradizione Perdute. La ‘Consolatio Philosophiae’ nell’Alto Medioevo: Antécédents et Postérité de Boèce (Padua, 1980), esp. pp. 107–10. Note that the Boethian elements in the early annalistic section of pseudo-Symeon, Historia Regum (ed. Arnold, 2, 46–66), particularly quotations of the metra, are due to Byrhtferth and no evidence of eighth-century York learning ( pace Brown, ‘“Classical authors”, A Palaeographer’s View’, p. 158). 50 The even fuller apparatus in Godman’s Oxford D. Phil. thesis merely offers Paulinus of Pella, Eucharisticon, 298 fidere regno (a line-ending not, in fact, reported elsewhere). 51 P. Courcelle, La Consolation de Philosophie dans la Tradition littéraire, Études Augustiniennes (Paris, 1967), 2e Partie.

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malignis fatis to be found in his work.) The first two lines of the passage from the poem are much closer to ones in Seneca’s Agammemnon and other plays, notably O regnorum magnis fallax/ Fortuna bonis,/ in praecipiti dubioque locas/ excelsa nimis, and later in the same chorus, ut praecipites regum casus/ Fortuna rotat; although it is most unlikely that these were his direct source or inspiration.52 In view of the impact of the Consolatio on Alcuin in the mid-790s, it seems unlikely that it would not have influenced his one allusion to Fortuna in the poem if he were already familiar with Boethius’s evocative treatment of the theme when he was composing it. The extent of Alcuin’s early knowledge of the writings of Boethius’s more fortunate contemporary Cassiodorus is similarly debatable. As we have seen, his Expositio psalmorum was a familiar and an influential text. But what of his Institutiones, for half-a-millennium a unique combination of study-manual and bibliography? It may be regarded as certain that no copy had reached Wearmouth or Jarrow in Bede’s lifetime: none of his writings show any awareness of either of its two Books or of Cassiodorus’s career; and there are better explanations of the Cassiodorian elements in the prefatory material of the Amiatinus Bible than direct acquaintance with chapters in Book I.53 On Bede’s testimony, the Wearmouth-Jarrow library also lacked the Historia tripartita and Cassiodorus’s De orthographia.54 The York library may subsequently have acquired the second of these: Alcuin makes extensive use of it in his De orthographia (versio I), which has a good claim to having been written not later than 793; but neither that text nor 52 Seneca, Tragoediae (ed. Zwierlein; OCT, 1986), Agamm. lines 57–9, 71–2; cf. Thyestes lines 617–8, 621–2,. . . prohibetque Clotho/ stare Fortunam, rotat omne fatum./. . . res deus nostras celeri citatas/ turbine versat, and the citation from Pacuvius in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, II 23, 36 . . . eo cadere Fortunam autumant./ Caecam ob eam rem etc. The verses of Dracontius, whose identifiable models include Seneca’s plays, include nothing that might have been Alcuin’s sources for these lines. 53 See, most recently and fully, P. Meyvaert, ‘Bede, Cassiodorus and the Codex Amiatinus’, Speculum 71 (1996), 827–83. Among earlier writers compare A.C. Dionisotti, ‘On Bede, Grammars and Greek’, RevBén 92 (1982), 111–42, at p. 129: ‘it was a mean trick of fate to deprive Bede of Cassiodorus’ Institutes’; and (for Amiatinus) K. Corsano, ‘The first quire of the Codex Amiatinus and the Institutiones of Cassiodorus’, Scriptorium 41 (1987), 3–34, whose arguments and conclusions are effectively challenged by Meyvaert, cit. 54 M.L.W. Laistner, ‘The library of the Venerable Bede’ [1935], Intellectual Heritage, pp. 117–49, wrongly admitted the Historia: Bede’s source was Rufinus’s Historia Ecclesiastica, see Levison, England and the Continent, p. 141 (compare idem, p. 283 for Boniface’s acquaintance with Cassiodorus’s work). For Bede’s non-use of the De orthographia, see Dionisotti, ‘On Bede, Grammars and Greek’, esp. at p. 121.

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the probably equally early Quaestiones in Genesim suggests in any way a familiarity with one or both books of Cassiodorus’s ‘Principles’.55 The one apparent quotation from Book II in Alcuin’s letters is in fact dependent on Isidore.56 On the other hand, his major pedagogic works from the mid-790s all use the Institutiones; and the several pages of schemata in the (Tours-period) joint edition of the De rhetorica and the De dialectica seem clearly to reflect the tables that were an integral element of Cassiodorus’s text, but are very inadequately presented in Mynors’s otherwise unsuperseded edition. It still seems likely that Alcuin encountered it for the first time, as a whole or in part, only at the Frankish Court.57 Two authors not named in the ‘York poem’s’ list with whose writings Alcuin was demonstrably familiar before he left his patria for Francia are Gildas—whom, like Bede, he clearly knew as ‘Gildus’— ‘most learned of Britons’, and Isidore, ‘than whom Spain had noone more distinguished’.58 He would have encountered parts of Gildas’s De excidio indirectly in the first Book of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, although the author is only named there as he ceases to be used as a source. In early sections of ‘the York poem’, however, he seems to be using the work directly; and in one of his letters on the sack of Lindisfarne (793) Alcuin observes that an account of the Britons’ loss of their native land because of their misconduct can be read in 55 See Alcuino ‘De orthographia’, ed. S. Bruni, Millennio Medievale 2 (Florence, 1997), esp. pp. 39–40. Bruni’s edition of what she calls ‘redazione’ effectively supersedes all previous editions; but her insistence that it was ‘scritto probabilmente a Tours’ is not supported by any new evidence. 56 Below, n. 62. 57 For a pre-800 Court collection which includes an interpolated version of Inst. Book II, see below, ch. 3. 58 Epp. nos 17 (p. 47), 129 (p. 192): Gildus (Gyl-) Brettonum (Britt-) sapientissimus; ep. no. 166 (p. 274): cui nihil Hispania clarius habuit. Gildus,-i and not Gildas is the orthography of all the pre-1100 manuscripts of ep. no. 17, while the two H manuscripts of ep. no. 129 have ‘Gyldum’ and the Salzburg Vienna 808 ‘Gyilbum’ [sic]. In Bede’s HE I. 22, historicus eorum Gildus is the universal testimony of the early manuscripts, beginning with ‘Moore’ and ‘Leningrad’ and accordingly adopted by Plummer, but silently ‘corrected’ by Colgrave and Mynors to h.e. Gildas: which may have some bearing on the origin of that puzzling personal-name. The earliest example of the epithet sapiens is apparently the addition, in the form et Gildae sapientis, to the ‘Calendar of St. Willibrord’ at 29 (not 28) January: see Wilson’s facsimile and commentary (at p. 20). The calendar in Berlin Phillips 1869 has nat. sci. Gildi sapientis at that date, the calendar in Milan Ambr. M.12 sup (which seems often to preserve more accurately the text of the putative ‘northern English martyrology’) has Sci. Gildi sapientissimi in Britannia. It perhaps originated in Ireland: see the (muddled) discussion by M. Deanesly, with comments by P. Grosjean, in Franz Saxl 1890–1948: a volume of Memorial Essays, ed. D.J. Gordon (Edinburgh-London, 1957), pp. 53–76.

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‘Gildus’s book’. What may be an unattributed quotation in a later letter would, if the identification is correct, suggest considerable familiarity with the text.59 The Spanish author’s Etymologiae, in spite of its bulk and the copying problems this posed, reached north-west Europe early and circulated widely: Aldhelm and Bede were both familiar with it. By the end of the eighth century there could have been few religious communities with any pretensions to learning that did not have at least a partial text.60 Echoes of several different Books of the work have been discerned in Alcuin’s earliest poems; and both letters and the pedagogic works, beginning with the first version of De orthographia, incorporate defining and other phrases that are certainly or probably taken from it, including the ‘Aristotelian proverb’ according to which the author ‘dipped his pen in his mind’ when he was ‘writing his most sagacious work of argumentation, the Periermenias’.61

59 See Godman’s Introduction to the ‘York poem’, p. xlviii and n. 3, although not all the lines cited are equally germane; ep. no. 17 (p. 47), with which compare ep. no. 129 (p. 192). (It is also probable that Alcuin’s normal spelling of Britanni(a) was with a single -t-, although wavering between -ret- and -rit-: the T manuscripts have here (despite Dümmler) Bretonum, -es, with which compare ‘York poem’s’ Britann- in ed. Godman, lines 20 and 21 and Britonum in line 41.) In ep. no. 58, defending himself against unspecified accusations, Alcuin says Testis est mihi renium scrutator. Vg. Sap 1.6 (but not Ps 7.10, any version) has quoniam renum illius testis est Deus et cordis eius scrutator est verus; De excidio 1 (at line 7 in Mommsen’s edition, MGH AA XIII, p. 25) alone has both mihi and the incorrect gen. renium, which is the reading of all manuscripts, but ‘corrected’ by the editor to renum! Compare also the prayer ‘Cerne’ no. 49 = ‘Royal’ oratio sancti Augustini, at fol. 48, Kuypers, Book of Cerne, pp. 146, 222: Tu enim scrutator es cordis et renium, where in ‘Cerne’ a later corrector has deleted the i. 60 B. Bischoff, ‘Die europäische Verbreitung der Werke Isidors v. Sevilla’ [1960], MaSt 1, 171–94, at pp. 180–4; J.N. Hillgarth in StudMed 3 24 (1983), 825–9; and the Index s. v. ‘Isidorus Hispalensis’ in CLA Supplement (1971). (The work does not, however, make a single appearance in Sims-Williams’s richly documented Religion and Literature.) The fragmentary codex CLA VIII, 1189 (Düsseldorf etc.) is probably of Northumbrian origin and possibly of Werden provenance. Three hundred or more folios were commonly required for a complete copy, even when the scribes wrote a compact minuscule: so, for example, the substantially-palimpsest ?Bobbio book, Wolfenbüttel Weiss. 64 (CLA IX, 1386); but the now defective Leiden Voss. Lat. F.74 (associated with Lupus of Ferrières) must always have been less than two hundred folios. 61 Carm. iv (on which see below) line 4 (MGH Poet. I, p. 221), Tum tua prelongo ducatur prora remulco, and ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, lines 28–9 . . . longo sua prora remulco/ navita qua properans iam sistat . . . certainly depend on Isidore’s quotation from [C.] Valgius [Rufus] in Etym. XIX. iv. 8, Hic mea me longo succedens prora remulco/ laetantem gratis sistit in hospitiis; ‘York poem’ lines 45–8 seemingly makes use of Etym. IX. ii. 100. For a probable allusion to Etym. XIII. ii. 1 in carm. ix (to Lindisfarne in 793) and ep. no. 60, see below, ch. 3. The Aristotelicum proverbium etc. in ep. no. 86 (p. 129), which might be as early as the summer of 793, is from Etym. II. xxvii, 1, which in turn depends on Inst. II 3 (ed. Mynors, p. 114). Alcuin, like Isidore but unlike Cassiodorus, supposes that Periermenias has a genitive plural Periermeniarum.

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Alcuin’s knowledge while still at York of Isidore’s only slightly-less popular Sententiae—characterised by its most recent editor as perhaps the earliest Summa theologica—would be certain if his supposed contributions to the English legatine synods in 786 included the formulation of its third canon: the lengthy exhortation to bishops in its second half quotes verbatim Lib. III cap. 45, although with some re-arrangement and incorporating echoes of the preceding and succeeding chapters also.62 Even if Etymologiae Lib. IX had provided Alcuin with the tag A regendo vero rex dicitur (ultimately derived from Augustine’s De civitate Dei V 12) in his admonitory letter to the Northumbrian king and leading men in 793, the passages that follow certainly seem to have been influenced by Sententiae III, capp. 47–9.63 The third Book of the De laude shows that Alcuin had access to a text of Isidore’s exuberant early exercise in ascetic self-denunciation, the so-called Synonyma, or perhaps to a collection of extracts from it. Bede apparently never cites it, and the linking together of sentences from several chapters in the latter part of its Lib. I to form the ‘Book of Cerne’s’ prayer 50, inc. Succurre mihi domine, does not conclusively establish the compiler’s first-hand knowledge;64 a copy that was soon to be taken to Germany had, however, been made in Mercia or southern England before the middle of the century.65 The text of the ‘York poem’ points to knowledge of the Versus in bibliotheca, which were already familiar at Ceolfrith’s and Bede’s Wearmouth-Jarrow.66 Finally, Alcuin may also have consulted the same scholar’s De natura rerum, a work with an unusually-full testimony in pre-ninth century manuscripts and a distinctively Insular 62 Isidorus Hispalensis Sententiae, ed. P. Cazier (CCSL 111; Turnhout, 1998), at pp. xiii, 288–9 and pp. 287–92 passim; MGH Epist. IV, pp. 21–2 (several of the ‘corrections’ to the transmitted text being unjustified). For the extent of Alcuin’s involvement, see below, ch. 3. 63 Ep. no. 18 (p. 49); Etym. IX. iii, 1 and 4 (reges a regendo vocati . . . ita et rex a regendo); Sententiae ed. Cazier, pp. 295–302, esp. III 48.7 and 11, and 49.2 and 3. In Wallach’s view, ‘it was Isidore’s Sententiae, one of the main sources of Alcuin’s treatise On Virtues and Vices, that chiefly impressed upon Alcuin Isidore’s ideas of the functions of rulers’: Alcuin and Charlemagne, p. 7. 64 PL 83, cols 827–68 (but the texts in the ca. 500 manuscripts vary enormously); Constantinescu, ‘Alcuin et les “libelli precum”’, pp. 30–1; Cerne prayer 50, ed. Kuypers, pp. 148–50, with the title Oratio sancti Ieronimis presbyteri. In the version of the pseudo-Alcuinian Officia per ferias in Paris BNF. lat. 1153, a slightly variant text has the title Oratio sancti Isidori: Sims-Williams, ‘Ephrem the Syrian’, p. 212; and see ibid. p. 217 for other versions and copies. 65 CLA IX, 1426; Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, pp. 202–3. 66 Ed. C.H. Beeson, Isidor-Studien (Munich, 1913), pp. 133–66; A. Ortéga, in Helmantica 12 (1961), 261–99 (which I have not seen).

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(northern English?) branch in its tradition. It was however used extensively by Bede for his own work of that name and, where appropriate, in his writings on Time; and Alcuin’s references analogically to Lucifer (Venus) as the bright star of the morning and the brightest of them all—which he would not have found in Bede—could easily depend on some other source-text.67

From the Other Island? No Irish name figures in the York ‘book-list’. Perhaps we should not expect one. The majority of early Irish writers are anonymous, although many of their works early acquired an illegitimate Patristic parentage; the few that are not are the authors of only one or two works; and of these only one certainly (two if we count Augustinus Hibernicus) and one possibly (Cummian or Lathcen?) were drawn on by Alcuin in his later writings. A single passage in the ‘Questions and Answers on Genesis’, which I believe may be pre-790 in date, is taken from the ‘Irish Augustine’s’ De mirabilibus Sanctae Scripturae of 655.68 Alcuin’s verbal dependence on Aileran’s Interpretatio . . . progenitorum Domini Iesu Christi for large parts of his own Interpretationes nominum hebraicorum, which possibly belongs to the years back in York between 67 Isidore: splendidly edited by J. Fontaine, Isidore de Séville: Traité de la Nature (BÉHÉHisp 28, Bordeaux, 1960), who suggested (p. 31, but without any real evidence) that the ‘long’ recension may have originated at York. Fontaine’s A, the thirteen-leaf(!) large-format Basel Öffentl. Bibl. F. III 15 f (CLA VII, 848), was probably written in England and possibly in Northumbria. Lowe, ibid. followed by Bischoff (MaSt 3, 87), claimed that it was the exemplar of Basel Öffentl. Bibl. F. III 15 a (CLA VII, 842) in Continental Anglo-Saxon minuscule, probably at Fulda where it very soon was; but what the former calls ‘astronomical notes’ in the two manuscripts is in fact a short text—unpublished?—on the position of the twelve signs of the zodiac (with tables of the corresponding calendar dates), of which three are missing in the supposed exemplar! Bede: C.W. Jones, CCSL 123A, pp. 173–234, cf. CCSL 133C, pp. 769–71. Alcuin: epp. nos 186 (p. 311), 283 (p. 442), with which compare Isidore, De nat. rer., III 3, XXVI 10–11 (ed. Fontaine, pp. 185, 271–3), but cf. Etym. III, lxxi. 18, Lucifer dictus eo quod inter sidera plus lucem ferat and, for ep. no. 186’s quasi matutinus Lucifer semper nova exoritur, perhaps Gregory, Moralia, Praef. VI (13) (ed. Adriaen, CCSL 143 [1979], p. 19), quousque verus Lucifer surgeret, qui aeternum nobis mane nuntians, stellis caeteris clarius ex divinitate radiaret. 68 The full text of ‘Augustinus’ is PL 35, cols 2149–2200 (but see Bischoff, ‘Wendepunkte’, MaSt 1, 268–9): it is regrettable that Father McGinty’s excellent new edition, which I examined as a Dublin Doctoral dissertation nearly 30 years ago, remains unpublished. For the author, see P. Grosjean, ‘Quelques exégètes irlandais du viie siècle’, SE 7 (1955), 67–98, at 67–76.

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790 and 793, leaves little doubt that he was working with the learned Irishman’s text in front of him.69 The importance of the mid-seventh century De duodecim abusivis <saeculi> (‘pseudo-Cyprian’), and more specifically its ninth abuse, the Rex iniquus, in the formation of Alcuin’s—or alternatively of an ‘insular’—notion of kingly authority and of the virtues on which it should rest has been much emphasised in recent decades. The evidence is partly textual, i.e. verbal parallels to or echoes of ‘pseudoCyprian’ in some of Alcuin’s earliest extant letters and elsewhere, and partly in the realm of ‘ideas’.70 Some reasonable doubts are greatly diminished if it is supposed that his text was a different and probably older version than the received one and that, in his long letter to the Northumbrian king and his principes in 793, Alcuin was perhaps using it in combination with another text that had independently drawn on Abusio IX. It is in any case likely that he was relying then on recollections of a text read and digested years before.71 Faint support for earlier familiarity with pseudo-Cyprian can be found 69

Aileran’s work has been re-edited from the manuscripts by A. Breen, Ailerani Interpretatio Mystica et Moralia Progenitorum Domini Iesu Christi (Dublin, 1995), which must, however, be used in conjunction with the review by Jean Rittmueller in Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, no. 32 (Winter 1996), pp. 105–10. In Dr. Breen’s view (Introduction, p. 6)—accepted by Rittmueller—‘The breadth of Aileran’s scholarship is quite remarkable’. 70 Text: for nonus abusionis gradus, ibid. pp. 51–3, for sextus abusionis gradus, dominus sine virtute, ibid., pp. 43–5. A new edition and detailed source-analysis has been prepared by Dr. A. Breen (Dublin). Commentary: Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, pp. 8–10; H.H. Anton, Fürstenspiegel und Herrscherethos in der Karolingerzeit (Bonn, 1968), pp. 67–71, 73–4, 103–7; Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship, pp. 56–7, 100–1, 105 (Alcuin showing in his letters ‘the insular slant on kingship derived from close attention to Pseudo-Cyprian and Isidore as well as the Old Testament’). For possible influence on the royal ‘title’ of the 789 Admonitio generalis, see below, ch. 3. 71 H.H. Anton, ‘Pseudo-Cyprian, De duodecim abusivis saeculi und sein Einfluss auf den Kontinent, inbesondere auf die karolingischen Fürstenspiegel’, Die Iren und Europa ed. Löwe, 2, 568–617, esp. 578–89, 597–602. Legimus . . . quod regis BONITAS in ep. no. 18 (p. 51) is not pseudo-Cyprian’s language; but, perhaps also with pseudoCyprian in mind, Alcuin uses the same word of the virtues of a Frankish duke in the almost certainly earlier ep. no. 69 (below, ch. 3). Echoes of pseudo-Cyprian in ep. no. 18 are not, however, limited to the Legimus passage: see the verbal parallels listed by Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, p. 9 n. 10; and add from Alcuin’s earlier passage Bona vero sunt opera per quae ascendere in caelum possumus (p. 50 lines 18 ff.) the phrases iustitia in iudiciis, pacientia in adversitatibus (adversantibus in T ), elimosina in pauperes, fides recta in Deum and continentia in cibo et potu, to be compared with ‘pseudoCyprian’s’ pauperes elemosynis alere, cuncta adversaria (al. adversantia, adversa), fidem catholicam in Deum habere and ante horas congruas non gustare cibum, which regem ad caelestia regna meliora perducunt (ed. Hellmann, pp. 51, 52).

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in the ‘York poem’s account of King Eadberct and its indirect criticism of unnamed later rulers: namely, the reference in the former to tempora felicia huius gentis and its emphasis on germana pax, the king’s subduing of hostiles phalanges and the occurrence of the then-distinctive phrase negotia regni; and the subsequent assertion that Bishop Ælberht non regi aut ducibus iustus parcebat iniquis.72 Inferentially, if debatably, the characterisation of a rex iniquus could have influenced the ‘Northumbrian Annalist’s’ account of the reign of King Æthelwald.73 Finally, although other influences are always possible and Alcuin develops his own language of reproof, several of his letters may have echoes of the first three of pseudo-Cyprian’s abuses, ‘the man of learning and teacher (sapiens et praedicator) without good works’, ‘the old man without religion’ and ‘the young man who is found to be without obedience’.74 Eighth-century York’s likely familiarity with examples of Irish hymnody and with other aspects of its liturgical practice has already been remarked on.75 A unique early-eighth-century Psalter-commentary, written by a man with a Northumbrian name, has lemmata that are overwhelmingly from the Gallican version, exegesis that seems to be characteristically Irish, and vernacular glosses in both Northumbrian and Irish, suggesting composition and copying in a community where English and Irish worshipped and studied side by side.76 The home of the ‘Scottish’ magister (al. presbyter et lector) Colcu who figures twice in Alcuin’s correspondence in 790 and died in 794—and is com72

‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1276–84, 1479; but also the accounts of King Oswald in lines 237–40, 266–75. Compare with these, pseudo-Cyprian’s ecclesias defendere, pauperes elemosynis alere, iustos super regni negotia constituere and patriam fortiter et iuste contra adversarios defendere as attributes of a just king (ed. Hellmann, pp. 51, 52) and hostium incursus provincias undique vastant as among the consequences of unjust rule. As the source of Alcuin’s negotia regni, Godman suggested I Mcc 6.56; and indeed, that OT Book is a probable source of line 116 and certainly of passages in the anti-Adoptionist treatises and elsewhere. 73 See above. 74 Ed. Hellmann, pp. 32–8; for the disobedient disciple, see, e.g., ep. no. 295. Unlike Hincmar of Rheims in the next century (references in Anton, ‘Pseudo-Cyprian und sein Influss’, pp. 612–14), Alcuin never cites an abusio as such. 75 For further evidence from Lindisfarne, see Bullough, ‘A neglected early-ninthcentury manuscript of the Lindisfarne Vita S. Cuthberti ’, ASE 27 (1998), 105–37, at 114–15. 76 BAV Pal. lat. 68, CLA I, no. 78; M. McNamara, Glossa in Psalmos: the HibernoLatin Gloss on the Psalms of Codex Palatinus Latinus 68 (StT. 310; Città del Vaticano, 1986) Paul Meyvaert has drawn attention to a possible link between the commentary’s exegesis of Ps 148 and the iconography of the Ruthwell Cross, The Ruthwell Cross, ed. Cassidy (above, ch. 1, n. 10), at pp. 128–9.

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monly, but wrongly, identified with the homonymous scholar-abbot of Clonmacnois—might have been a church of the Columban paruchia politically subject to the Northumbrian king: the letters certainly imply that at that time he was living in Northumbria. Alternatively (or earlier?) he could be connected with Mayo ‘of the Saxons’ in western Ireland, perhaps even to be identified with Colcu, abbot of Inishboffin, the death of whose fosterling (dalta) Blathmacc is recorded in the ‘Annals of Ulster’ for 813 (recte 814). But his scholarly achievements and what, if anything, Alcuin owed to him are quite unknown.77

Christian and Pre-Christian Poets Once ‘the Fathers’ have been listed, the ‘York book-list’ makes no very clear attempt (in lines 1547–1557) to separate Pagan and Christian authors. It begins with historici veteres, devotes three lines to LateAntique Christian poets and one to pagan, and concludes with three lines on grammarians. Almost all the Christian poets named—Sedulius, Iuvencus, Alcimus Avitus, Prudentius, Prosper, Paulinus (of Nola), Arator and Venantius Fortunatus—are quoted or echoed in the poem, none more so than Paulinus and Fortunatus. Among the few absentees (except for an echo indirectly via Bede), Prosper of Aquitaine is extensively excerpted for the De laude Dei, together with Sedulius and Dracontius, who is not in the ‘author-list’.78 They are representative

77 Ep. no. 7, Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/4, addressed to Benedicto magistro et pio patri Colcu; ep. no. 8, Chase I/5, addressed to Joseph, declared to be a shared pupil of Colcu and Alcuin. The Colcu of the two letters is surely the Colcu presbyter et lector, a man ‘to be lauded for his earthly labours’ whose death in 794 is recorded in the ‘Northumbrian (?York) Annals’ (HR ed. Arnold, 2, 56), and therefore a different person from Colcu ua Duinechda (of Clonmacnois). The death of the latter—who may or may not be the author of the litanic Scuap Chrábaid or ‘Broom of Devotion’, ed. K. Meyer in Otia Merseiana 2 (1900–1), 92–105, ed. C. Plummer, Irish Litanies, pp. 30–45, 111–12—is recorded in the Annals of Ulster s.a. 795 (for 796), ed. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill (1983), p. 250. The lemma of ep. no. 7 in Tib. reads Epistola Albini magistri ad Colum <sic> lectorem in Scotia, there being no counterpart to the last three words in the letter itself (although Gale improperly introduced them into the address-clause in his transcript). If in Scotia goes back to the original ‘registration’ of the letter, Colcu’s community can hardly have been anywhere in mainland Britain: his evident Northumbrian connections therefore point strongly to York-dependent Mayo, cf. above, ch. 1. For Colggen (gen.) abbas Insolae Uaccae Albae, see Ann. Ulst., ed. cit., p. 270. 78 For Prosper (the Epigrammata ex sententiis S. Augustini; CPL3 526) see Bamb. fols 152v–153 (Esc. unreadable in the microfilm), also fol. 155 which is from the Poema

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of a ‘school canon’, established before the Ancient educational tradition finally dissolved in the West and reflected in composite manuscripts of early-Carolingian and later date: indeed, a ?mid-ninth-century Liège cathedral book, in which an illustrated text of Sedulius’s Carmen Paschale is combined with Prosper’s Epigrammata, is regarded by arthistorians as a copy of a Northumbrian book of more than a century previously.79 These writers form ‘a coherent whole’, which was solidly complemented at York by the newcomers Aldhelm and Bede; other Christian poets, characterised as ‘marginal to the canon’, make only a minimal appearance, although in 796/7 Alcuin quoted two lines from the Heptateuchos (lib. Exodus) of the ?fifth-century ‘Cyprianus Gallus’ in a more correct version than that of the only complete Carolingian copy.80 To them must be added, however, some strands of Rome’s Christian epigraphic tradition, which he may have encountered in loco as well as through imported collections of inscriptions (syllogae), and of its early English imitators: a line in Pope Leo I’s epitaph was adapted for the ‘York poem’, and one in John VII’s for tituli for Abbot-Bishop Arn’s restored tomb of St. Amand and for the restored (?)Laon cathedral.81 Reinforced by Virgil, whose language had been coniugis ad uxorem (CPL3 531; S.-K. no. 458; previously cited by Bede), probably not Prosper but of uncertain authorship; Bede, HE I 10 quotes six lines of one of his epigrammata in obtrectatorem Augustini (CPL3 518; S.-K. no. 2728), the source therefore of Alcuin’s ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, line 88. For Sedulius see Bamb. fols 151v–52, followed by short extracts from Iuvencus and Arator (Bamb. fols 152–152v); for Dragontius see Bamb. fols 154–5. The latter are from Dracontius’s De laudibus Dei (ed. Vollmer, MGH AA XIV, pp. 23–113), Books II and III only: Alcuin certainly knew Bk. I in his later years, since line 650, et rediviva salus reduci per membra vapore, must surely be the source of Vita Willibrordi (II) xxxi, 12 (MGH Poet. I, p. 217), et rediviva salus per membra cucurrit ubique. 79 ‘York Poem’, ed. Godman, lines 1551–3, with Intro. pp. lxix–lxxii. For the manuscripts generally, see G. Glauche, Schullektüre im Mittelalter. Entstehung u. Wandlungen des Lektürekanons bis 1200 (Münchener Beitr. zur Mediävistik u. Renaissance-Forsch. 5; 1970), pp. 31–6. The Liège book is Antwerp, Musée Plantin-Moretus, M.17.4 (176), on which see C. Caesar, ‘Die Antwerpener Handschrift des Sedulius’, Rheinisches Museum N.F. 56 (1901), 247–71; J.J.G. Alexander, Insular Manuscripts 6th to the 9th Century, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, 1 (London, 1978), pls 286–301; Bischoff, Katalog, 1, 23 (no. 75) as ‘Lüttich, IX. Jh., 2. Drittel’ (against Alexander’s and his own earlier datings). 80 Cypriani Galli Heptateuchos. ed. R. Peiper (CSEL 23; 1891), p. 61; Alcuin’s ep. no. 162 (p. 260), . . . in metro quod in eptatheco (so T; -ico, T *) conscribitur . . . In quo conspicua flammarum lampade cernit/ procurvam fulgere rubum neque ignibus uri’. The reading of Laon Bibl. mun. 279 (Moselle region, s. ix2/3, according to Prof. B. Bischoff: pers. comm. 1987) here is rubrum; its Laon-region copy, Laon Bibl. mun. 273, omits the Heptateuchos. 81 A. Silvagni, ‘La Silloge epigrafica di Cambridge’, RivArchCrist 20 (1943), 49–112; P. Sims-Williams, ‘Milred of Worcester’s collection of Latin epigrams and its continental counterparts’, ASE 10 (1982), 21–38; idem, Religion and Literature, pp. 339–59,

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a major influence on the Late-Antique ‘school poets’ concerned to write verse Christo digna, they provided Alcuin and his disciples with forms of expression, vocabulary and metrics without which their verses, ponderous and banal or lively and inspired, are hardly imaginable.82 The range of Alcuin’s reading in pre-Christian poetry and prose while he was still at York will always be a matter of speculation rather than fact, as will, a fortiori, the precise nature of his manuscript texts, even when we can be sure that a particular author was known to him: we know only the end-product. The ‘York poem’ and, on a much smaller scale, the earlier letter-poem inc. Cartula, perge cito, are none the less evidence of a thorough familiarity with Virgil’s Aeneid and with at least parts of the Georgics and probably the Eclogues.83 But from what kind of text did he acquire that familiarity? I am less confident than I was some years ago that its character can be broadly established from some of the more distinctive Virgilian citations in Alcuin’s other writings: certainly these do not provide a recognisable link with any particular manuscript tradition for which there are accessible collations. It is not difficult to find later manuscripts with alia serpillumque at Ecl. II 11, which Alcuin quotes after Alium et dolium per i scribenda in both versions of his De orthographia; but here he is simply following Bede. Urgere tela manu, cited from Virgil in the same work’s lemma Urgere debemus dicere is, according to the late Sir Roger Mynors, recorded at Aeneid IX 773 (against the standard unguere etc.) in a number of late-medieval codices, thus at least offering the possibility that it was already the reading of an eighth/ninth-century exemplar; but since Alcuin has here adapted a passage in Cassiodorus’s De orthographia, it is perhaps more likely that he has simply taken over the apparent testimony of his manuscript-source.84 esp. pp. 346–8 (objecting, probably fairly, to my earlier description of contemporary Roman verse-inscriptions as ‘tired but not dead or entirely despicable’ inheritors of an ancient tradition). ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 672–3 is from Silvagni no. 3 (p. 86), line 8; carm. lxxxviii.14 line 3 (MGH Poet. I, p. 308) and carm. lxvi. 2 line 8 (ibid. 286) are from Silvagni no. 41 (p. 111) line 9. 82 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, Intro. pp. lxxvii–lxxxvii, c–ciii, cvii–cx; Gernot Wieland, ‘Alcuin’s ambiguous attitude towards the Classics’, JournMedLat 2 (1992), 84–95, arguing convincingly for a distinction, recognised by the school-poets who influenced Alcuin as well as by Alcuin himself, between ‘content’ and ‘language’. 83 For Cartula perge, see below. I rely on R.A.B. Mynors’s Oxford Classical Texts edition for the text of Virgil and for the principal manuscript variants (but see below, ch. 3, pp. 399–400 n. 215). 84 Serpill-: Alcuin, De orthographia ed. Keil, GL 7, 295–6, ed. Bruni, p. 4 [no. 12] (although the oldest manuscripts of both versions, respectively Erfurt Amplon. F.10

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More problematic is the part-line Sub lucem exornant calathis, quoted in the De grammatica as evidence of prepositional usage. There can be little doubt that this is what Alcuin wrote or dictated when composing the definitive ‘published’ version. Exornant is the reading of manuscripts of his work as different and unconnected as the clumsy early-ninth-century abbreviation in the Vatican manuscript Reginensis lat. 251—a grammar-teacher’s compendium, which also includes carmina of Aldhelm, Proba, and letters of Pliny extracted from a distinctive ?Court-connected collection85—and the unique Renaissance (Urbino) edition in another Vatican codex, Urbinatis lat. 308. But the consensus of all collated manuscripts of Virgil at Georg. III 402 is sub lucem exportant, modern editors inserting a colon after lucem (exportans in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions is an emendation of Scaliger’s);86 nor is Alcuin’s version found in any other grammarian. Had he then read when young a text with a seeminglyunique variant? or had Alcuin’s Virgil-manuscript the standard exportant which he mis-copied (or mis-remembered) and subsequently mis-quoted or an amanuensis mis-heard? Until a manuscript, or better still a group of manuscripts, comes to light with that distinctive reading I shall prefer the second hypothesis.87 In this particular context, the ‘York poem’ is no great help, even if the early dating for its composition is maintained. Its most recent editor has identified over one hundred and fifty Virgilian parallels and Vienna 795 read here serpellumque!); Bede, De orthographia, ed. Jones, p. 11 [100 seq.]. Urgere etc.: Alcuin, De orth. ed. Keil, GL 7, 311, ed. Bruni, p. 33 [no. 397] with idem. pp. lviii–lix; Mynors ‘reported’ the Virgil manuscript readings in a letter of 1971 but unfortunately gave no details. Should some work on metrics similarly be sought to account for the non-attested relliquiae Danaum (Aen. I 30) in the lemma Reliquiae per q scribendum est . . . in both versions (as Virgil poetica licentia dixisset), ed. Keil, GL 7, 308, ed. Bruni, p. 27 [no. 334]. 85 Wilmart, Codices Reginenses 2, 1–3, the abbreviated Alcuin on fols 38–52v. For the Pliny letter-collection, see Reynolds in Texts and Transmission, pp. 321–2. Among the unpublished glosses of Proba (line 20: ed. Schenkl, CSEL 16, 570) is Castalio (sed fonte madens imitata beatus) gl. baptisterio! The late Professor Bischoff (pers. communication, 1983) felt unable to locate the manuscript more precisely than ‘possibly eastern France’. 86 See Mynors’s Oxford Classical Texts edition (Oxford, 1969/1972), ad loc. 87 E.K. Rand said of Bern, Stadtbibl. cod. 165, a Tours book of the secondquarter of the ninth century, that it ‘often tempted [him] to the conjecture’ that it reflects an ‘Alcuin edition of Virgil’s text’ ‘despite some of his anti-Virgilian remarks’(!): A Survey of the Manuscripts of Tours, 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), pp. 52, 127–8 (no. 64). This is very much a ‘school-book’, with construe-marks—not mentioned by Rand—and scholia (for the former see Chatelain, Paléographie class., pl. 67); but it has neither urgere nor exornant among its readings.

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(quotations, allusions or echoes) in the 1658 lines. Some of these are sufficiently remote as to show no more than that Alcuin the poet, and before him the composers of epigraphic and Christian-Latin verse, were thoroughly soaked in Virgil’s language and metrical forms.88 Only once does he lift an entire line without change, adopting Aen. I 609 semper honos nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt for the ‘York poem’s line 1596. There are fewer than a dozen other instances where Alcuin quotes more than two complete feet, but at least one of them confirms that Alcuin’s Virgil was not the version in the ninth-century Tours copy, Bern 165: for his line 626, ‘Quid iuvat atroci tantum indulgere dolori?’, clearly depends on Aen. II 776 quid tantum insano iuvat indulgere dolori, where the Bern manuscript and other ninth-century and later ones have indulgere labori.89 A special problem is presented by Alcuin’s apparent knowledge of Statius, who is in the author-list at line 1554. Two or three lines or half-lines in the ‘York poem’ are taken from the Thebais (lines 218, 281, ?1475) and one (line 334) from the Achilleis; and there are other supposed ‘echoes’. Since the branch of the tradition of both works headed by the mid-ninth-century Corbie book BNF lat. 8051 has errors showing that their ‘ancestry included a manuscript in insular minuscule’, it is permissible to assume that Alcuin’s quotations are based on direct acquaintance.90 Very early in the ‘York poem’, Alcuin seems also to echo the Silvae, the manuscript tradition of which—a single poem apart—begins only in the fifteenth century.91 The opening line 88

Thus, Godman compares line 18, Euboricae raris praeclarae versibus urbis, with Aen. IV 655, urbem praeclarem statui, mea moenia vidi. But the comparison of the preceding line et veteres cunas properat proferre parumper with Aen. III 105 (. . . ubi et gentis cunabula nostrae!) obscures its essentially un-Virgilian character: veteres cunas is either tautological or giving cunae a transferred sense distinctive to Alcuin, as indeed is implied by Godman’s translation ‘the ancient foundation’. 89 See Mynors’s OCT edition ad loc.; for Bern 165, above, n. 87. 90 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, ad loc. with p. 152; Reeve in Texts and Transmission, pp. 394–7; Ganz, Corbie, pp. 57, 60, 152. The evidence for the ‘ancestor manuscript’ was marshalled by A. Klotz in Philologus 63 (1904), 157–60; but see also his 1902 Teubner edition of the Achilleid, pp. xii–xx, for errors in the Corbie book P (Thebaid, with Achilleid as its second text) and in some later ones not copied from P, as ‘Insular symptoms’, and Reeve’s remarks in Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, pp. 394–7. However, in spite of Godman’s confidence about ‘Alcuin’s unusual knowledge’ of Statius (p. 125 comm., cf. pp. lxii, lxxiii), not even heremi] per devia vastae (line 1475, of which his translation is surely on the wrong track) = Theb. V 248 is conclusive. 91 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, line 20, . . . comites sociosque laborum corresponding to Silvae V. 2 line 35 comitem belli sociumque laborum.

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of Silvae IV. 4, however, is quoted with one change in a poem in King Charles’s name (to Peter of Pisa, Pope Hadrian and Paul the Deacon) which was probably in fact composed either by Alcuin or by Angilbert (of St.-Riquier); and II.7 is among the miscellaneous texts added at an early date to a copy of the Agrimensores, apparently written not far from the Imperial Court. It is not impossible therefore, but certainly not demonstrated, that York’s Statius extended to that work also, and that Alcuin played a part in its transmission back to the Continent.92

Grammarians and Pre-Christian Prose Writers For the most part, we are forced back on speculation about what Alcuin might have read at York on the basis of the author-list and, more debatably, from references in his later writings to texts and authors which have no documented ‘history of transmission’ before his emigration to Francia. I begin with the eight named grammarians, two of whom, Probus and Cominianus, Alcuin can only have known indirectly.93 Already before ca. 780 Echternach had been supplied with copies both of Phocas (the Ars de nomine et verbo) and of Priscian, at this date probably the concise Institutio de nomine et pronomine et verbo designed specifically for the instruction of the young, rather than the ‘monumental’ Institutiones grammaticae, although the latter is not excluded;94 while Pompeius’s Commentary on Donatus, the expan-

92

Below, ch. 3 n. 37. Compare the ‘at most seven’ grammatical texts—contra C.W. Jones’s twentyseven!—which according to Carlotta Dionisotti, ‘On Bede, Grammars and Greek’, pp. 111–21, Bede used for his De orthographia: namely, a collection of idiomata and differentiae and two other anonymous compilations, plus Caper, Agroecius, Virgilius Maro and a grammar ‘of the Charisian group’, of which only the latter overlaps with Alcuin’s list. But for Alcuin’s familiarity with Caper, see above, Pt. I; also perhaps his De orthographia (both versions), ed. Keil, pp. 306–7, ed. Bruni, p. 26 (no. 316): Protenus . . . sagitta’—where, however, Caper does not have the intruded coepit in the citation of Aen. V 485 (nor will it be found in the early ?Lorsch Virgil, Paris BNF. lat. 7906 or the Tours Bern 165); and, doubtfully, ed. Keil p. 305, ed. Bruni, p. 22 (no. 253): narro et narratio per duo r scribatur (= Caper, Orthogr. ed. Keil, p. 26). 94 Alcuin, carm. iv (of ?779/80), lines 33–4 (MGH Poet. I, p. 221). Compare Holtz, Donat, pp. 347–8 and V. Law, The Insular Latin Grammarians (Woodbridge, 1982), p. 21, for York’s Priscian; but Bruni identifies three or four places in Alcuin’s De orthographia where he may have used the Institutiones. No early copy of any of these works has an Echternach provenance. 93

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sive manual of a teacher whose oral instruction has left its mark on the received text, was well-known in Insular circles throughout the century and drawn on by Alcuin for his own De grammatica.95 Another Pompeius (Trogus) is the first of two names introduced by the words historici veteres: it conceals the work more legitimately credited to his epitomiser Justin and the only secular history in the list, fragments of a pre-800 northern-English manuscript of which are still extant.96 It is not demonstrable that Alcuin had read it: none of his references to what he had found ‘in old (al. secular) histories’ is linked with anything for which Justin’s narrative is the most likely source. It is possible, on the other hand, that he knew something of the Breviarium of Eutropius, whose name was necessarily omitted: Bede had used the work extensively for his Chronicle and to expand passages dependent on Orosius in his Ecclesiastical History, including the statement that Constantinus in Brittania creatus imperator . . .; and Alcuin was to quote him later, anonymously, on a good pagan Emperor.97 The second name is Plinius. The scale of the Elder Pliny’s Natural History discouraged the copying of the work as whole. The first surviving ‘medieval’ manuscript, of Northumbrian origin, has incomplete texts of Books II–VI; Bede knew these (except perhaps Bk. III) together with Bk. VII and, after a long gap, some of the later books, including perhaps the concluding Bk. XXXVII.98 A distinctive collection of extracts, with illustrations, from Books II (planetary) and XVIII (meteorological) and long known as the excerpta Eboracensia has, it is now agreed, nothing to do with York or indeed with England: it was most probably compiled in the vicinity of the Aachen Court, where it was certainly used in the early years of the ninth century 95 L. Holtz, ‘Tradition et diffusion de l’oeuvre grammaticale de Pompée, commentateur de Donat’, Rev. de Philologie, ser. 3, 45 (1971), 48–83; Law, Insular Latin Grammarians, pp. 16, 103–4. Pt. i (fols 1–20) of St. Paul in Kärnten (al. im Lavanttal) Stiftsbibl. 2/1 (CLA X, nos 1451–3)—all three parts written in northern England— is a text of Pompeius; the circumstances in which this collection of grammatica was acquired by Murbach, possibly already before 800, is unknown. 96 Above, p. 259 and n. 25. 97 Bede, Chronicon maior, ed. T. Mommsen, MGH AA XIII (1898), pp. 247–327 = CCSL 123B, pp. 463–544, also Wallis, Bede: The Reckoning of Time, pp. 157–237; HE I.8; Alcuin’s ep. no. 249 (p. 403). 98 Ms.: Leiden Voss. Lat. F. 4 (above, n. 26). Bede: K. Welzhofer, ‘Beda’s citate aus der naturalis historia des Plinius’, Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiet der klassischen AltertumsWissenschaft, Wilhelm von Christ zum 60. Geburtstag (Munich, 1891), pp. 25–41, with the corrections and amplifications of Laistner, Intellectual Heritage, pp. 124–5 and 148; Jones’s notes to his edition of Bede’s De natura rerum, CCSL 123A (Turnhout, 1975), pp. 189–234; and Wallis, Bede: The Reckoning of Time, pp. lxxxii–iii, 462.

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and possibly some years previously.99 It has not always been appreciated, however, that Book XVIII is the ultimate source of a distinctive series of astronomical entries included in a group of calendars headed by those in Cologne, Dombibl., 83 II (this part of 805) and, more fully, in Berlin, Staatsbibliothek (Preuss. Kulturbesitz), Phillips 1869, both typically accompanying the text of Bede’s De temporum ratione and evidently already a feature of their northern-English ancestor: Caesari delphinus matutino exoritur. Vespero occidit at 4 January and Caesari fidicula exoritur et Aegypto sagitta at 5 January, Itali[a]e milvus ostenditur at 18 March and Cesari matutino canis occidit. Et Attice aquila vesperi at 30 December, for example.100 But it does not therefore follow that a complete or part-copy of that Book was available in early Northumbria: together with two entries relating to Meroe (Egypt), ancient month-names, dies aegyptiaci and other material, they had almost certainly been taken over by Bede (who was unaware of their Plinian source) from a version of the Roman civil calendar, comparable with but distinct from that incorporated in the mid-fifth-cen99 The Excerpta Eboracensia were published by K. Rück in 1888 and continue to be referred to as such, in spite of the powerful contrary arguments put forward by V.H. King, ‘An Investigation of some Astronomical Excerpts from Pliny’s Natural History found in Manuscripts of the earlier Middle Ages’ (Oxford B. Litt. thesis, 1969)—unpublished but available in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. King’s conclusions have been independently summarised by L.D. Reynolds in Texts and Transmission ed. Reynolds, pp. 309–11 and by B.S. Eastwood, ‘Plinian Astronomy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance’, Science in the Early Roman Empire: Pliny the Elder, his Sources and Influence, ed. R. French and F. Greenaway (London and Sydney, 1986), pp. 197–251, at pp. 201–3, 224–5 (with an inaccurate account of the ‘longer’ manuscripts) and elsewhere. No evidence of early York knowledge of Pliny can be got (despite Brown, ‘Classical Latin authors’, A Palaeographer’s View, p. 162) from the apparent citation in the annal for 752 in HR 2, ed. Arnold, p. 40, of Nat. Hist. II, on eclipses, since a. this is almost certainly one of the eleventh-century interpolations; b. the quotation is from Bede’s De natura rerum and not from Pliny directly! 100 Respectively (4/5 Jan.) in Milan, Bibl. Ambros. M. 12 sup., ed. Bischoff, ‘Das karolingische Kalendar’, p. 249, from Hist. Nat. XVIII (lxiv) 234; (18 Mar.) in Cologne, 83 II, fol. 73 (unpubl.), in Berlin, Phillips 1869, ed. Borst, Karolingische Kalendarreform, p. 264, and in Ambros. M. 12 sup., ed. Bischoff, p. 250, from Hist. Nat. XVIII (lxv) 237; (30 Dec.) in Cologne, 83 II, fol. 76 (with the reading Ces[ari] mater (sic!) canis occid[it] etc.), in Phillips 1869, ed. Borst, p. 297, and in Ambr. M. 12 sup, ed. Bischoff, p. 256, from Hist. Nat. XVIII (lxiv) 234. The entries for 4 and 5 January, in the forms Caesari delfinus matutinus exoritur and Caesari fidicula matutina exoritur. Vesper[i] occidit [sic], are also in the first calendar in the early-ninth-century Verona book, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek (Preuss. Kulturbesitz.), Phillips 1831 (Bischoff, Katalog, 1, no. 437), together with other ‘Plinian’ entries found in one or more of the other calendars: G.G. Meersseman and E. Adda, Manuale di Computo con Ritmo Mnemotecnico dell’Arcidiacono Pacifico di Verona (+844), Italia Sacra 6 (Padua, 1966), pp. 173–80.

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tury Polemius Silvius’s Laterculus, for the calendar accompanying his De temporum ratione.101 A less discussed collection of extracts from Books II–IV and VI, which was already in existence c. 800 (the date of the portion of the composite St. Gallen codex in which they first occur) has Insular (Northern) connections at several points but is not demonstrably copied from an Insular exemplar.102 There is nothing to indicate Alcuin’s familiarity with any of these, except (almost certainly) the Bedan calendar entries: answering queries from the king in 798 and 799, he can only refer to Pliny’s views at second hand or from memory, while clearly assuming that a copy of at least the earlier Books will be available in the Court ‘library’.103 Early acquaintance with Vitruvius’s De architectura libri X is arguable from the history of its transmission in the Early Middle Ages. The oldest extant manuscript is the handsomely-written London, BL Harley 2767, whose origins Bischoff would locate in his Austrasian scriptregion ca. 800, with the Aachen Court library possibly its destination:

101 P. Meyvaert, ‘Discovering the Calendar’ (AnBoll, forthcoming), suggesting that it had been part of Benedict Biscop’s Codex Cosmographiorum. V. Rose already suggested a Roman Calendar origin for the non-hagiological entries when he catalogued the Phillips manuscripts: Verzeichniss der Leteinischen Handschriften . . . Berlin, 1 (Berlin, 1893), pp. 280, 294. The Laterculus calendar in its unique (twelfth-century) manuscript-testimony notes equinoxes and prevailing weather but does not record the ‘Egyptian days’ and has nothing on the constellations; the received text of the calendar in ‘the Chronograph of 354’ (‘Calendar of Philocalus’) notes the ‘Egyptian days’ and the course of the sun through the Zodiac, but similarly has nothing on constellations: see the parallel edition by T. Mommsen in Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum I/1 ed. 2 (Berlin, 1893), pp. 256–79; the non-calendar sections of the Laterculus are ed. Mommsen, MGH AA IX, pp. 518(–19)–51. Since C.W. Jones’s 1934 article on ‘Polemius Silvius, Bede and the Names of the Months’ (Speculum 9, 50–6) it has been generally accepted that Bede’s source for the Hebrew, Egyptian and ‘Greek’ month-names in De temporum ratione, cc. 11 and 14 was the headings in Polemius’s calendar, and that this text was the computus eorum annalis ‘recently transmitted to us from Rome’ (still accepted by Wallis, Bede: the Reckoning of Time passim, even though she insists (p. 52) on the translation of c.e.a. as ‘their annual numeration’). This seems to me by no means certain, and in Meyvaert’s view even unlikely. An equally good case can be made for Bede’s having used the short text De anno, ed. J.F. “De mensium nominibus”, Journal of Hellenic Studies 43 (1923), 114–16, from the Bede and computus manuscript Rome, Bibl. Vallicelliana E 26 (Lyons, s. ix1), fols 136v–137v, which is a good copy of the relevant part of Polemius’s Prologue (cf. nos Chaldaeorum rationem secuti, where the twelfth-century manuscript has calendorum, emended by Mommsen to the equally meaningless calendarum) and of his monthtable headings. 102 Published by K. Rück in Sitzungsber. d. Kaiserlichen Akad. für Wissenschaft (Wien) Ph.-Hist. Kl. 1898, Bd. 1, 213–45, from Leiden, Rijksuniv.-Bibl., cod. Voss. lat. Q. 69 pt. ii. 103 Epp. nos 155, 170. Compare Reynolds in Texts and Transmission, pp. 309–10.

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it is not, however, the source of the entire later tradition. Valentin Rose, in what after a century is still the best edition of Vitruvius, remarked on the pervasiveness of ‘Insular symptoms’, which point to derivation from an archetype in Anglo-Saxon script. Alcuin, rather gratuitously although justified by what the Hincmar-period Rheims glossator designated similitudines phylosophorum, quoted from Books II and VI (without naming the author) in a letter addressed to the Emperor from Tours—in 801–3/4, therefore. Together, this makes a plausible case for the notion that Alcuin had been instrumental in the work’s migration from northern England to the Continent. Indeed, it is possible that the phrase historici veteres in the poem’s author-list, which because of its context has caused problems to translators and commentators, was intended to include Vitruvius as well as others named and unnamed. For, having quoted the two anecdotes in his letter, Alcuin concludes that part with the comment that he would not haec veteris monimenta historiae proferrem if the Emperor’s letter had not called to mind the philosophers’ names.104 Finally, after Pliny and acer Aristoteles, presumably one or more of his logical treatises in Boethius’s translation, is the intriguing and in some ways puzzling naming of ‘Tully the great rhetorician’. This should be a reference to Cicero’s De inventione, perhaps to the Ad Herennium, wrongly attributed to him throughout the Middle Ages, or (least likely) the De oratore. Alcuin used the first of these, although neither of the others—nor the Topica—when he composed his De rhetorica at the Carolingian Court; but no early Insular transmission of any of them has been detected in the extant manuscript witnesses, which begin in the middle decades of the ninth century.105 Elsewhere, however, Alcuin appears to quote a passage missing from the ninthcentury mutili manuscripts of the De inventione, which none the less Lupus of Ferrières was in a position to add to his Tours-origin copy!106 That Ælberht’s York had possessed a copy of the fuller text is a possibility, but no more. 104 Edition: Leipzig, 1899 (Teubner). ?English exemplar: Rose’s introduction, p. vi; Bischoff, MaSt 3, p. 281. Origin of Harley 2767: B. Bischoff in Philologische Wochenschrift 62 (1942), 504. (Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, p. 441 does not accurately represent his views.) Alcuin: ep. no. 308 (p. 472). 105 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1549–50, Lapidge, ‘Surviving booklists’, p. 46; Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, pp. 98–100, 102–7 (Winterbottom et al.). For the De rhetorica, see ch. 4 below. Godman’s assertion, p. 125, note to line 1550, repeated by Lapidge, loc. cit., that the De oratore was among Alcuin’s ‘principal sources’ is surely mistaken. 106 De inv. I 36.63, quoted in De dialectica xv, PL 101, col. 970D, as Wallach showed

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Mastering ‘Computus’ In one area of learning, and perhaps therefore in one text-genre, it may be possible to define more closely both Alcuin’s sources and some of the use he made of them while still a teacher at York. I suggested previously that his summary account of the teaching of computus in ‘the York poem’ points to an awareness of Easter-tables and other material not associated with Bede; and this is confirmed by the evidence of short astronomical and computistic texts (argumenta etc.) copied in ninth-century books in contexts that suggest that at least some of them were previously included in a collection assembled by Alcuin, either while he was still in England or during his earliest years at the Frankish Court. That he none the less saw himself as Bede’s follower and heir is indicated by what is generally if not universally accepted as prefatory material to such a collection, wherever it was made.107 In a twelve-line poem, inc. Ut praecepta, mihi dederas, dulcissime domne, Alcuin declares that he has hastened to compose for the king a ‘calendar book’ (libellus annalis), with argumenta taken from learned men of earlier times, which the marvellous master Bede, nostrae cathegita terrae, had previously written down: the unique copy is an early addition to a section of a composite computistic manuscript later at Mainz (now BAV Pal. lat. 1448) which may have originated at the Imperial Court before ca. 840/50. The initial folios of a mid- and late-ninth-century manuscript from Lorsch, now BAV Pal. lat. 1449, have a title-page in monumental script: IN XPI NOMINE/ INCIPIT LIBELLUS/ ANNALIS BEDAE/ PRESBITERI/ FELICITER. Despite the naming of Bede, this is clearly something quite different from the ‘annalis libellus (i.e. calendar!) Bede attached to his De temporum ratione’, the form and content of which have recently been convincingly established by Paul Meyvaert.108 Contra Arno Borst, I continue to believe that the Alcuinian collection (Alcuin and Charlemagne, p. 37; overlooked by Winterbottom et al. (last note), together with my complementary remarks in EHR 75 (1960), 490–1). This same passage is among the near-contemporary additions to Paris BNF. lat. 7774A (Rand, Survey, no. 85); for the identification of the hand as Lupus’s, see Bischoff, MaSt 3, 64–6 (Engl. transl., pp. 124–6). 107 Bischoff, ‘Hofbibliothek’, MaSt 3, 154, Engl. transl. p. 61; idem, Lorsch2, pp. 89–90: with which compare, however, the contributions of A. Borst and D. Lohrmann to Science in Western and Eastern Civilization in Carolingian Times, ed. P.L. Butzer and D. Lohrmann (Basel, 1993), pp. 53–78 and 79–101; also Borst, Karolingische Kalenderreform, 1, pp. 185, 188–9; and below. 108 Ut praecepta: carm. lxxii, MGH Poet. I, pp. 294–5, S.-K. no. 16886, ALC 11.72:

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circulating on the Continent which had annexed that title would have begun with a version of ‘Bede’s calendar’ followed by excerpts from or texts based on Bede’s writings on Time, similar perhaps to the opening folios (written in 810) of Pal. lat. 1448; in the Lorsch book as now constituted the calendar precedes a collection of Dionysian argumenta and other short computistic texts, with additional ones including a Calculatio Albini magistri quomodo repperiri possit quo die mensis etc. on an inserted quire.109 The ‘Calculation of master Alcuin’, which figures in earlier (and later) computus-collections without an author’s name, is a new recension of a pseudo-Dionysian argumentum Quota feria singulis annis XIIIIa luna Pasche occurrat—a topic not independently explored by Bede— with an annus praesens of 776, when the fourteenth moon occurred on Tuesday 9 April.110 If the attribution is accepted as authentic (and it is an unlikely late-ninth-century invention) it establishes his activ-

at fol. 72 (as an addition of ?s.ix2) of Pal. lat. 1448. The contents of this complex manuscript—four parts, two of them with later additions—are most fully, but incompletely, described by W.M. Lindsay, ‘The (early) Mayence scriptorium’, Palaeographia Latina 4 (1925), 22–6. The first part (only), to fol. 44v, is a Trier book of 810 (Bischoff, MaSt 3, p. 9, Engl. transl. p. 24); for the origin of fols 61–116, see (cautiously) Bischoff, Lorsch2, p. 128. Compare further the preface to the ‘Pachomian verses’, S.-K. no. 10525 (early-Carolingian? or eighth-century insular?) in, e.g. the Verona ms., Berlin, Phillips 1831, fol. 121 (ed. Meersseman-Adda, Manuale di Computo, p. 80 n. 25, as well as in BAV Pal. lat. 1448 fol. 71, the opening words of which are Hii vero numeri praenotati in prima linea annalis libelli perscriptos repperies etc. Meyvaert: as above, p. 285 n. 101. 109 Pal. lat. 1449, fols 2–11v + 17–23v, fols 12–16v added later: see Bischoff, Lorsch2, pp. 51–2, 89–90. The title-page is fol. 2v; the Calculatio (below) begins on fol. 11v and is followed by Bede’s Epistola ad Uuichtedum, ed. Jones, Opera de Temporibus, pp. 319–25, and not therefore part of the original manuscript. (The editor’s confidence that the text here and in 28 other manuscripts all ‘come from an archetype taken from York to Tours or Auxerre (!) in the eighth century’ (ibid. p. 168) is not easy to share.) There is no comprehensive account of the contents (I rely on notes made in 1979 and 1984), but see C.W. Jones, Bedae Pseudepigrapha (Ithaca-London, 1939), p. 135, Jones, Bedae Opera de Temporibus, pp. 158, 167, Bischoff, Lorsch2, p. 93 (n. 49). 110 Ninth-century manuscripts were listed Jones, Bedae Pseudepigrapha, p. 43, with some account of the earlier version; but a fuller and better listing is ALC 10 (pp. 23–5). The earliest is Cologne, Diözesan- u. Dombibl. 103 (CLA VIII, 1158, Bischoff, Katalog 1, no. 1916), where it follows the text of Bede’s Epistola ad Wichtedum at fol. 51. The text is ed. Jones, Bedae Pseudepigrapha, pp. 104–6, using the sixteenth-century printed text of the Cologne copy. The rubric Calculatio Albini magistri quomodo possit repperiri etc. is unique to BAV, Pal.lat. 1449, fol. 11v; but according to Prof. Wesley Stevens (pers. comm.), an ascription to Alcuin is also to be found in the eleventhcentury Montpellier, Bibl. Fac. méd., H. 48 fol. 27—which is not in the ALC 10 list. For Alcuin’s preference for calculatio over argumentum, see above, Pt. I, p. 9 n. 13.

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ity in this area already in the ill-documented mid-770s. A further consequence would be that the three hexameters which conclude the text in some copies are the earliest of Alcuin’s verses to survive— vocabulary and scansion are acceptably his—and throw a glimmer of light on York’s scholarly exchanges at this time: Here, beloved companion, are arguments written out by my own hand; and tell me what you are going to offer me today as a return gift, I having given you these, tired as I am.111

The annus praesens of 777 in one of the ‘Easter-day arguments’ in some of the same manuscripts as the calculatio could also be a relic of Alcuin’s York teaching; but there are obvious objections.112 What other texts might have been included in a putative pre-786 (or pre790) ‘Alcuin’ collection, with or without Bede’s name on the titlepage, is probably ultimately irresolvable. Borst, of course, is very dismissive of previous ‘reconstructions’. He rightly rejects a suggested identification with an apparently late-eighth-century computus, inc. (tit.) Quot modis soleat annus nominari, which in its complete version had seventy numbered items, the last an Opinatio philosophica de spatio aeris: for although the Calculatio [Albini] quomodo repperiri possit etc. figures in what is probably the earliest manuscript-text as well as in later copies as no. xviiii, the annus praesens in no. iv (on calculating whether a year is a leap-year) is 793.113 Borst has accordingly dubbed this 111 Inc. Haec, dilecte comes (S.-K. no. 5854), already in Cologne 103 (fol. 51) and in BAV Pal. Lat. 1449 (fol. 12); also in Paris BNF. lat. 13013 (fol. 46). For the first line, compare ‘York poem’ line 20, . . . comites sociosque laborum (evidence of early acquaintance with Statius’s Silvae?; and for this in conjunction with the concluding words dum tibi fessus, see the verses in two ‘Alcuin Bibles’, adapting earlier scribal complaints, of which line 3 reads Sic scriptor fessus calamum sub calce laboris (carm. lxv.4: MGH Poet. I, p. 284). Compare also the boy Wilberht’s appeal to the dying Bede, as reported by Guthbert (Epistola de obitu Bedae: ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 584), ‘Magister dilecte, restat adhuc una sententia non descripta’. 112 The early manuscripts include Cologne, Erzbisch. Diözesan- u. Dombibl. 103 and Milan, Bibl. Ambrosiana H 150 inf. 113 The seventy capitula-headings figure at fols 116–17 in the computus manuscript Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Phillips 1831 (Rose 128) + Phillips 1784 (Rose 177), Bischoff, Katalog, 1, no. 437 (p. 92), written at Verona in the early-ninth century, with annotations by Pacificus (but as the concluding item, on qu. ‘xviii’ = Phillips 1784, is the text of Dungal’s letter to the Emperor Charles, ed. Dümmler, MGH Epp. IV, pp. 570–8, not before 811). Although it is impossible to be sure without a new description (cf. V. Rose, Verzeichniss der Lateinischen Handschriften . . . Berlin, 1 (Berlin, 1893), no. 128 at pp. 282–4, which does not, however, claim to be a complete index) or Borst’s promised edition, the text on 117–25v may be incomplete, and there is as yet no basis for describing it as ‘the best

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the ‘Encyclopedia of time-studies, 793 version’; but his claim that it was commissioned (from Verona!) to replace a rejected compilation of Alcuin’s relies on an impossible chronology for the ‘lost’ work and an account of the manuscript evidence for Alcuin’s ‘own’ computistic-astronomical tracts that is seriously mistaken.114 Two texts (or one?) directly and closely linked with him, although whether as ‘author’ or merely as transmitter is uncertain, are the Ratio de luna, inc. Luna, verbi gratia and the Ratio de cursu lunae, inc. Luna quippe velocitate (the correct expl. et XX et uno ostentis): i.e. accounts of the course of the Moon through the Zodiac and its calculation, related to but quite distinct from chapters 16–18 of Bede’s De temporum ratione and their probable principal source.115 They are copied in the early Tours letter-collection manuscript Troyes Bib. mun. 1165 at fols 44v–46, between the texts of ep. no. 211 and ep. no. 162— neither of which is concerned with computistic or astronomical issues—and at the corresponding point in its later Rheims collateral (BAV Reg. lat. 272), and nowhere else: this alone is an argument against their having been part of the pre-Alcuin Continental repertoire of such texts.116 Borst, who never refers to these texts, maintains that ‘Alcuin’s computus’ is the little collection in the manuscript BAV Reg. lat. 226, fols 18–32v, where the texts on the preceding seventeen leaves are a selection of Alcuin’s letters on computisticmanuscript’ (so R. McKitterick in TRHS ser. 6, 7 (1997), p. 110 n. 37). Possibly a better text, although without c. ‘lxx’, is Abbazia di Monte Cassino, cod. 3 (874/82?), pp. 148–65, 193–4, partially published in Bibliotheca Casinensis, 1 (Monte Cassino, 1874), Florilegium Casinense, pp. 80–9, 96. Remarkably, there is an almost complete copy, without ‘i’ but including the opinatio, in London, BL Royal 13.A.xi (Engl., s. xi/xii), fols 132v–139v (and not as McKitterick, cit.); fols 120–126v are a text of the Dungal letter closely related to but at some points superior to the Phillips copy; and fols 139v–140v are a very incomplete text of the verses inc. Anno domini notantur (MGH Poet. IV, pp. 674–82; S.-K. no. 814) which have been attributed tentatively to Pacificus. 114 A. Borst, ‘Alkuin und die Enzyklopädie von 809’, in Butzer-Lohrmann, Science in Carolingian Times, pp. 53–78, esp. pp. 60–3; idem, Kalenderreform, pp. 188–9, 317–19 and passim. For the impossible chronology and the weakness of the evidence for a Verona origin, see below, ch. 3. 115 DTR ed. Jones, Bedae Opera de Temporibus, pp. 213–18; anon. De causis quibus nomina acceperunt duodecim signa, ed. Jones, Bedae Pseudepigrapha, pp. 102–3, idem, Bedae Opera Didascalica, pp. 665–7; and the comments of Jones, Bedae Opera de Temporibus, pp. 351–3 and of Wallis, Bede: The Reckoning of Time, pp. 287–91. 116 Both are printed in PL 101, cols 981–4, using the edition of Frobenius Forster who was here declaredly copying Duchesne (ibid. c. 979), the source of whose edition was Reg. lat. 272 (at that time still owned by P. Petau): the headings ratio etc. are only in this manuscript.

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astronomical topics and the text immediately following (on fols 32v–33v) is a Chronicon mundi to the year 824; specifically, the sequence of eight texts De saltu lunae (i.e. the adjustment of the calculated lunar days to the astronomical ones) on fols 19–26v is, in his view, Alcuin’s ‘genuine opusculum II ’. That they have been extracted from a much larger computus-collection, as is evident from the numbering of the second, fourth, sixth and eighth problemata in the manuscript as ‘lxxviiii’, ‘lxxxi’ etc.,117 is sufficient to throw doubt on this; and Alcuin’s authorship of at least the first and second is excluded by their presence in manuscripts of the ‘Sirmond’ group, whose exemplar for this part is almost certainly a pre-718 Irish computus. Only the eighth and last seems not to be found elsewhere, and Forster already denied it to Alcuin on stylistic grounds.118 The two Argumenta de bissexto (i.e. the ‘leap-year’ correction of the solar calendar) on fols 26v–32v, the first of them numbered ‘lxxxvi’ in sequence with the preceding De saltus lunae texts, are likewise in the ‘Sirmond’ manuscripts.119 The reiterated assertion that the opening text of the Reginensis collection is the one first published by Duchesne, and after him by Forster (= Migne), from the letter-collection manuscript,120 which Borst reasonably categorizes as Alcuin’s ‘genuine opusculum I ’, is equally fallacious: the text De saltu lunae on its fols 18–19 is a quite different one, inc. Saltus autem a grecis di <sic!> est in aegypciis cursum lunae naturalem’ des. ‘incensione. per XVIIII annos. There is therefore nothing in the collection that supports a connection with Alcuin, direct or indirect— although it cannot, of course, be excluded that he was familiar at York with the pre-Bedan texts copied in manuscripts of the ‘Sirmond’ group.121 A calendar would almost inevitably have been a component of a Carolingian-period computus assembled for teaching and private study: 117

Note that Migne’s problema primum, problema secundum . . ., problema octavum have no manuscript authority. 118 Forster’s edition, reprinted in PL 101, cols 984–93 (the first two ‘problems’ at cols 984–90), is still the only one. For the texts in the ‘Sirmond’ book, i.e. Oxford, Bodl. Libr., Bodley 309, and its congeners, see C.W. Jones, ‘The “lost” Sirmond manuscript of Bede’s Computus’, EHR 51 (1937), 204–19 and Wallis, Bede: The Reckoning of Time, pp. lxxii–lxxviii; for a not always reliable listing of other manuscripts of the problemata see Lohrmann, ‘Alcuins Korrespondenz . . .’ in: ButzerLohrmann, Science in Carolingian Times, pp. 102–3. 119 PL 101, cols 993–9 (from Forster, using Reg. lat. 226 only). 120 Above, n. 118. 121 For the Reginensis 226 letter-collection as a secondary one, compiled from a T-type manuscript, see above, Pt. I.

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in the case of the collection transmitted by Alcuin, in all likelihood the exemplar of the one in the mid-ninth-century Prüm book, Berlin Phillips 1869, with its inherited Roman civil and Plinian astronomical entries and its then recent (end-780) York additions.122 Necessarily, the York community before 780 would have been familiar with an earlier version (or versions). Independent evidence of their form and content is provided particularly by the Milan Ambrosiana text (H 150 inf ) and, for those months where this is defective, by the Verona book at Berlin (Phillips 1831): the former retains the Bedan title Liber annalis; both have, at several points, additional or fuller hagiological and astronomical entries than the Berlin Prüm version. The Ambrosiana version’s latest datable English-origin commemoration is that of bishops Mellitus, Wilfrid and Egberht (ob. 729) at 24 April, which is also in the York-Prüm calendar and (without Mellitus) in the ‘Metrical Martyrology’ but not in Willibrord’s calendar; the unique Oslac rex at 29 July is unidentified and undatable.123 A distinctive entry common to the Cologne (cod. 103), Berlin Prüm and Ambrosiana calendar-texts is SCOLAE MAGISTRORUM at 26 October. Borst implausibly supposed that it indicated some English local festival for clerics and pupils! Clearly, however, it is another of the entries taken over (by Bede) from the version he used of the old Roman calendar: although absent from the transmitted text of Polemius Silvius’s calendar, the phrase—which remains unexplained—is of a type that recurs there several times.124 Unique to the York-Prüm version are the short texts that follow four of the months, with astronomical observations or calculations relating to the 760s, 770s and 780s. Several of them are problematic, including supposed lunar eclipses on 22 September 777 and 2 November 784. One or two are impressively accurate, such as the (annular) solar eclipse on Sunday 16 September 787 ‘from the first 122 For the astronomical entries, see above, pp. 283–4 at n. 100; for the York additions, see below. 123 Ambrosiana text, ed. Bischoff, ‘Das karolingische Kalendar’, pp. 248, 251, 252; Berlin text, ed. Borst, Reichskalendar, I, p. 268; ‘Metrical Martyrology’, ed. Wilmart, p. 66. The wording of the 29 July entry (Umbra absumitur in Meroe Oslac rex sole obtinente) indicates that the obit was an early addition suprascript to the original astronomical entry, based on Pliny, Hist. Nat. II (lxxv) 184, but perhaps via Bede, DTR c. 31 and probably here displaced, cf. the Berlin text, ed. Borst, p. 280. 124 Compare Borst, Kalenderreform, p. 291 with Bischoff, ‘Das karolingische Kalendar’, p. 257 and Meyvaert, ‘Discovering the calendar’ (AnBoll, forthcoming). For Polemius’s Roman civil calendar, see above, pp. 284–5 at nn. 101–2.

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to the third hour’. The earliest is a reference to a solar eclipse in August 760, ind. xiii, thus anticipating the fuller and accurate record in the Court ‘Encyclopedia (al. Computus) of 809 (812)’.125 The conjunction of Jupiter, Mars and Venus in Cancer in 781 and of Saturn and Jupiter in Cancer at the beginning of 770 are noted, and prompt the remark that anyone who gets hold of codicellus iste will be able to find out about the courses of the planets.126 Coincidentally or not, the three decades covered by the calendar notes are ones for which there are no comparable records in the ‘Northumbrian Annals’.127 Some of the ‘observations’ may favour an origin in northern England rather than in some Continental centre, but none is decisive. In any case, there is nothing that would link the notes with Alcuin personally, unless perhaps as an intermediary after he had established himself in Francia.

The Beginnings of Letter-writing A year or two after his revision and compiling of computistic argumenta, Alcuin composed for and dispatched to a chain of prominent figures ( proceres) whom he had recently met in the Frankish Rhineland or at the Court a highly-accomplished letter-poem of eighty-one hexameters.128 Yet for several years thereafter no prose letters are preserved, and it is only in 789/790 that anything like a regular sequence begins. Some of the early ones have a looseness of structure and 125 Borst, Kalenderreform, p. 284; L. Boschen, Die Annales Prumienses (Düsseldorf, 1972), p. 21. The computus’s list of eclipses 760–812, ed. Boschen, pp. 21–2 from four manuscripts, was unfortunately unknown to D.J. Schove and A. Fletcher, Chronology of Eclipses and Comets AD 1–1000 (Woodbridge and Wolfe, 1984), p. 156. 126 Ed. Borst, Kalenderreform, p. 284. 127 In the ps.-Symeon (Byrthferth) text, there is nothing after the lunar eclipse and probable Jupiter occultation on November 23, 755, HR 2, ed. Arnold, p. 41 (s.a. 756) until the lunar eclipse on March 28, 796—correctly ‘between cock-crow and dawn’—ibid. p. 57, the latter also in ASC ‘D (E)’ (the ‘E’ text ed. Plummer, Two Saxon Chronicles, 1, 57). 128 Carm. iv, MGH Poet. I, pp. 220–3; S.-K. no. 2146. For its ‘originality’, see Godman, Poets and Emperors, pp. 45–6. It is noteworthy how few of the line-endings are taken verbatim from earlier verse (compare, however, line 65 Oceanum Rhenum sub te natet unca carina with Aen. IV 398,. . . natat uncta carina) and how effective are some of the variations or adaptations: e.g., lines 77 ff. Ut cum vere novo rubrae de cortice gemmae/ erumpunt . . ./. . . novas . . . adferre camenas, to be compared with Ecl. V 13, Immo haec in viridi nuper quae cortice fagi/ carmina descripsi and VII 48 . . . iam lento turgent in palmite gemmae.

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degree of informality that is uncommon later; but this seems to reflect the nature of the letter-collections rather than a subsequent abandonment of hitherto-usual forms and practices. In fact, stylish and stylised expressions of amicitia, and admonitory letters to those with authority over others and responsibility for them before God, are also among the earliest: language—vocabulary and syntax, both far removed from rusticitas—as well as tone, imply a thorough grounding and probably ample practice in Alcuin’s adolescence and early manhood; and the formal elements (inscriptio, salutatio etc.) of many of his extant letters confirm this. In the last years of the century he was to encourage the bishop of an unidentified see-church to organise his boys’ studies (lectiones), so that one group would read epistolas et parvos libellos.129 Did Alcuin have in mind formula collections, such as were incorporated in the early collections of his own letters? or something like the final quires of a Ferrières (temp. Lupus) book otherwise devoted to Bede’s two major works on Acts—in part from a perhaps Insular exemplar—which provide texts of three long letters of Bede’s and an incomplete copy of a letter of Pope Gregory I’s?130 Letters ‘written’ by the latter and by several of his successors were, of course, readily available in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, usually complete with introductory and final formulae. A collection of Gregory’s letters ‘extracted from the Roman Church’s archive’, of unknown scale and content, had been sent to York by Boniface, with a promise of others if the archbishop wanted them; and there are good reasons for thinking that papal letters, for the most part now lost, were addressed to York in the later eighth century.131 ‘Education in letterwriting was clearly based on imitation’.132 The recorded tradition of 129

Ep. no. 161, on which see Brunhölzl, ‘Bildungsauftrag’, Karlswerk, 2, 31 (rightly rejecting an identification of the unnamed addressee with Arn). 130 C. Lanham, Salutatio Formulas in Latin Letters to 1200: Syntax, Style and Theory, Münchener Beiträge zur Mediävistik u. Renaissance-Forschung 22 (Munich, 1975), p. 91, suggests (not very plausibly) a use of Formulae Marculfi. The manuscript, the ‘corrector’ of which might be Lupus himself (so B. Bischoff, ‘Paläographie und frühmittelalterliche Klassikerüberlieferung’, MaSt, 3, 65, Engl. transl. p. 126; but in Katalog 1, 261 (no. 1230) he is much more sceptical) is Paris BNF lat. 2840, here fols 88v–105. 131 Papal letters in HE: E.A. Lowe, ‘The script of the Farewell and Date formulae in early Papal documents’ (1959), Palaeographical Papers 2, 450–58, with a neat summary of earlier literature at p. 456 n. 4 (–457). Boniface’s letter is Epist. select. 1, ed. Tangl, no. 75 (of 746–7); a collection put together by Paul the Deacon forty years later (‘collectio P’) had fifty-four letters, another eighth-century selection (‘collectio C’) had two hundred. 132 For the mature Alcuin’s notion of ‘imitation’, see his De rhetorica, ed. Halm,

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Northumbrian letter-writing begins in the years either side of 710 with Bede’s earliest letter(s) on chronological problems, and with a short letter of Abbess Ælfflæd of Whitby (daughter of King Oswiu; ob. 713 × 14) to Adola of Pfalzel (Trier), commending an unnamed abbess who was on a pilgrimage to Rome. This last includes only two very brief New Testament quotations and uses a modestly ‘literary’ vocabulary of late-Latin origin, but it reveals a respectable understanding of Latin syntax, with good models.133 Bede’s other letters apart, there is then a gap of more than half-a-century: Archbishop Egberht’s side of a correspondence with Archbishop Boniface in his last years is unfortunately totally lost.134 In 764 at the end of an exceptionally hard winter, Abbot Gutberct, who had been (he said) in the monastery of St. Paul, i.e. Jarrow, for forty-six years and had learnt what he knew ‘at Bede’s feet’, wrote a ‘thank-you’ and begging-letter to Lul of Mainz; and another letter followed some time later. The earlier of the two displays an extensive vocabulary for semi-precious and precious artefacts and has a farewell in quantitive verse; the second introduces the soon-to-be familiar phrase (inter nos) amicitiae foedera; but neither of them has a single Biblical quotation!135 From the next ten or fifteen years two letters certainly of York origin, one of them

p. 544, ed. Howell, p. 132, taken almost verbatim from Julius Victor, Ars rhetorica (who is here following Cicero, De oratore III 39!), ed. Halm, p. 431, although the words eorumque bene dicta memoriae mandanda seem to be Alcuin’s own, and raro before ornandi is not in the received text of Julius Victor. For a very different approach to imitatio in the Latinity of Alcuin and his contemporaries, see M. Banniard, ‘Théorie et pratique de la langue et du style chez Alcuin: rusticité feinte et rusticité masquée’, Francia 13 (1985), 579–601, especially the concluding pages. 133 Epist. ad Pleguinam, ed. Jones, Bedae Opera de Temporibus, pp. 307–15, internally datable to 708; Epist. select., 1, ed. Tangl, no. 8: only in the manuscript Vienna Nationalbibl. 751 (Mainz, s. IX1) which preserves the orthography adoliscentiae. Bede says of Ælfflæd that she was primo discipula vitae regularis (under Hild) deinde etiam magistra at Whitby, and also describes her as devota Deo doctrix: HE III 24, IV 26; she is the fourth in the Liber Vitae’s nomina reginarum et abbatissarum, Gedenküberlieferung, ed. Gerchow, p. 304. 134 Epist. select. 1, ed. Tangl, nos 75 of 746/7, 91. The first of these was accompanied by copies both of Pope Gregory I’s letters (above at n. 131) and of the Epistola admonitoria which he was sending to King Æthelbald of Mercia, idem, no. 73. The ‘recipient’s text’ of the letter to Æthelbald is fragmentarily preserved in the burnt manuscript, London BL Cotton Otho A. i, the contents of which are most fully described and analysed by S. Keynes, ‘The reconstruction of a burnt Cottonian manuscript: the case of Cotton Otho A.1’, BLJ 22 (1996), 113–60, who rightly emphasises its significance as a ‘symbol of a programme of reform which had originated in a Mercian context’ in mid-century. 135 Epist. select., ed. Tangl, nos 116, 127.

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from Archbishop Ælbert, under his other name Coena, the second in the name of King Alchred and his wife, have been preserved in the Mainz manuscript of Lul’s correspondence. The same collection includes letters from a possibly Northumbrian Abbot Eanwulf respectively to Lul and to the Frankish King Charles—both, unusually, precisely dated (24 and 25 May in 773): the first of these may be a personal re-fashioning of fairly conventional epistolary phraseology, expressing thanks for a letter from the bishop and asking to be included in his prayers, with an undertaking that his own monastery will reciprocate; the second, however, is substantially a verbatim copy of a letter from Pope Gregory I to King Æthelberht of Kent, as transmitted by Bede!136 Alcuin, on the available evidence, drew substantially on Papal letters included in the Historia Ecclesiastica only when they provided information germane to his purpose in writing, as (for example) when he answered Offa’s query about archiepiscopal consecrations.137 His vocabulary and style may none the less reveal the intermittent influence of Gregory’s correspondence; and the letters of more recent popes were probably among the sources of his final salutations or ‘farewells’.138 The surviving York and other Northumbrian letters, few though they are, have something further to offer for a reconstruction of his for136 Epist. select. 1, ed. Tangl, nos 124 (on which see above, n. 11), 121; idem, nos 119, 120. A York cleric, not necessarily from the cathedral, presumably composed the Alchred letter, with which was sent a list of ‘names of friends and relatives’ to be prayed for. For the possible significance of the dating-clauses in Eanwulf ’s letters, see below, n. 195. The principal source of the letter to the Frankish king, including part of the address and all (less one word) of the elaborate farewell formulae, is HE I. 32 (for some implications, see my comments in ‘Albuinus deliciosus Karoli regis’, p. 82 n. 32); only the request for prayers (necessarily!) and the added salutation obtabilem sospitatem—an unusually early example of the omission of a final salutem—are the writer’s own. 137 Ed. Lehmann (1921). According to Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship, pp. 88–9, the language with which Pope Vitalian had addressed King Oswiu (in a letter quoted incompletely by Bede: HE III 29) was considered by Alcuin ‘useful enough to appropriate’ for a letter addressed to the Frankish king, his ep. no. 41. He cannot have read either of them very carefully: a noteworthy feature of Alcuin’s letter (ante-dated by Dümmler) is the distinctiveness of its language and particularly the epithets applied to the king. For an English cleric who did use the Vitalian letter, but in a totally different way, see Bullough, ‘Bishop Torthelm’s letter’ (forthcoming). 138 See, e.g., the citation of Mt 25.21 Euge serve bone et fidelis etc., and its context in ep. no. 67 with Gregory’s use of the same verse in his final salutation, preceded by clauses closely similar to those found in association with Mt 25.34—which, surprisingly, Gregory never himself uses—in Alcuin’s letters (above, ch. 1, n. 181). For eighth-century letters, see next note.

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mation. The opening words of the Ælberht-Coena letter are Acceptis tuae beatitudinis . . . litteris, which may seem so common-place as to be without significance. In fact, they are never so used in the entire correspondence of Pope Gregory I, or by any of the eighth-century popes whose letters are preserved with Boniface’s correspondence or in the Codex Carolinus, although susceptis epistolis is common; and there is no other example in the Boniface-Lul collected correspondence. On the other hand, they or a slight variant occur seven or eight times as openings for Alcuin’s letters, two of them included in the English letter-formulary, plus an instance of Accepimus dignitatis vestrae cartam; but the formula susceptis epistolis never.139 The concluding phrase of the otherwise unusually-worded farewell of Ælberht’s letter, conservet in evum, which is also that of the metrical second line of the abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow’s final salutation in 764, subsequently occurs several times in Alcuin’s verse (once, indeed, in a line almost identical with Gutberht’s) and has its counterparts in various combinations in his letters, while lacking in those of Boniface and Lul.140 A possible explanation of the opening Acceptis litteris common to Ælberht’s one extant letter, many of Alcuin’s and (exceptionally) one of his pupils’141 is that Alcuin was the composer (dictator) also of the first of these! There are other pointers in that direction. The words after litteris in the Ælberht letter are multa sum laeticia delibutus, which can be compared with similar but not identical continuations in Alcuin’s letters in the 790s;142 and . . . quia perseveranti gloriosa retributionis inpenditur corona mercesque futurae felicitatis has parallels, but not particularly close ones, in several of them. The first feet of the six hexameter verses that form an appendix to the letter, Vive Deo felix, 139 Susceptis epistolis: Gregory, Reg., VIII 1 (Susceptis epistolis fraternitatis vestrae), IX 234, XI 59, also suscepi, suscepimus etc.; Epist. selectae, ed. Tangl, no. 51 (from Pope Zacharias); cf. MGH Epp. III, p. 715 (from Stephen III: susceptis apicibus). Letter-formulary: epp. nos 103 (acceptis caritatis vestre munusculis), 256, Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/14, I/9. Accepimus etc.: ep. no. 60, to Paulinus of Aquileia. 140 Te Deus omnipotens salvum conservet in evum, Epist. select. 1, ed. Tangl, p. 252; Vos Deus omnipotens totum conservet in aevum, carm. xxiv (MGH Poet. I, p. 244; Utque suum famulum Christus conservet in aevum, carm. cvii/1 (idem, p. 1, 333); and similarly in carm. ciii/2 (idem, p. 330), and in carm. civ/4 (idem, p. 331), ‘vielleicht’ by Alcuin according to Burghardt. Compare epp. nos 6 (conservet ubique), 84 (comitetur in aevum), etc., also ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, line 104, sit semper in aevum and carm. liv (MGH Poet. I, p. 266), in adonics, semper in aevum./Te comitetur. 141 The one letter in MGH Epp. V (first half of the ninth century) which opens with those words is Hrabanus Maurus’s ep. no. 27 (p. 441) of 838 × 842. 142 E.g., ep. no. 82: Dulces tuae dilectionis accepi litteras mellifluis sensibus delibutas . . .

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are ones that Alcuin was to use regularly in final salutations.143 These indications are suggestive but hardly decisive; and in view of the stylistic differences in other parts of Ælberht’s letter it still seems more probable that it was either his own composition or the work of another, anonymous, York discipulus. But Alcuin’s skilful combining, modification and re-combining of older formulae in the protocols and farewells of his post-789 letters—and even the apparently deliberate avoidance of some of them, such as Pervenit ad me al. nos— would hardly have been achieved without considerable previous familiarity and practice.144 Whatever the measure of Alcuin’s debts to a locally-evolved and -taught style of letter-writing, which he was later able to develop in his own way, it would still be wise to assume a direct influence from his own reading of letters of the Fathers, in vocabulary if not in form. Finally, some time before 796 and quite possibly at York, Alcuin became familiar with Julius Victor’s Ars rhetorica, which he was to use extensively at the Frankish Court. Uniquely among works of that genre, it concludes with a short disquisition De epistolis.145 Alcuin, exceptionally, has taken no identifiable quotation from that final chapter; and he seems not to have adopted in so many words Victor’s contrast aut negotiales aut familiares, which he might well have 143

Details below, ch. 3. Pervenit etc. is a not uncommon Papal letter-opening from the pontificate of John II (532–5) if not earlier to that of Hadrian I (772–95): for the ad nos version, see MGH Epp. III, p. 46 (ed. Gundlach), C. de Clercq (ed.), Concilia Galliae A.511–A.695 (CCSL 148A; Turnhout, 1963), p. 86; for ad me, see MGH Epp. III, p. 568 (Codex Carolinus, 49; ed. Gundlach). It had, however, already been used as the opening of a letter or praeceptum of the Ostrogothic King Theodoric, ed. T. Mommsen, MGH AA XII (1894), p. 392. Even in the singular this particular opening was evidently regarded as appropriate only to a person in authority: it is never used by Alcuin; but Pervenit ad nos epistola missa introduces King Charles’s response to him on the subject of Septuagesima etc., ep. no. 144 (798), composed by an unknown royal notary. A final salutation nowhere to be found in Alcuin’s letters is Vale . . . [et] prosperis successibus . . . and its variants, quite common in the (early) correspondence of Boniface and his circle, including Lul, and going back (via Aldhelm?) to the Actus Silvestri: for the details, see Levison, England and the Continent, pp. 285–6; and add the extraordinary rhymed salutation, Vale vive virtutibus/ virgo Christi perennibus/ ut prosperis successibus/ crescas operibus, of a late-eighth-century Salzburg formula-letter of amicitia with Aldhelmian echoes in the text (e.g. sine falsitatis frivola), Bischoff, Salzburger Formelbücher, p. 53 (III, 17), cf. ibid., pp. 18–19. In this case, its absence must be simply because it had never been adopted for York ‘model-letters’. 145 Ed. Halm, Rhetores Latini Minores, pp. 447–8; ed. R. Giomini, M.S. Celentano (Teubner; Leipzig, 1980), pp. 105–6. This would be the first such treatise, unless the anonymous De epystolis in Paris BNF lat. 7530 fols 251r–v (ed. Halm, p. 589), which only occasionally overlaps with it, is of an earlier date. 144

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done. Yet its overall approach, including the suggestion that the composition of an epistola is covered by many of the precepts put forward in the preceding and related chapter (which he does quote) on ‘informal speech’, accords well with his own epistolary style. It is noteworthy, therefore, that Victor asserts that veteres, when replying to letters to their dearest friends, took care to do so in their own hand or to include a long personal subscription: which I believe to have been Alcuin’s practice also. The possibility raised by the Ælberht-Coena letter that Alcuin had a hand in his episcopal master’s correspondence in the 770s may allow us to speculate a little further: specifically, on how he gained his first experience of writing the kind of letter that looms so large in the collected correspondence of the 790s, the epistola admonitoria. Although the only reference to Boniface anywhere in his letters—as ‘our father’, whose intercessions will be particularly effective—is when he reproves the Fulda monks at the beginning of the ninth century, that particular term makes an early appearance in English correspondence in a letter addressed by the archbishop to the Mercian king which he records he has copied to Egbert.146 Alcuin’s account of Ælberht as bishop follows the description of his teaching, pilgrimage and election, with the assertion that nolentesque sequi placido sermone vocantem insequitur iuris terroribus atque flagellis: non regi aut ducibus iustus parcebat iniquis.

The first two lines have latterly been translated ‘And those unwilling to heed his gentle preaching he pursued with the terrible punishment of the law’. The noun for an adjective is not impossible, particularly in poetry, but it is not very convincing in this context. Terror is a proper attribute of secular authority in Isidore’s Sententiae and in Alcuin’s letters. Ius, iura here, as frequently elsewhere in the poem, although occurring only exceptionally in the letters, is ‘earthly authority or powers, lawful condition, rules’.147 In contrast, flagella 146

Alcuin: ep. no. 250, only in the ‘personal’ collection. He composed verses commemorating Boniface’s martyrdom for Liudger’s church at the site, carm. lxxxvi, MGH Poet. I, p. 304, but there are no other tituli: has this something to tell us about Boniface’s early cult—or lack of it? Boniface: Epist. select. 1, ed. Tangl, p. 157. 147 Terror: Isidore, Sententiae III. 47.1 and 51.4 (ed. P. Cazier, CCSL 111 (Turnhout, 1998), pp. 295, 304), here following but considerably adapting passages in Gregory the Great’s Moralia and perhaps other (earlier) texts; epp. nos 17 (p. 47: humanae dignitatis terror), 178 (p. 294: triumpho terroris vestrae [sc. Karoli ]), etc. Ius etc.: ‘York poem’

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are, in the writings of Pope Gregory I and, very publicly, in the opening words of his Denuntiatio pro septiformi letania, and subsequently in Isidore’s Sententiae and writings dependent on them, ‘God’s scourges, Divine punishment’ in this world, although they may lead to eternal joy in the next: Sententiae, Lib. III opens with a characteristically aphoristic chapter De flagellis Dei.148 Alcuin himself, in the aftermath of the Northmen’s sack of Lindisfarne, warns Northumbria’s leaders to dread ‘the scourge that has fallen on the church of St. Cuthbert’ and adds that ‘whoever does not show fear and correct himself and lament to God for the good of his country does not have a docile heart but a stony one’.149 He frequently juxtaposes the secular and divine in his writings, although usually not so elliptically as in the poem: what he is surely trying to convey here is that his master was not afraid to demand earthly penalties as well as threatening Divine retribution, and ‘spared neither the king nor evil nobles’ (even ‘evil king or nobles’). Such threats could have been made face-to-face, as by Columbanus nearly two centuries previously; but it is not unlikely that on occasion they were, with the help of a vocabulary drawn from Gregory, Isidore, Pseudo-Cyprian and others, conveyed in writing.

ed. Godman, Index p. 169, s.v., but especially lines 759 (iura thori: an uncommon expression, although used by e.g. Ambrose, and which does not mean ‘sacrament of marriage’), 1278–9, 1283; the corresponding passages of Bede’s HE for the most part do not use the word. A rare instance in the letters is hereditario iure in ep. 204 (p. 338 l. 16) of ?799; what seems to be the earliest occurrence of the term in a genuine (and original) Frankish royal diploma is in DK 1, no. 181 of 797. 148 Examples in the Moralia are lib. III ix, 16, lib. VII xix, 22, lib. VIII xvi, 32, lib. IX xxxiv, 54 lib. XXVI xxi, 21 (nostrum est hic flagella percipere, quibus servatur de aeternitate gaudere), xxvii, 50–1 and xxxix, 71, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 143 (3 vols.; Turnhout, 1979–85), pp. 125, 348, 404, 1294, 1304–5, 1319; in the Regula pastoralis c. xxxvii (III, 13), ed. F. Rommel, SC 382 (1992), p. 334; Oportet fratres carissimi ut flagella Dei, quae metuere ventura debuimus, saltem praesentia et experta timeamus: Reg. Epist., MGH Epp. II, ed. Hartmann (1899), XIII, 2, ed. Norberg, CCSL 140A, App. ix (p. 1102). Isidore: Sententiae, ed. Cazier, pp. 193–6, where III. i 3 (Nequaquam Deus delinquenti parcit, quoniam peccatorem aut flagello temporali ad purgationem ferit, aut iudicio aeterno puniendum relinquit etc.) depends on Moralia IX xxxiv, 54; but the subsequent chapters 4–13 have no identifiable Patristic source. 149 Ep. no. 18 (p. 52), where S1 ‘corrects’ flagellum to -a; also no. 17 (p. 47). The former’s Carneum non habet cor sed lapideum is Ez 11.19. Compare especially the first of the passages in Gregory’s Moralia cited in the previous note which begins (CCSL 143, p. 125): Quisquis autem flagellis atteritur sed flagellorum tempore nequaquam se ex donis quae eum contigit accepisse, consolatur ab statu mentis omnimoda desperatione destruitur.

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Alcuin and the Vernacular Writing to the Frankish king in the early part of 798 with an elaborate answer to a layman’s question about swords in the Gospel Passion narratives, Alcuin concludes by extolling the work of praedicatores to the people and complaining that Frankish bishops had forbidden priests and deacons ‘to preach in their churches’. In the context this can surely only mean ‘preaching (teaching) in the language of their audience’: for Alcuin goes on to say that since ‘everywhere homilies are read by clergy of all ranks’, it is ‘surely strange quod legere licet, et interpretare non licet so that all can understand’!150 When Eanbald of York arrived at the Frankish Court in 794 or 795 with letters and oral messages for Alcuin, and when ‘Anglo-Saxons’ turned up at St. Martin’s in Alcuin’s last years, were their spoken exchanges in their native language? I am sure that the answer is ‘yes’, although the sources never say so directly, and many scholars have assumed the opposite.151 Even for those who had joined a religious community at York or Jarrow (or Fulda or Salzburg) in earliest childhood, Latin was ‘a second language’; and several of Alcuin’s letters, like Bede’s self-imposed death-bed task, show that fluency in it was attained only with difficulty and often incompletely. Thus, writing to the communities at Wearmouth and Jarrow in the aftermath of the sack of Lindisfarne (793), he evidently sees no incompatibility between the exhortation that the young should study the Sacred Scriptures and other (Latin) writings and a recommendation 150 Ep. no. 136 (p. 209). It is not among the texts considered by M. Zink, La Prédication en langue romane avant 1300, Nouvelle Bibliothèque du Moyen Age 4 (Paris, 1976), who—incredibly—relies exclusively on Labbé’s Sacrosancta concilia of 1671 (!) for his Carolingian-period citations. 151 Epp. nos 43, 45, Chase, Two Letter-Books II/6 (p. 58), I/7 (p. 30); ep. no. 44; Vita Alcuini ed. Arndt, c. 18, MGH SS XV, pp. 193–4. The Vita’s story is that when a priest who was Engelsaxo et ipse came to visit Alcuin, he was met by four of the brethren who, putantes nichil eum illorum de locutione scire (which in the context can only mean lingua roman(ic)a), vocally deplored the arrival of one more ‘Briton’ and were subsequently identified by Alcuin. A short letter from a monk to a ?bishop (Levison, England and the Continent, p. 130 n. 2) preserved in one manuscript of the BonifaceLul correspondence, Epist. Select. 1, ed. Tangl, no. 146, asks him to recall a Saxonicum verbum—four short lines of verse. For a proper insistence on Alcuin’s childhood grounding in the ‘Northumbrian dialect’ and his continuing ‘contact affectif ’ with it, see M. Banniard, “Viva Voce’. Communication écrite et communication orale du IV e au IX e siècle en Occident latin, Collection des Études Augustiniennes (Paris, 1992), pp. 312–13, 324–6 and passim, although his account frequently errs on points of detail.

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that the reading of Benedict’s Rule in conventu should be accompanied by its exposition ‘in the [brothers’] own language so that it can be understood by all’.152 For the same reason, the legatine conciliar decrees of 786 were read out tam latine quam theodiscç. Alcuin’s responsibility for the English-language version has been supposed: the wording of the legates’ report, however, does not support this and the public reading is associated with the Mercian, not the Northumbrian, synod.153 Alcuin would certainly have been familiar with Bede’s account of the English names of months in De temporum ratione ch. 15, where they are treated in a way that suggests that they were then already going out of use.154 The new currency they gained from this was extended when they were included with the ‘Greek’ (correctly, Macedonian) and sometimes the Hebrew month-names—following the pattern of the Roman civil calendar in one or more of its manuscript versions—in the headings of each month’s table in liturgical calendars: one of the earliest, perhaps even the earliest, instance was in the archetype of the calendar that I associate with Alcuin at York.155 The English runic alphabet of which a copy figures, with other alphabets, in the manuscript now Vienna Nationalbibl. lat. 795 (fol. 20), may well have been transmitted to Salzburg (or St.-Amand?) by Alcuin or one of his disciples; but its place in the manuscript, immediately after a text of Alcuin’s De orthographia, does not provide conclusive proof.156 The passing reference to Ingeld in a letter to a Bishop Speratus has attracted plenty of attention, much of it misconceived. By contrast, Alcuin’s possible naming of a second figure from the ‘heroic’ or legendary Germanic past, coincidentally or not only a few months apart from the Speratus letter, has been very largely ignored. According to his Vita of Willibrord, when the North152 Ep. no. 19 (pp. 55, 54), Chase, Two Letter-Books II/2 (pp. 48, 46); M. Richter’s claim (‘Die Sprachenpolitik Karls des Grossen’, Studies, p. 98 n. 36) that exponere is one of the ‘üblicheren Bezeichnungen für “übersetzen”’ is not warranted by any evidence known to me. 153 MGH Epp. IV, p. 28. 154 Wallis, Bede: the Reckoning of Time, pp. 286–7. 155 II.Grecorum Eythinyos. Giuli. . . . I.Grecorum Apileos. Giuli in Phillips 1869, ed. Borst, Kalendarreform, 1, 254, 295. The corresponding headings in Milan, Ambros. M. 12 sup. are Giuli. II.Grecorum mensis Eydyneos. . . . Giuli. II.Grecorum mensis Apyleos, ‘Karolingische Kalendar’, ed. Bischoff, pp. 248, 255. Compare the calendar in Polemius Silvius’s Laterculus (above, n. 101). 156 R. Derolez, ‘Die “Hrabanischen” Runen’, ZfDPh. 78 (1959), 1–19, esp. pp. 1–3, 15–19; Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 2, p. 118 (especially for the scribe).

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umbrian missionary failed to make headway with the Frisian King Radbod (towards the end of the seventh century) he turned his attention instead to the ‘fierce Danes’, whom at that time, ut fertur, regnabat Ongendus.157 The two allusions show Alcuin’s awareness of figures named in vernacular poetry; they are unrevealing about the extent of his familiarity with that verse or where and when he may have acquired it; and, like others, I am unpersuaded that the ‘similitudes’ between some of his writings and the Beowulf-poem, both in aspects of diction and in recurrent themes and symbols, should encourage us to suppose knowledge of the latter’s inferred antecedents.158 The ‘riddling’ and word-play in Alcuin’s pedagogic works have been claimed as indicating an earlier acquaintance with their vernacular counterparts; but there is nothing, or almost nothing, which he could not have found equally well or better in his Latin reading.159 It is more likely, although again unproven, that Alcuin was familiar with English alliterative verse on Christian themes: Cædmon’s hymn in its Northumbrian form is among the ‘original’ additional material in the manuscript of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica that was at the Aachen Court.160 That verse, like the theodisca version of the 786 decrees, the exposition of the Benedictine Rule, and the vernacular preaching of Northumbrian clergy, necessarily required the development of an appropriate English-language vocabulary. There is 157 Ingeld: Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, ASE 22, 93–125, esp. 93–5. Ongend þeow: Vita Willibrordi c. 9, ed. Levison, pp. 123–4. The passage is not noted in Analogues of Beowulf ed. Garmonsway et al. (to lines 2991 ff.), nor in the very full commentary on Widsith line 31, ed. R.W. Chambers (Cambridge, 1912), pp. 199–200, where it is stated that ‘The name Ongend þeow is unknown in England in historical times, nor is any tradition of him retained, beyond the references in Beowulf and in Widsith’. The reference to it in W.F. Bolton, Alcuin and Beowulf: an Eighth-Century View (Rutgers NJ, 1978; London, 1979), p. 97, following L. Morsbach writing in 1906, is a notable exception. 158 As Bolton, Alcuin and Beowulf, passim. But on diction, and especially ‘formulas’, compare M. Lapidge, ‘Aldhelm’s Latin poetry and Old English verse’, AngloLatin Literature 600–899 (London and Rio Grande, 1996), pp. 247–69 (originally published in 1979, the same year as Bolton’s book). 159 So Godman, ‘York poem’, Introduction p. lxxiii and comm. on lines 1325 ff. (p. 105): contra H. Reuschel, ‘Kenningar bei Alkuin . . .’, Beiträge zur Gesch. der deutschen Sprache u. Literatur 62 (1938), 143–55 and Bolton, Alcuin and Beowulf, pp. 67–71. 160 See the facsimile of the ‘Moore Bede’ (Cambridge, Univ. Libr. Kk.5.16), fol. 128v. C. Edwards has suggested that the (verse) Wessobrunner Gebet in the southGerman manuscript Munich clm. 22053 (of s. ix in) may owe not a little to earlier Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse: ‘ “Tohuwabohu”: the Wessobrunner Gebet and its analogues’, Medium Aevum 53 (1984), 263–81.

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obviously no way of determining the chronological order in which Alcuin, or any contemporary, acquired a particular part of his (or her) Latin lexica and its putative, often polysemic, English equivalent.161 Readily conceding that Alcuin’s ‘use of compound nouns and adjectives derives from the elevated style of late Antique Latin epic poetry’, it is surely unnecessary and unwise to conclude that the direction of influence in new coinings was always one-way.162 Finally, traces of Alcuin’s ‘native’ pronunciation are occasionally to be found in his Latin orthography, as a consequence presumably of dictation to amanuenses: the voiceless f for initial and also even medial v, for example. Those same scribes had understandable difficulties in rendering unfamiliar Old English sounds, such as the velar fricative in Alcuin’s own name.163

Teacher and Perpetual Deacon Alcuin’s emergence from anonymity among the York clerici, as a teacher in his own right and of more-than-local repute, is associated in the record and perhaps in fact with the 767 consecrations. He himself makes no such claim, perhaps because he was eager to laud Ælberht’s qualities as a teacher even in his years as (arch)bishop.164 Indeed, lines in the ‘York poem’ that are regularly cited as evidence that Alcuin succeeded Ælberht as ‘master of the school at York’ in 161 See, for example, the splendid discussion of iudicium in the first line of Ps 100 and its possible OE equivalent dom by E.G. Stanley, Some problematic SenseDivisions in Old English: “glory” and “victory”; “noble”, “glorious” and “learned” in Heroic Poetry in the Anglo-Saxon Period: Studies in honour of Jess B. Bessinger, Jr., ed. H. Damico and J. Leyerle, Studies in Medieval Culture 32 (Kalamazoo, 1993), pp. 171–226, here pp. 171–4. 162 Godman, ‘York poem’, Introduction, p. ci. Bellipotens, for example, is ClLat; but might not the nonce-word vaccipotens in carm. iv (MGH Poet. I, p. 221) have had an OE equivalent? 163 The rejection of K1’s and A’s (correct) quadrifido in favour of T ’s quadrivido in ep. no. 19 (p. 53) is, however, simply an editorial mis-judgement. For Alcuin’s nameform(s), see epp. nos 5, 15, 16, 18 etc. and Bullough, ‘Alcuin before Frankfort’, p. 571 n. 1. Banniard, “Viva Voce”, p. 324 n. 70 cites with apparent approval the uncovering of ‘quelques particularités dues au substrat dialectal [!] dans le latin d’Alcuin’ by H. Tiefenbach, ‘Altsächisches und Althochdeutsches im Latein Alkuin’s’, Sprachwissenschaft 5 (1980), 320–38; in 1985 (‘Théorie et pratique’, above, n. 133, p. 595), he had been much more sceptical; and most of Tiefenbach’s examples seem to me very unconvincing. 164 Compare ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1481–2 (where he is both sagax doctor pius atque sacerdos) and lines 1515–16 (the building of a church by his two discipuli, doctore iubente).

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767 are unambiguously connected with that man’s resignation from the bishopric in 778; and while the earlier lines patri qui semper adhaesit/ doctrinae sitiens haurire fluenta suetus could refer to the situation in the previous decade, in the context in which they occur they are more naturally understood as meaning that Alcuin remained with his master in his self-imposed retreat.165 His ‘biographer’, however, certainly assumes that he took over from his former master very soon after Ælberht’s promotion. More tellingly, the mid-ninth-century Vita Liudgeri by Bishop Altfrid, whose unusually detailed and partly-controllable narrative suggests that it rests on a good tradition, declares that when Aluberht, Sigibert and Liudger were ordained ‘Alchuinus was master at York’; afterwards, the three men remained there for a year, during which time Liudger eagerly imbibed ‘religious teachings’ (spiritalia dogmata) from Alcuin.166 Subsequently, having returned to Utrecht, Liudger beseeched his abbot Gregory to let him go back to York to learn more from the master; and a reluctant Gregory finally agreed. Received joyfully by Alcuin, Liudger ‘remained for three years and six months, gaining in knowledge’. He would indeed have stayed even longer if a Frisian merchant, apparently ‘conscripted’ into the royal army, had not killed the son of a local comes (gesith? ealdorman?) in a quarrel; whereupon the whole Frisian community, ‘fearful of the wrath of the young man’s relatives’, hastily left Northumbria. Alcuin felt obliged to compel Liudger to depart with the merchants; and he even sent ‘his deacon’ Putul with him, because he felt that ‘for love of learning’ Liudger might simply go to another town and be the victim there of those seeking to avenge the dead man. Alcuin was well aware of the harsh realities of vendetta.167 The evidence of other texts allows us to calculate Liudger’s longer stay as extending from (probably) the latter part of 769 or early 770 to the early months of 773, and the military expedition in which the killing happened as plausibly connected with the internal troubles which a year later led to King Alchred’s overthrow. This necessarily excludes the several-times proposed identification of Alcuin of York with an Albuinus deliciosus Karoli regis who, according to the Liber pontificalis, took part in an embassy to the Pope in 773; and 165 ‘York poem’, lines 1533–5, 1527–8. Ælberht’s resignation from the bishopric is discussed below, ch. 3. 166 Vita Alcuini c. 6 (ad init.), ed. Arndt, p. 188; Vita Liudgeri c. 10, ed. Diekamp, pp. 15–16. 167 Vita cc. 11, 12: ed. Diekamp, pp. 16–17.

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evidence from the Frankish side suggests that he was in fact a lay courtier who probably died young.168 Alcuin’s later correspondence, and a few poems, refer intermittently to the names or bye-names and subsequent careers of other York pupils; but even the best-documented among them, the Scottus Joseph, begins in a chronological void. As the discussion of Alcuin’s computus underlined, only fragments of what he taught in his years as magister, with or without the title and perhaps initially in association with rather than as successor to his own teacher are now identifiable; and the extent of his use of Ælberht’s remarkable collection of books remains largely speculative, although indications in the De laude and elsewhere are (as have been seen) not entirely lacking. It is a meagre tally for almost two decades in which a reputation was first formed. Having been ordained deacon in the church of York in the mid/late 760s(?)—his own third decade169—Alcuin, as is well-known, never proceeded further in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. This has naturally invited speculation; and I am no more able than previous ‘biographers’ to offer a conclusive or all-embracing explanation. For the long-term failure to obtain a bishopric in Francia, which was the reward of lesser men among both pupils and acquaintances, I would certainly give some weight to his non-noble origins: and attention has already been drawn to a feature of his private life which was apparently a disabling factor in his later years.170 His failure even to advance to the priesthood certainly caused inconvenience, since in a period in which the practice of ‘private’ or special masses was spectacularly increasing (many of them composed by Alcuin himself ), he always had to find someone else to celebrate Mass at which he merely served levitice.171 It cannot be excluded that Alcuin’s persistence in the diaconate was, at least initially, a deliberate choice. However widely or loosely

168 Bullough, ‘Albuinus deliciosus Karoli regis, Alcuin of York and the shaping of the early Carolingian Court’, in: Institutionen, Kultur und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter: Festschr. f. Josef Fleckenstein, ed. L. Fenske et al. (Sigmaringen, 1984), pp. 73–92, for the dates of Liudger’s visits, esp. pp. 79–83. 169 Above, ch. 1. If it was Ælberht and not Egberht who ordained Alcuin, then he was almost certainly performing the duties of a magister before he was a deacon. 170 Pt. I. 171 Vita c. 23, ed. Arndt, p. 196.

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the term minister might be used in both the secular world and the Church, it had a very special force for the latter as the translation or equivalent of the Biblical ‘Levite’. Levitae . . . Graece diacones, Latine ministri dicuntur, quia sicut in sacerdote consecratio, ita in diacono ministerii dispensatio habetur, explained Isidore; and the Alcuin-circle Disputatio puerorum copied him, adding, from a text of the so-called ‘Ordinals of Christ’, unde et Dominus ‘diaconus’ dictus est quando lavit pedes discipulorum suorum.172 A ‘Synodal book’ of Pope Gregory I, circulating in eighth-century Northumbria, included a decree that defined the deacon’s ministry as praedicationis officium elemosinarumque studium.173 One of Alcuin’s earliest extant letters shows him distributing substantial sums in alms on behalf of others as well as himself; and he showed concern in later correspondence that bishops, abbots and royalty should ensure a proper ‘dispensing’ of their resources.174 Gregory’s praedicationis officium almost certainly referred to responsibility for liturgical reading: but even more certainly Alcuin would have understood it as teaching or preaching, as in his epithet for both the Pope and Augustine of Canterbury and in letters to kings and others. (Is it this, together with his English experience, that explains why he was to defend preaching or ‘exposition’ by deacons as well as priests in a later letter to the Frankish king?)175 It has sometimes been supposed that in the seventh and eighth centuries deacons had acquired a particular importance in pre-baptismal instruction. This could, however, only apply to the preparation of adult candidates, predominantly in missionary regions; and neither Alcuin’s letters and writings on baptism nor the relevant Roman (or gallicanized-Roman) ordo, which gives a prominent place in the baptismal ceremonies to a deacon or deacons, suggest such a role.176 It can be assumed (although it is an 172 Etym. VII xii, 22; Disputatio c. 9 (using, however, the singular number—diaconus, minister), PL 101, col. 1132C, cf. Reynolds, Ordinals of Christ, pp. 79–80. 173 MGH Epp. I, ed. Ewald and Hartmann, p. 363; Bede, HE II, 1 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 128); P. Meyvaert, ‘Bede and the Libellus Synodicus of Gregory the Great’, JTS n. s. 12/2 (1961), 298–302, repr. Meyvaert, Benedict, Gregory Bede and Others, no. XII. 174 Ep. no. 7, Chase Two Letter-Books I/4, discussed below, ch. 3; epp. nos 114 (p. 168: with the comment duplex fiat elymosina tua, una in salvandis animabus, altera in adiuvandis corporibus egentium), 124 (p. 183), etc. 175 Lib. pont. 1, 486 uses evangelizare (intrans.) in a similar way to Gregory’s praedicationis officium when describing the future Pope Hadrian I’s qualities as a deacon. For Alcuin’s ep. no. 136 (p. 209), see above, Pt. I, ch. 1 and below. 176 Compare, e.g., Bede’s account of the York deacon James who in the middle

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assumption) that northern-English bishops were accompanied by deacons when they travelled round their dioceses to impose a postbaptismal annointing, i.e. ‘confirmation’.177 That in Rome until the late-ninth century Popes were commonly chosen from the deacons, the eighth-century Paul and Hadrian among them, is not of universal relevance, because of the city’s distinctive pastoral organisation: but it could none the less have provided a model for York and have coloured Alcuin’s hopes or expectations of succeeding Eanbald I in 794/5.178 The historic dignity of the grade and its special closeness to the leader of the diocese is dimly reflected in Alcuin’s insistence in 796 that the new archbishop of York should never put on his pall (for the exercise of his pontifical powers) ‘without deacons in attendance’.179 Conversely, there are hints in contemporary evidence from the Continent that the diaconate, particularly in the person of a head- or arch-deacon, was the appropriate grade for a magister : Peter of Pisa, who was a teacher at the Frankish Court before Alcuin, was remembered there as archidiaconus; Pacificus was archidiaconus and magister at Verona cathedral for forty-three years (probably 801–44).180 decades of the seventh century magnas antiquo hosti praedas docendo et baptizando eripuit (HE II 20, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 206) with Ordo Romanus XI, ed. Andrieu, 2, 417–47. For the latter’s relationship to the ‘Old Gelasian’ ordo, I xxix–xxxvi, also xlii and xliv, Mohlberg nos 283–328, 419–30, 444–52 (which I assume was known in Northumbria), compare Andrieu with Chavasse, Sacramentaire gélasien, pp. 166–8 (arguing that OR XI depends on the Sacramentary ordo). It has subsequently been argued by French liturgical scholars that OR XI as we have it is neither seventhcentury nor Roman but ‘a gallicanized text that took its present form in the eighth century’: so Lynch, Godparents and Kinship, p. 290; but the summaries of their views, which are all that I have been able to consult, are not immediately convincing. 177 Below, p. 132 and n. 188. 178 Lib. pont., ed. Duchesne, 1, 463, 486, etc., i.e. both before and after the Papal election decree of 769 (MGH Conc. II/i, 79); R. Vielliard, Recherches sur les origines de la Rome chrétienne (Rome, 1959) (for pastoral organisation); T.F.X. Noble, The Republic of St. Peter (Univ. of Pennsylvania; Philadelphia, 1984), 188–205, 212–30. According to Alcuin’s ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, line 1430, Ælberht [Ecgbercto] defensor clero decernitur omni (et simul . . . in urbe magister, line 1431), cf. idem line 1400; for Roman clerical (regionary) defensores, see Noble, pp. 222–3. For the episcopal succession at York in 795/6, see ch. 4, below. 179 Ep. no. 114 (p. 168), numquam . . . absque diaconorum adstantium ministerio. 180 Peter: Bullough, ‘Reminiscence and Reality’, JournMedLat 5, esp. pp. 188, 193. Pacificus: his epitaphs, one rhythmical, the other metrical, in Verona Cathedral, best published by L. Billo, ‘Le iscrizioni Veronesi dell’alto medioevo’, Archivio Veneto n.s. 16 (1934), at pp. 49–61; the metrical one is taken almost entirely from Alcuin’s epitaph (MGH Poet. I, pp. 350–1), omitting any reference to sophia. (The elaborate attempt by C. La Rocca, Pacifico di Verona. Il Passato Carolingio nella Costruzione della Memoria Urbana, Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, Nuovi Studi Storici 31

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‘Without the city walls’ Any explanation must face the uncomfortable fact that Alcuin never alludes directly to his own diaconal ministry at York. His silence on such matters has, however, a wider context: namely, an apparent lack of interest in the religious life of the Northumbrian parrochia(e) beyond the walls of the city, and a dismissive and contemptuous attitude to country-dwellers at large. It is typical of rustici that they keep alive old hatreds, even in the presence of a saint’s relics, as he tells us in his ‘unhistorical’ re-writing of Bede’s account of the arrival of King Oswald’s relics at Bardney; that they forsake their churches for places in the hills where they have drinking-, not prayer-sessions; that they wear ligaturae with supposedly protective relics, and even have intercourse with their wives while doing so, instead of thinking about holiness.181 If they are entrusted with (oral) messages they will probably forget them ‘because the memory of rustics is weak’.182 (Rome, 1995) to impugn the authenticity of the epitaphs and their evidence for Pacificus’s life and career has not persuaded me or others.) The clerical grade of the Salzburg magister Baldo seems, however, to have been presbyter: Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 2, 78–9 and the texts cited there. According to Amalarius of Metz (Lib. off. II, 13, 9: ed. Hanssens, 2, 230), after quoting a letter of Jerome: archidiaconus eandem consecrationem habet quam ceteri diaconi sed electione fratrum praeponitur; I know of no other ninth-century evidence in support of this claim. 181 Bardney: ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 367–9: priscis odiis . . . saevi . . . coloni. Other failings: epp. nos 290, 291, the former certainly, the latter probably, to Archbishop Jaenberht of Canterbury, although possibly several years apart; and compare also ep. no. 17 (p. 45), Isti sunt qui consuunt pulvillos sub omni cubitu et oves Christi morbidas faciant non sanatas, where Alcuin was presumably aware that the first statement was taken from Ez 13.18 although his audience may not have been. DMLBS does not give any example of debitum ‘conjugal dues’ (ep. no. 291) earlier than the twelfth century: but it is the familiar (or insufficiently familiar?) I Cor 7.3, which Bede previously, commenting on I Pt 3.7, had (mis-)interpreted wholly negatively: In epist. VII catholicas, ed. D. Hurst (CCSL 121; Turnhout, 1983), pp. 243–4. For ligaturae etc. and degrees of disapproval towards them, see now Flint, Rise of Magic, pp. 242–9, 326–7. In his ep. no. 290 Alcuin says ‘I saw (videbam) these undesirable practices’: does he mean in Kent? in which case this is the only evidence that he was ever there! or in his native Northumbria? compare the northern Northumbrians who had once come down from the hills to be blessed by Cuthbert: Anon. vita IV 5, ed. Colgrave, p. 116. For rustici mores, see epp. nos 30 (Chase, Two Letter-Books, II/5), 61. 182 Ep. no. 112 (p. 163) to Arn, memoria rusticorum fragilis est: to be compared with Bede’s account of a miracle on the lower Tyne, recalled and recounted ab . . . rusticae simplicitatis viro, et simulandi prorsus ignaro, Vita (pr.) Cuthb. c. 3, ed. Colgrave, p. 164. Cf. further Claudius of Turin’s evidently insulting reference to the rusticus portitor who has brought to him Abbot Theudemir’s false accusations, MGH Epp. IV, pp. 4, 610; and the words added to the text of ordo Romanus XV in the earlyninth-century Tours manuscript Montpellier Bibl. Fac. Méd. 412, relating to Lenten abstention from meat, rustici autem et reliquus vulgus a quadragesima (ed. Andrieu, 3, 115).

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There is nothing in Alcuin’s exegesis comparable with Bede’s occasional glimpses of the practice of the faith at village level: the familiar passage in the Commentary on Mark where he declares that ‘when we come to any [royal?] estate-centre or walled settlement(?) or any other place in which there is a prayer-house consecrated to God we enter it’ and pray before getting on with our worldly business; and the less familiar and more remarkable one where Bede recalls how ‘a certain neighbouring priest recounted to me’ how a holy woman had been freed from her demon and her ulcers healed by prayer, the application of blessed salt and finally of consecrated oil.183 It is, of course, possible that if we had letters written by a younger Alcuin they would give a very different impression. In two lines of the ‘York poem’ which are dependent on a chapter-title in Bede’s metrical ‘Life of St. Cuthbert’, Alcuin records how the saint ‘by anointing a girl with holy oil, cured her of pain in the side and head-ache’; and at the end of the century he asked Archbishop Arn to ensure that he was remembered in the prayers of his diocesan clergy (tuis parrochianis) who would be coming ‘for the consecration of holy chrism’ on Thursday in Holy Week.184 Writing to Colcu early in 790, he declares that he has sent, with other precious items, a quantity of (olive-)oil, ‘which is now hardly to be found in Britain’. The apparently corrupt passage which follows and has defied all attempts at convincing emendation, Ut dispensares per loca necessaria episcoporum ad utilitatem vel honores Dei, must surely mean that it is to be distributed to see-churches,185 whose bishops will bless it or con183

In Marcum III (xi, 11) ed. Hurst, p. 575 lines 1298–1303: cum forte villam aut oppidum aut alium quemlibet locum in quo sit domus orationis Deo consecrata intramus etc.; In Lucam III (viii, 30) ed. Hurst, pp. 184–5 lines 731 ff. For the significance of villa in Bede’s historical works, see especially Campbell, ‘Bede’s words for places’, pp. 44–8; he does not consider the In Marcum passage. 184 Chrismate sic quandam sanaverat ipse perunctam/ a morbo lateris capitisque dolore puellam: ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 717–18, corresponding to Bede, Vita s. Cuthberti metr. ed. Jaager, c. xxiv tit., cf. lines 571–3; ep. no. 169, evidently written in March ex/April in, 799. In Bede’s prose Vita s. Cuthberti c. 30 (ed. Colgrave, p. 254), the saint unxit oleo benedicto; while Vita anon. IV 4 (ed. Colgrave, p. 116) has the more liturgical unguens eam crisma benedictione sua consecrata. This last is the earliest reference to chrism in an English text; DMLBS 2 (1981), 332–3, s.v. chrisma, unnecessarily separates it from the main entry where, ignoring the several places in Bede (here and n. 186), the first example cited is the Alcuin letter, with a wrong date. 185 Ep. no. 7, Chase, Two Letter-books, I/4 (pp. 24–6); for the addressee, Colcu, see below, ch. 3. Emendation began with Ussher, who inserted hominum before vel (which is in Tib. but not in Vesp.: see Chase, cit.); but what is surely needed is the dissociation of necessaria (which could anyway be a false reading) from the preceding loca, the loca episcoporum being see-churches, cf. Alcuin’s use of loca sanctorum in later letters for (apparently) monasteries.

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secrate it as chrism for use in the appropriate rituals by themselves or by their priests: indeed, in the case of the ‘pure oil’, it may be used in emergency by laity.186 None of his letters of the 790s to monastic communities in England suggests that they are engaged in or that Alcuin thinks they should be engaged in pastoral work among the laity.187 Concern that the church, through its bishops and priests, should be actively evangelizing country districts figures only incidentally in letters to archbishops, to cathedral fratres or to Northumbrian kings, whether admonitory or informative. Alcuin recognises, of course, that regular preaching will help. Thus, writing to Archbishop Eanbald (II) shortly after his election and consecration in mid-August 796, Alcuin exhorts him ‘not to let his tongue be remiss in preaching nor his 186 See the Holy Thursday (Maundy Thursday) ‘Chrismal mass’ in Sacr. Gelas. ed. Wilson, I xl, ed. Mohlberg et al., nos 381–8, the corresponding prayers in ‘eighthcentury Gelasians’ and the seventh-century Roman ordo surviving into or being re-discovered in late-Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Banting, Two Anglo-Saxon Pontificals, pp. 128–9 (with the editor’s comments at pp. xxvi–xxix). But for eighth-century Northumbria, see also Bede’s several allusions to the preparation as well as use of chrism in his exegesis: e.g. In Cantica Canticorum ad cap. 1, 13, quod in chrismatis confectione, liquori olivae admisceri ac pontificali benedictione solet consecrari (ed. Hurst, CCSL 119 B (1985), 206); the previously quoted passage from In Lucam; and the comment on Iac 5.14, Nec solum presbiteris sed ut Innocentius papa scribit etiam omnibus christianis uti licet eodem oleo in suam aut suorum (sc. ‘kinsfolk’?) necesssitatem ungendo quod tamen oleum non nisi ab episcopis licet confici (In epist. VII septem catholicas: ed. Hurst, CCSL 121, ii/4, 221, where Bede’s dependence on the Ep. ad Decentium c.[10], ed. Cabié, p. [xx], is surprisingly not noticed). Janet Nelson, ‘Symbols in Context: Rulers’ Inauguration Rituals in Byzantium and the West in the Early Middle Ages’ in Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London, 1986) pp. 259–281, cites the first of these passages in support of a claim that ‘northern churchmen insisted upon’ the use of olive-oil as distinct from animal-fats, and suggests (n. 109 ‘Symbols in Context’, p. 119) ‘anthropological’ implications. I do not see how it (or the related passage in Bede’s In Samuh. 4, CCSL 119, 223) can possibly be read as prescriptive: if it were, this would necessarily extend to balsam, the words immediately before quod being namque in vineis Engaddi ut praefati sumus balsamum gignitur; and there is ample evidence that for many centuries (until the twelfth?) the West lacked that ingredient! 187 Letters: Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, ASE 22, 95–101. For a supposed continuing pastoral responsibility see Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, pp. 243–7; but the views expressed here should now be compared with Catherine Cubitt’s impressively-argued ‘Pastoral care and conciliar canons: the provisions of the 747 Council of Clofesho’, Pastoral Care, ed. Blair and Sharpe, pp. 193–211. Alcuin’s silence on this matter may be compared with that of Æthelwulf, De abbatibus, noted by Cubitt, p. 207 (‘if the community had carried responsibility for pastoral care’ beyond works of charity, ‘it would be odd that Æthelwulf did not find anything of note in its performance of this duty’). The one letter in which it is implied that monks may be responsible for a plebs and its ecclesia is addressed to Arn of Salzburg, the organisation of whose see-church and diocese, with continuing missionary responsibilities, was probably untypical: ep. no. 169, written to accompany ep. no. 168 addressed to the sanctissimis fratribus Iuvavensis ecclesiae; cf. ASE 22, 100–1.

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feet be remiss in going round the flock entrusted to him’ (non cesset lingua tua in praedicando, non pes tuus in circuiendo gregem tibi commissum): the second clause was probably intended to cover the bishop’s specific responsibilities, such as confirmation, as well as his more general duty of inspecting and correcting both clergy and laity.188 Chapters in the final sections of Charlemagne’s Admonitio generalis in 789, in which Alcuin’s direct involvement seems certain, prescribe that the catholic faith ‘should be diligently read and taught to all the people by the bishops and priests, because this is the first commandment of the Lord God Almighty in the law’, and again ‘that you must see to it, most beloved and venerable pastors and governors (rectores) of God’s churches, that the priests whom you send throughout your dioceses to govern the people serving God and to teach them in the churches to teach rightly and worthily’.189 Over half-a-century earlier Bede had insisted, in the fifth chapter of his letter to Egberht, that since the diocese of York was too big for the archbishop to reach every community it was essential that he ‘appoint several assistants for [himself ] in the sacred work by ordaining priests and instituting teachers who may devote themselves to proclaiming the word of God in particular villages ( presbyteros videlicet ordinando atque institutendo doctores qui in singulis viculis praedicando Dei verbo insistant)’ as well as baptizing and celebrating the Eucharist; and those who couldn’t manage Latin could at least pronounce the Creed and pray the 188 Ep. no. 114 (p. 167); similarly in id. no. 161 (p. 259) to an unidentified (?S. German) bishop. Compare the merely incidental references to ‘preaching’ as an episcopal responsibility in Alcuin’s first letter to Archbishop Æthelheard of Canterbury (ep. no. 17, Chase, Two Letter-books, II/10: but also guttur tuum tuba Dei debet esse et lingua tua omnibus praeco salutis at p. 45 [Chase, p. 71]) with the more categoric statement in his letter of rebuke to Æthelheard in 797, ep. no. 128 (p. 190) (with a reference—uniquely?—to singulas aecclesias atque parochias). For journeys of inspection see, e.g., Gregory, Dial. 3, 38 (SC 260, p. 428), the Frankish council of Chalôn (647/53) c. 11 (Conc. Galliae ann. 511–695 ed. C. de Clercq [CCSL 148 A], p. 305) and DMLB s. v. (c); for episcopal confirmation in early England see, in addition to Foote, ‘Baptism in early Anglo-Saxon England’, Pastoral Care, ed. Blair and Sharpe, p. 179, Bede’s parrochiam suam circuiens . . . nuper baptizatis ad accipiendam spiritus sancti gratiam manum imponeret in his Vita Cuthberti ( pr.) c. 29, ed. Colgrave, p. 252; there is no corresponding phrase in the Anonymous Life. 189 MGH Capit. XXII, 61, 82: ed. Boretius, 1, 58, 61. King, Translated Sources, pp. 214, 219 translates legere as ‘teach’ and praedicare as ‘preach’, equally legitimately: the Latin words as used by Alcuin and his contemporaries embrace both meanings. C. 61 quotes Dt 6.4,5 (lex), not Mt 22.37, although in a non-standard Vulgate form (Et ut ille diligatur; ex tota virtute nostra [Vg. fortitudine tua]) and possibly influenced by the Matthew passage (or by De imagine Dei, ed. Marenbon, p. 159) in its inclusion of ex tota mente.

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Lord’s Prayer in English. It is, therefore, possible that when in 798 Alcuin complained that bishops in Francia were preventing priests and deacons from preaching in their churches, to the obvious detriment of the faith and in despite of the royal admonitio, he was also making an implicit contrast with the practice of his native Northumbria: indeed, his protest apparently assumes that it is because priests will ‘preach’ in the vernacular that they should not be prevented from doing so.190 The major exception to his indifference to the church at large is an interest in anchorites: men who, in Benedict’s words, ‘after a long probation in a monastery. . . . are able to live without the help of others and with their own strength and God’s assistance to fight against temptations of both mind and body’. Alcuin in the ‘York poem’ follows the ‘Northumbrian Annals’ in commemorating the deaths of Balthere, in the kingdom’s furthest north, and Echa, not far from the ‘capital’; but he has independent knowledge which alllows him to include a description of the uncomfortable sea-girt setting ‘hemmed by terrible crags and steep cliffs’ (Bass Rock) in which Balthere fought his battles with the demonic hosts, and of Echa’s foretelling the future.191 In 790 he was to make available a significant sum of silver for distribution per singulos anachoritas; and in the aftermath of the Northmen’s sack of Lindisfarne in 793 he helped direct one of the survivors to the life of a solitary.192

190

Ep. ad Ecgbertum, ed. Plummer, Bedae Opera Historica, 1, 408; ep. no. 136 (p. 209). HR ed. Arnold, 2, 41, 43; ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, lines 1325–93; Bullough, ‘Hagiography as patriotism . . ., pp. 348–50 (with speculations on why he displayed that interest), 352–4. Balthere is characterized by Alcuin as a bellipotens miles in his struggles with the aerias turmas; the epithet bellipotens is otherwise applied, in a secular sense, only to King Edwin (‘York poem’, line 1490). Compare also the commemoration of the Depositio Oedilwaldi presbiteri et anachorete in the Phillips 1869 calendar at 21 April; there is no corresponding entry in the Ambrosiana calendar but Willibrord’s Calendar has Oedilualdi monachi at this date, written (its editor H.A. Wilson thought) by the original hand although as a later addition; and note that he also figures, as Edilaldi saxonis, in the ‘Martyrology of Tallaght’, ed. R.I. Best and H.J. Lawlor, HBS 68 (London, 1931), p. 35. This is the one-time Ripon monk who followed Cuthbert in the hermitage on Farne Island, and as Oediluuald pbr heads the list of Nomina anchoritarum in the ‘Lindisfarne’ Liber Vitae (ed. Gerchow, Gedenküberlieferung, p. 305). It is impossible to say whether the inclusion of the anchorite Alchfrid’s letter in the English collections of Alcuin’s letters results from his own interest or that of a later compiler. 192 Ep. no. 7; ep. no. 22, with my comments in ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, ASE 22, 99, and below, ch. 3. 191

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The extent to which Alcuin was a known and respected figure on a wider stage before his acceptance at the courts of the Frankish and other kings will always be uncertain; and the beginnings of the influence which he believed he could wield there in the century’s last decade are even more obscure. The ‘York poem’ is for the most part unrevealing. The letters, among which for whatever reason ones to addressees in the diocese of York are notably absent,193 provide only a few retrospective indications. The earliest approximately datable ones (of ca. 784), however, console and strengthen—briefly—the bishop of northern-Irish Mayo, whose church was suffering from local warfare, and encourage a monk who was evidently deeply upset by the conduct of his community (probably in that same region). Alcuin reminded the latter that ‘both good and bad are to be found in any place where many people are living together’, and that if the nature of a place determined conduct, ‘an angel would not have fallen from Heaven and Man would not have sinned in Paradise’! He urged the bishop to ‘have nothing to do with weapons of war’.194 In another letter, probably written some years later, he expresses his concern that a priest-abbot Eanwulf, who might be identical with the ?Northumbrian abbot who wrote to both King Charles and Lul of Mainz in 773, had accepted secular office (saeculi dignitas) obliging him to travel around instead of remaining in his community.195 Alcuin’s enormous respect for Bede and the fact that the twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow with their librorum thesaura were the nearest major source of Patristic texts must have encouraged early contact with their congregations; and the ‘York poem’s

193 They are lacking equally in the English, the Tours and the ‘personal’ collections. For a possible exception, see below at n. 197. 194 Ep. nos 2 and 1, both in the ‘personal’ collection. For their date, see below. 195 Ep. no. 283, also from the ‘personal’ collection. Eanwulf entries in the Nomina abbatum gradus praesbyteratus in the ‘Lindisfarne’ Liber Vitae, ed. Gerchow, Gedenküberlieferung, p. 306, are nos 28 and 63 (but there are thirty-eight other Eanwulfs in the Liber!). The Eanwulf letters of 773 (on which see above) are Epistolae Selectae 1, ed. Tangl, nos 119, 120. The inclusion of a dating-clause in the form ‘Dat’, month-day, indiction’ is without parallel in eighth-century English and Frankish letters: it strongly suggests that their writer was accustomed to composing royal—less probably nonroyal—charters that were dated, although in Mercia and the south the normal form at this period seems to be ‘Actum (sometimes Scripta), year of the Incarnation, indiction’.

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digression on Abbot Ceolfrid, whose uncorrupted body (Alcuin reports) had been returned from Langres to Northumbria post tempora multa, bears this out.196 Writing to the newly-elected Abbot Æthelbald of Jarrow in ?789/90, he recalls that previous abbots had ‘granted him the favour’ of having his name entered in the monastery’s register (album) of persons to be prayed for, and urges on him the maintenance of the high standards set by the original founder Benedict and his successor Ceolfrid; writing (later?) to the brethren of St. Peter’s, Wearmouth from his Continental exile, he declares that ‘everything about you that I saw’ was pleasing.197 Letters addressed to Bishop Higbald and the Lindisfarne congregation after June 793 refer to the prayer-based karitatis familiaritas or familiaris karitas (characteristic phrases) and loving friendship that presentem he had enjoyed in the past, contrasted with his current sadness and absence in Francia: but Higbald had been bishop only since 781, the two men had been present together at the legatine synod of 786 and a visit to Lindisfarne need not be earlier than the years of Alcuin’s return to Northumbria.198 196 Books: ep. no. 19 (p. 55); also the reference in ep. no. 286 to the copia librorum which the Jarrow monks are in danger of not reading! Ceolfrid: ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, lines 1295–1300, the recording of his death at Langres perhaps indicating knowledge of Hist. abb. anon. cc. 35, 36 (ed. Plummer, 401–2) and/or Hist. abb. Bedae cc. 21, 23 (id., 385–6); lines 1299–1300 record the return of the uncorrupted body to Northumbria, the earliest evidence of the translation, and indeed the only evidence before William of Malmesbury (De gestis pontificum Anglorum, I 60: ed. N.E.S.A. Hamilton, RS. 52 (1870), p. 198). Ceolfrid pbr heads the list of names of abbots gradus praesbyteratus in the ‘Lindisfarne’ Liber Vitae (ed. Gerchow, Gedenküberlieferung, p. 306). But he does not figure in the ‘York metrical martyrology’ nor, more surprisingly, in the calendar in Berlin Staatsbibliothek Phillips 1869, where other Wearmouth-Jarrow abbots are commemorated. 197 Ep. no. 67, Chase, Two Letter-Books I/3 (pp. 22–24); ep. no. 284 (p. 442). In albo] vestre beatitudinis has hitherto been taken to refer to the abbot, which has parallels elsewhere, although beatitudo was more commonly a term of address for the Pope and other bishops: but the context as well as the plural vestra indicate that Alcuin was using the word for the congregation, as he does in at least one other letter (ep. no. 117, to Murbach) and had been anticipated by Aldhelm (De virg. pr. lx, ed. Ehwald, p. 322). (The treatment of the early material in DMLBS 1, s. v. beatitudo is seriously inadequate.) For Benedict and Ceolfrith as models, see also ep. no. 282. 198 Epp. nos 20, 21 and the later no. 24, cf. Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, ASE 22, 95–8. For reciprocal, commemorative, prayer in Alcuin’s letters and its associated vocabulary, see H.-B. Meyer, ‘Alkuin zwischen Antike und Mittelalter: Teil 2’, Zeitschr. f. Katholische Theologie 81 (1959), 405–60 and Gerchow, Gedenküberlieferung, pp. 43–9 (although obviously I reject their characterisations of the correspondence as a whole); for the meaning of familiaritas, see Bullough, ‘Alcuin before Frankfort’, Das Frankfurter Konzil von 794. Kristallisationspunkt Karolingischer Kultur, ed. R. Berndt SJ, 2 vols. (Mainz, 1997), pp. 571–85, at p. 572 n. 5.

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The possibility has already been canvassed that the young Alcuin had, in the name of his bishop, composed ‘admonitory letters’ to layfolk.199 A more direct involvement in the public life of his patria in the 770s, because of connections with the royal court at York, is very probable; the evidence, however, is indirect or late or both. The Vita records a tradition that Alcuin had been sent on a mission to the king of the Franks some time before their momentous encounter at Parma.200 A reflection of this, it seems, is his novel letter-poem, inc. Cartula, perge cito: the succinct descriptions there of different, and independently-documented, methods of propulsion for the boats that will convey the letter up the river Rhine from Utrecht to the vicinity of Worms and Speyer have latterly been used as additional evidence for treating it as a record of recent personal experience, although that could easily have been in the reverse direction.201 Most of the men to whom it is addressed—there are, as yet, no encounters with women, even at the royal court—figure in other texts of the period; a very few, including a Ionas who is evidently abbot of the Suidbert-monastery on the later ‘Kaiserwerth’ and the one layman, an unwelcoming Durstede merchant, are named only here.202 A rough terminus ante quem for journey and poem is provided by the naming of the bishop of Speyer as Bassin(us), since a successor was in office before the end of July 782, a terminus post quem by the reference to Alberic of Utrecht as vaccipotens praesul, since he was still unconsecrated in June 777.203 199 Above, pp. 299–300, at nn. 147–9. Compare, however, Alcuin’s remark to the Salzburg monks in 799, ep. no. 168, that ‘your shepherd face to face with you can counsel you orally far better than any letter of mine’ ( pastorem vestrum praesentem qui vos viva voce melius admonere quam mea series litterarum), although he still expects it to be read aloud. 200 Vita, c. 9, ed. Arndt, p. 190. This was certainly not as early as 772/3, although there are not the same objections to Alcuin’s inclusion in Alhred’s legationes some time in 773, Epist. select. 1, ed. Tangl, no. 121: but note that when the Northumbrian legates reached Francia, they would probably have found that the king and his army had departed for Italy! For some possible implications of Court connections, see the language of Alcuin’s letter to the priest (and abbot?) Eanwulf, quoted in n. 197. 201 Alcuin, carm. iv, MGH Poet. I, pp. 220–3. For the Rhine boats, compare lines 11, 22–3 with S. Lebecq, Marchands et Navigateurs Frisons du Haut Moyen Age 1 (Lille, 1983), 215–22; and idem, “En barque sur le Rhin”, Publications de la Section Hist. de l’Inst. G.-D. de Luxembourg 104 (1988), 33–59, at 46–56. 202 Ionas: line 14, the identification of Litora being established by Bede, HE V, 11, cf. A. Dresen, ‘Beda Venerabilis u. der älteste Name von Kaiserwerth’, Düsseldorfer Jahrb. 28 (1916), 211–18; Fleckenstein’s suggestion of an Irish origin for Jonas (Karlswerk, 1, 36) is unsupported and unnecessary. Hrotberct mercator: lines 11–13. 203 DK I nos 117, 143.

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None of the other names offers much help. Beornred-Samuel of Echternach, to whom copies of Phocas’s and Priscian’s grammatical writings were now being sent—the earliest unequivocal evidence of York’s supplying copies of Antique secular works to a Continental centre—had succeeded to the abbacy in (probably) 775.204 The Italian Paulinus’s initial association with the Frankish Court (he is named before Peter, who is almost certainly Einhard’s Petrus Pisanus, in line 42) is conventionally, and almost certainly correctly, linked with Charles’s suppression of a rebellion in the regnum’s north-eastern region in the spring/summer of 776.205 Like a majority of commentators, I believe that Alcuin’s journey recalled in the poem should be distinguished from and precedes that to Rome to obtain the pallium, ending somewhere in the middle-Rhine region or in a place with easy access to it. Professor Schaller’s inference from the naming of Fulrad in line 59 that the intended final destination (Endstation) was his abbey of St.-Denis is unnecessary and surely contradicted by the subsequent verses: Alcuin would have encountered him at the Court performing his duties as (arch)chaplain, or possibly visited him in one of his possessions in Alsace.206 A likely, if ultimately unprovable, 204

Carm. iv, lines 24–5, 32–4; C. Wampach, Geschichte der Grundherrschaft Echternach im Frühmittelalter I/2 (Luxemburg, 1930), 159 (no. 94), cf. ibid. 130–1 (for the date 775 rather than 777); Bullough, ‘The Dating of Codex Carolinus Nos. 95, 96, 97 . . .’, DA 18 (1962), 223–30, at 227. For the grammatical texts, see above, pp. 280–1 at n. 88. 205 On 17 June, when the court was at Ivrea, Paulinus was granted the lands of a dead rebel at Lavariano, south-west of Udine: DK I, no. 112. Powerful arguments have been adduced for attributing a previously-unpublished Easter-canticum in fifteensyllable three-line verses, inc. Regi regum semper laudes, to Paulinus, specifically for that year’s Easter-celebration (14 April) at Treviso: Schaller, Studien zur lateinischen Dichtung des Frühmittelalters, pp. 361–98. See also Schaller’s convincing demonstration of Paulinus’s authorship of the Carmen de conversione Saxonum (777): ibid., pp. 313–31; also Bullough, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 133, 155. 206 Schaller, ‘Vortrags- u. Zirkulardichtung’, MLatJahrb 6, 19 (repr. in Schaller, Studien zur Lateinischen Dichtung, p. 92). Schaller, ibid. n. 18, claimed support for his interpretation in the St.-Denis origin (so B. Bischoff ) of the poem’s unique manuscript testimony, Paris BNF. lat. 528. But Alcuin’s poem figures there among poems and letters written by Paul the Deacon and Peter of Pisa, or connected otherwise with the Carolingian Court (Neff, Gedichte des Paulus Diaconus, pp. xix–xx), and not linked in any way with St.-Denis; while its concluding verses show clearly that the author assumed that the cartula would complete its outward journey, and its bearer begin his homeward one, somewhere on or near the Rhine. For Fulrad’s career, see the very concise account by J. Fleckenstein in (Artemis) LexMA 4 (1988), 1024–5, and the very elaborate one by A.J. Stoclet, Autour de Fulrad de St.-Denis (v. 710–784) (Geneva, 1993); but for Fulrad’s possessions in the Vosges etc., see above all Fleckenstein’s seminal ‘Fulrad v. St-Denis u. der fränkische Ausgriff in den süddeutschen Raum’, Studien u. Vorarbeiten zur Geschichte der Grossfränkischen und Frühdeutschen Adels, ed. G. Tellenbach (Freiburg i. Br., 1957), pp. 9–39.

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date for the completion of his ‘first’ journey to the Frankish king and court is either the spring/summer of 779, while they were briefly at Düren (Eifel), or the late autumn of that year, when they had gone into winter-quarters at Worms; when, sometime later, Alcuin wrote the letter-poem and dispatched his messenger, he was obviously uncertain where the Court would be found.207 Professor Godman has claimed that the author of these lively and pointed verses writes ‘in the guise of a shrewd observer of a familiar scene’ and not with ‘the tentative tones of a newcomer entering an unknown milieu’, and that he was already making his mark there.208 But this is hardly compatible with the later documentation of Alcuin’s life and career, whether in the letter-collections, in letters to individuals or in the Vita. In the light of those letters, the poem must be read as a determined attempt to cultivate men with whom the author has recently become acquainted in favourable circumstances, not without some exaggeration of the impact he believed he had made on them: the intimacy claimed with the distinguished addressees of much of his extant correspondence had still to be established.209 If there was a political background to Alcuin’s journey to Francia and visit to the Court, the poem ignores it.210 The Northumbrian King Alchred had been ousted in 774 and Æthelred son of Æthelwald Moll raised to the throne. Alcuin was later to be Æthelred’s supporter and a consoler of his mother, even in discouraging circumstances; but the new monarch does not figure in any verses which 207 BM2 222c, 226; Bullough, ‘“Aula Renovata”’, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 131–2, 153 n. 30. But I failed to take account there of Alcuin’s forte (cf. HE III 5, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 226; ep. no. 138 (p. 217)) in line 36, Si te forte velit regis deducere ad aulam, which follows the account of the ‘detour’ to Echternach. 208 P. Godman, Poets and Emperors: Frankish Politics and Carolingian Poetry (Oxford, 1987), p. 45. To take any other view is, according to the author, a simplistic approach to the evidence. 209 The phenomenon of name-dropping and claims that one made an impression, which can be invalidated or validated only with evidence from the other side, is surely not peculiar to post-medieval societies, from which there are many welldocumented examples. When (for example) Robert Adam first travelled to Rome and stayed for several days in Florence, he claimed in letters home that he had been well-entertained by and made his mark with the Consul, Sir Horace Mann; but Mann’s almost daily letters to Horace Walpole survive complete from this period, and Adam is never mentioned! see John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle (London, 1962), pp. 132–3. 210 A guess about its purpose—and it is a guess—is that the king who seized the Northumbrian throne in ?778 was seeking a renewal of the pax et amicitia with the Frankish king, which Alchred’s legationes had been expected to seek in 773: which might also help to explain Charles’s reported rage in 796.

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might pre-date the earliest extant letters, unless by implication.211 Alcuin can hardly have been indifferent to, although in the light of his later reaction (or non-reaction) to similar episodes he may well have ‘kept his counsel about’, the treacherous killing by royal order of three ‘high-reeves’ or duces—in 778, but at different points in that year in the two annalistic accounts.212 A record of Æthelred’s first deposition and exiling, leaving behind him both his mother and a sister (or step-sister), follows in both sets of Annals: their different year-dates (779; 778) are perhaps to be interpreted as ‘late in 778’.213 The man who replaced him on the throne was Ælfwald, son of the Oswulf who had reigned briefly in 758 and therefore with a claim to descent from Ida. The earliest recorded event of his tenyear reign was the murder of the patricius Bearn by a ducal-led army; subsequently, at least three synods were held in different parts of the kingdom; and when he was assassinated in September 788 he was given honourable burial, not at York but at Hexham. The ‘Northumbrian Annals’s’ judgement, inserted (when?) into its record of Ælfwald’s accession, is that he was a ‘pious and just king’; and a subsequent passage (contemporary? a later insertion?) says that a heavenly light having been seen by many in the place where he was killed, the local faithful built a church there dedicated to Saints Cuthbert and Oswald.214 Alcuin’s one reference to him by name, in 793, can be and has been understood as an approving comment, although the opposite interpretation is more probable; and the circumstances of his departure 211

‘York poem’ ed. Godman, line 1479. 22 March in ASC ‘D’ (= ‘E’) text, ed. Classen and Harmer, p. 18; 29 September in HR 2, 46. The former (but not the latter) locate the killings at two different places, neither of them certainly identified: is this the explanation of the alternative dates? compare, however, Kirby, Earliest English Kings, p. 161 (n. 78). 213 HR ed. Arnold, 2, 46, s. a. 779; ASC ‘D’ text, s. a. 778, ed. Classen and Harmer, p. 18. But for the contents of the latter’s annal for 779 (which should almost certainly be corrected to 780), see below, ch. 3. 214 HR 2, ed. Arnold, pp. 47–8, 51–2; ASC ‘D’ (ed. Classen and Harmer, pp. 19–20) = ‘E’, s.aa. 778, 779, 782, 785 [786], 788 [787], 789 [788] (for the 786 synod, see below, ch. 3); HR 2, ed. Arnold, p. 52. HR’s annal for 779 concludes: Elfwald . . . regnum Northanhymbrorum suscepit tenuitque x. annis; erat enim rex pius et iustus, ut sequens demonstrabit articulus. HR’s account, s. a. 788 (p. 52), of his death and burial reports that he was taken to Hexham cum magnis monachorum cuneis et clericorum cantilenis: it is unfortunately uncertain whether or not this is a contemporary record; for the uncertain status of the Hexham community, see Alcuin’s ep. no. 31 and my comment in ASE 15, 99. The heavenly light, but not the building of the church, is reported also by ASC. There is no claim that Ælfwald was himself commemorated; compare Rollason, Saints and Relics, p. 128. 212

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for Francia in the course of the reign are similarly ambiguous.215 There is no suggestion of royal interest in a major church-building undertaking at York in the late 770s. As Alcuin records it in his verses, ‘a new church of wondrous design (basilicae mirae structurae) was begun, completed and consecrated’, lofty, with galleries and thirty altars; ‘on the orders of their teacher (sc. Archbishop Ælberht) his two disciples Eanbald and Alcuin, working in harmony (concordes) with intense devotion to their task, built this temple; and that father, with his associate bishop (sc. Eanbald), dedicated it to the Beneficent Wisdom [for this translation, see below] nine days before he closed his eyes on this present life’.216 A passage later in the poem and other sources independently give November 8 as the day of the archbishop’s death, which establishes the church’s consecration-day as October 30th.217 There is the small difficulty that in 780 that day was a Monday (in 779 it was a Saturday); but this is probably no difficulty at all, since even in regions where Sunday was the preferred day there were many exceptions.218 Moreover, October 30 is a day without a commemoration in both the Gelasian and the Gregorian sacramentaries.219 Nothing that might be associated with the church 215 Ep. no. 16 (p. 43), Chase, Two Letter-Books, II/4 (p. 54), referring to sexual and other sins which have flooded the land a diebus Aelfwaldi regis. The issue is whether a diebus is to be understood as ‘since, subsequent to’ Ælfwald’s death, to point out the contrast with the present reign (Chase’s view, p. 54 n.), or as ‘since, beginning in the time of ’ Ælfwald, as most commentators have supposed. The latter is surely to be preferred, both because of Alcuin’s apparent dynastic loyalties (see ch. 3) and on syntactical grounds; compare, for the extended use of a(b) in Late-Latin and Early-medieval Latin, D. Norberg, Beiträge zur Spätlateinischen Syntax (Uppsala, 1944), pp. 81–3. Note also Alcuin’s inundaverunt super terram: Classical usage would have been the simple accusative, but he almost certainly had in mind Vulg. Gn 7.6 and the following verses. 216 ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, lines 1507–20; for the translation of alma as ‘beneficent’, see below. This is the only instance of basilica in the poem or (I think) anywhere in Alcuin’s writings; lesser churches are (singulas) aecclesias atque parochias in ep. no. 128, to the archbishop of Canterbury. Is it mere chance that the dedicationrite in the Gelasian Sacramentary (below, n. 230) is in dedicatione basilicae novae? 217 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1583–4 (octavo sub sole Novembris); calendar in Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Phillips 1869, ed. Borst, Kalenderreform, p. 293; Vita Alcuini c. 8, ed. Arndt, p. 189. 218 G.G. Willis, Further Essays in Early Roman Liturgy, Alcuin Club Collections, 50 (London, 1968), pp. 142–3, contrasting Spanish conciliar decrees with well-documented local practice. A particularly interesting Carolingian Frankish example is the entry for 853 in the Annales S. Columbae Senonensis in BAV Reg. lat. 755 (MGH SS I, p. 103), XI Kal. Augustas dedicatio basilicae sanctae Columbae et X Kal. ipsius mensis translatio corporum Columbae virginis et Lupi confessoris et episcopi; the first day is a Saturday, the second a Sunday. 219 Before the end of the ninth century, St. Quentin was commemorated on 31

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has come to light archaeologically, nor is there any textual evidence of later date for it; its supposed location and physical relation with the cathedral church are, therefore, entirely speculative. A recent meticulous and ingenious topographical analysis of the area around the high-medieval minster, however, proposes a location which at least has the merit of plausibility: namely, that it was at the southeast corner of a (hypothesised) precinct of the pre-1066 cathedral, to the north of the minster, on the site of the later chapter-house.220 The unique dedication has naturally invited speculation, much of it (in my view) far-fetched: it has been described as ‘residual Hellenism’(!), which is rather like saying that the use of the word garage implies a minimal knowledge of French; it has been claimed as an ‘imitation’ both of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and of the recently-consecrated Sancta Sophia in south-Italian Benevento, although no convincing context for such imitation has been put forward.221 Alma, on the other hand, has generally been treated as a simple synonym of sancta, which it is not. Early translators of both the Old and the New Testaments avoid it. The first Christian poets generally adopted it in the sense in which it had previously been an epithet of goddesses, i.e. ‘nourishing’, ‘bountiful’, ‘life-giving’, and extended its use to fides and, exceptionally, to the Church. In Aldhelm’s verse, alma occurs in a variety of contexts, although never with sofia; for Bede, alma is an epithet both of the Trinity and of a sedes for (probably) the bishops of Lindsey, almus an epithet of ‘the Forerunner’ i.e. John the Baptist.222 Almus, -a is among the commonest adjectives in October (the martyrological date) in a probably limited area of north-east France/ Flanders, and the Feast was subsequently introduced to England: see Corrêa, Durham Collectar, pp. 106–8. In some places it was later displaced to 30 October, so as to avoid a clash with the Vigil of All Saints. 220 See Norton, ‘Anglo-Saxon Cathedral at York’ (above, ch. 1, n. 78), esp. pp. 11–15 and fig. 2 (p. 6); for the possibility of a link with the scola puerorum and with the book-collection, see below. R.K. Morris, ‘Alcuin, York and the alma sophia’, in: The Anglo-Saxon Church: Papers . . . in Honour of Dr. H.M. Taylor, ed. L.A.S. Butler and R.K. Morris (CBA Research Report, 60; London, 1986), pp. 80–9, is an example of speculation without supporting evidence of any kind. 221 H. Belting, ‘Studien zum Beneventanischen Hof im 8. Jahrhundert’, DOP 16 (1962), 141–93, at 175–93, by contrast, can cite contemporary or near-contemporary evidence for the Benevento Sta. Sophia’s imitation of basilica Iustiniani and establishes its place in current south-Italian politics. 222 Examples of alma fides are Paulinus of Nola, carm. 14, 80, etc, and Ennodius, carm. 2, 20. 8; Ambrose’s hymn inc. Victor Nabor Felix pii, never widely circulated, has sancto replevit spiritu/ almae fides ecclesiae (Ambroise de Milan: Hymnes, ed. Fontaine et al., p. 455). The many examples in Aldhelm include doctrinis . . . almis in carm.

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Alcuin’s ‘York poem’, applied to faith, virginity and light among other subjects.223 It is markedly rarer in his other verse: it is, however, used of both persons and abstractions in his longest and ?earliest Bible-poem (carm. lxix), and rebuilt churches at both St.-Vaast and ?St.-Riquier are Haec domus alma Dei. To qualify sophia, Alcuin usually favours sacra; but he uses its synonym sapientia for the Old Testament book of that name, Sapientia dicitur alma.224 The reiterated statement that the church of Alma Sophia is recorded only in ‘the York poem’ is not strictly true; and the one other text in which it is named may have something to tell us about its establishment and intended function. The calendar in the manuscript Berlin Phillips 1869 had been through several stages of development, some but not all of which it shares with related calendars, before its final copying at Prüm.225 Its hagiological entries are for the most part in one of several standard forms: Natale sci. N., occasionally Passio, Depositio of non-martyrs, Dedicatio, an Ordinatio; the Depositio of several English bishops and kings and of one anchorite are also included, as are those of abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow and some others.226 Except for the last group, all these have their counterparts eccl. IV 12, ed. Ehwald, p. 31. Alma Deus Trinitas are the opening words of Bede’s ‘hymn’ on Queen Æthelthryth (HE IV 20: ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 396–400; included by Alcuin in his devotional Libellus manualis copied in Cologne Dombibl. 106 etc.), in which her virgin body is also alma; alma sedes is in a titulus (in a fragmentary ?Worcester manuscript) of which the most accessible complete text is in M. Lapidge, Bede the Poet ( Jarrow, 1994), repr. Lapidge, Anglo-Latin Literature 600–899, pp. 313–38, at p. 316; Bede’s hymn for Decollatione S. Iohannis Baptistae (ed. Fraipont, CCSL 122/iv, 431–2 (no. x)) begins Praecessor almus gratiae/ et veritatis angelus, and a later stanza has Exsultat almi spiritus/ Praeconis artus linquere. 223 In his edition of the ‘York poem’, Professor Godman translates almus variously, although most commonly as ‘sweet’ or ‘pure’. But ‘How pure was her faith’ for the half-line 760 Virginis alma fides, cf. virginis almae seventeen lines later, cannot be right. 224 Domus alma: carm. xcix/1, lxvi/2 (MGH Poet. I, pp. 308, 285); and the new cathedral at Cologne is Haec est alma domus donis solidata supernis, carm. cvii/2 (Poet. I, p. 334). Sacra sophia: carm. xxxiv (2), liv, cv/5 (sacrata), cviii/3 (Poet. I, pp. 250, 266, 333, 334; but sophia is celsa in carm. lix (Poet. 1, p. 273) and caelestis in carm. cv/1 (Poet. I, p. 332). Sapientia: carm. lxix line 139 Poet. I, p. 291). Theodulf, by contrast, uses alma very rarely—a reflection of his character?—and only once in his Biblepoem, carm. xli (MGH Poet. I, p. 535). 225 Above, ch. 1 at n. 234. 226 Most of these are straightforward. King Ecgfrith’s death on 20 May (685) is entered in at least two earlier calendars—Willibrord’s, but as an early addition, and the Munich fragments (ed. Bauerreiss, p. 178)—although not, I think, in any later one. Bishop Eadberht of Lindisfarne is entered at 7 May, and not at the correct 6 May (as in the Munich fragments); but 7 May is the historical dies depositionis of Bishop John of York, while 6 May is the feast of Iohannis [ante portam Latinam], so

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in the other calendars. The Prüm calendar, however, has among its entries for October three that are completely unparalleled elsewhere: under 14 Kal. Nov. Titulus Agiae Sophiae, under 7 Kal. Nov. Titulus sci. Stephani protomar.,227 under 3 Kal. Nov. (again) Titulus Agiae Sophiae. Under VI Id. Nov. the customary entry for the Four Crowned Martyrs228 is followed by Depos[itio] Aelbrecti archiep[iscop]i. 8 November is indeed the independently-recorded date of Ælberht’s death; it is also nine days after the second Titulus Agiae Sophiae entry: this cannot be anything other than a record of the consecration of the church of Alma Sophia at York in 780. But what of the other two October entries? The unfamiliar use of titulus here, in place of (I assume) the customary dedicatio, is perhaps best regarded as an extension of the not very frequent titulus for ‘dedication (-name), church with specified dedication’. The first Agiae Sophiae entry, at 19 October, could be a doublet, the result of mis-copying, although it is not easy to imagine how an error of this kind would have occurred. An alternative explanation, to which I incline even though I can find no lexical parallel, is that it records a depositing of relics in the church in question, perhaps almost a year after, rather than ten days before, the consecration.229 Traditional Roman practice did not require the there may have been confusion and mis-copying. Eosterwine at 7 March (?686) is the day of his death in Bede’s Historia abbatum (ed. Plummer, Bedae Opera, 1, 372); but for Hwætberht on 22 April (post 746/ante 764), the calendar appears to be the only source. A conspicuous omission is Ceolfrith. His commemoration seems to have begun only after the translation of his relics to Glastonbury: for the earliest calendarial evidence, see esp. D. Dumville, Liturgy and the Ecclesiastical History of Late Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 45–57; for the date and circumstances, see D.W. Rollason, ‘Relic-cults as an instrument of royal policy c. 900–c. 1050’, ASE 15 (1986), 91–104, at 95–6 (without reference to the calendars). For the anchorite Oediluuald, see above, n. 191. 227 Replacing the standard martyrological Natale sanctorum Crispini et Crispiniani in other versions. 228 Here simply with the collective nomenclature. The related calendar in Cologne 83 II has (fol. 75v) natale sanctorum Nicostrati Claudi Castori et Simproniani, and that in Milan, Ambros. M. 12 sup. has Natale sanctorum IIII Coronatorum. Claudini. Nicostrati. Simphoriani et Castoris. The assumption of Michelle Brown, in her discussion of the possibly Canterbury origin of Paris BNF lat. 10861 (vitae sanctorum) in ASE 15 (1986), 119–37, at 125, that the Quattuor Coronati ‘were not represented in English (calendars and martyrologies) prior to the production of ’ that book is therefore mistaken; and another of her three ‘missing’ saints, namely Vincent at 22 January, is also in Phillips 1869 and the other two calendars. 229 I have naturally wondered whether titulus might be the contemporary term for the reliquary labels, commonly referred to in modern literature as authentica (which does not seem to have been medieval usage); but none of the now considerable

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depositing of relics at consecrations, although this had latterly become common: the dedication rite in the ‘Old Gelasian’ sacramentary, i.e. Lib. I lxxxviii, although in large part of Gallican and not Roman origin, does not mention relics; and the acta of the southern-English council of 816—transmitted uniquely in the main English manuscript of Alcuin’s letters—having summarised the dedication rites sicut in libro ministeriale habetur, allows that the ceremony can be completed by the simple depositing of a consecrated Host from the subsequent mass, si alii [sic] reliquias intimare non potest.230 Continental rituals certainly existed pre-800 for the bringing in of relics, apparently independently of the ceremony of consecration. The Phillips calendar’s Titulus sancti Stephani entry could, on this hypothesis, refer to a ceremony of either of the two kinds: the Protomartyr’s established feastdays are December 26th and his inventio on August 3rd (or 4th), the latter not perhaps observed in England until the tenth century.231 In fact, a cella sancti Stephani which appears to be another part of the cathedral complex is referred to by Alcuin in a letter to the York presbyter (and monk?) Calvinus but has left no other trace.232 Alcuin reveals himself later as an avid acquirer of relics. If those of Sophia were indeed brought to the York church at this time a specific source for them may even be identifiable. An extra-mural cult of a mythical (sancta) Sophia had established itself in Rome well before Alcuin’s day. Her relics, together with those of her supposed daughters, were among the many translated within the city walls by number of known pre-800 and early post-800 labels (many of the pre-800 ones magnificently published in Chartae Latinae Antiquiores vols. 18 and 19 (1985, 1987) precedes the name of the saint or relic with tit. What might seem to be a ninthcentury example of tituli for ‘relics’ is in the Vita Lupi episcopi Senonici, where it is recorded that the bishop circuiret: erat enim ei erga sanctorum TITULOS magna dilectio, praecipue sanctae Columbae (Vita c. 6: ed. Krusch, MGH SSRM IV, p. 180). If, however, the words after dilectio in some manuscripts, et in reliquiis exornandis praeclare intencio, were part of the authentic text (as Krusch subsequently thought: MGH SSRM VII, pp. 828–9), this seems excluded, and tituli here must have the meaning cited at the beginning of the paragraph. 230 Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 580; Sacr. Gelas. I, lxxxviii, ed. Wilson, pp. 133–6, ed. Mohlberg nos 689 to 702. Mohlberg nos 703 to 708 and 709 to 714 (Wilson, pp. 137–40) are two alternative mass-sets In dedicacione basilicae novae. 231 Compare the Phillips 1869 calendar (but the Inventio sci. Stephani protomartyris is in the Ambrosiana version at 3 August: ed. Bischoff, p. 253) and those in Oxford, Bodleian Libr., Digby 63 and Salisbury Cath. 150, ed. Wormald, English Calendars, pp. 9, 23, with ‘the Metrical Calendar of Hampson’, re-edited by P. McGurk in AnBoll 104 (1986), 79–125, at 103 (line 215) and the other pre-1100 calendars, ed. Wormald, English Calendars. 232 Ep. no. 209, cf. ep. no. 233.

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Pope Paul I (757–67), and in their case deposited in 761/2 in a public church that was incorporated in his recently-founded monastery of SS Stephanus et Silvester (San Silvestro in Capite): there, remarkably, they were listed with their feast-days in inscriptions that still survive.233 That the new Roman church is where York, like Chrodegang’s Gorze and other places, had subsequently acquired its relics of saints recently brought there from their previous extra-mural cult-places is made more likely by the distinctive form of the English calendar reference to Sophia, as (titulus) AGIAE Sophiae (which might otherwise strengthen the case for an ‘imitation’ of Constantinople): for the Liber pontificalis’s account of the foundation and early history of the monastery and its several buildings records that Paul established at it a congregation ‘for the chanting of the offices in the Greek manner’ ‘so that praises to our God almighty and all the saints resting there should be carried out diligently and unceasingly’.234 Relics of the Protomartyr, on the other hand, are unlikely to have come from the Roman monastery: the Stephen honoured there was the third-century Pope of that name who is correctly entered at 2 August in the Phiilips 1869 calendar and its closest relatives.235 The new evidence and possible wider context for the York church’s unusual dedication invites two further speculations, one that has a 233

M. van Esbroeck, ‘Le saint comme symbole’, The Byzantine Saint. University of Birmingham, 14th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, ed. S. Hackel (London, 1981), pp. 128–40, here pp. 134–6, has produced evidence favouring—against Halkin— a Constantinopolitan origin for the cult. The inscriptions are reproduced in A. Silvagni, Monumenta Epigraphica Christiana saec. XIII antiq., 1 (Vatican City, 1943), pl. xxxvii, 1–2. 234 Lib. pont. ed. Duchesne, 1, 465; J.-M. Sansterre, Les Moines Grecs et Orientaux aux époques byzantine et carolingienne, 2 vols. (Acad. Roy. de Belgique, Cl. des Lettres; Brussels, 1983), I, pp. 36, 63, 127 and passim II, pp. 89–91, 115, 145–6, 188, etc., with ample references to previous literature; J. Guyon, Le Cimitière aux Deux Lauriers (Roma Sotteranea Cristiana 7; Rome, 1987), pp. 474–6. Alcuin’s one reference to supposed Greek observances that he heard about when visiting Rome makes it almost certain that he had had no personal exchanges with Greci: ep. no. 143 (pp. 225–6). 235 But not included in the York ‘Metrical Martyrology’. It cannot be absolutely excluded, of course, that protomar. in the entry for 7 Kal. Nov. is a later copyist’s ‘gloss’. But, for what it is worth in this context, Alcuin composed over the years at least six extant tituli commemorating Stephanus protomartyr and his altar in partly shared language—carm. cxiv/6 (p. 345) may not be his—and none for the martyrPope. (Protomartyr will go into a hexameter, both in the nominative and in the genitive, provided the first o is shortened—the common practice.) Since Alcuin regularly re-fashions or ‘re-cycles’ metrical formulae which in part he took over from earlier epigraphy, the series might in fact have begun in York, but I can find no internal indications that this is so.

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solid textual base but is unlikely ever to be independently confirmed, the other that may yet be proved or disproved by archaeological discoveries. The cooperation between Alcuin and Eanbald in the construction of the church ‘at the command of their teacher’, the dedication of which to the alma Sophia had powerful associations for Alcuin in particular, is a strong argument for supposing that it was associated with the schola puerorum: with the corollary (I suggest) that it was close to wherever the cathedral’s schooling was conducted, and that the precious collection of books was housed, in however modest a building, ‘under one roof ’.236 Those who, for many centuries, celebrated the votive mass De sapientia prayed in its concluding super populum that: Deus qui misisti filium tutum et ostendisti creaturae creatorem, respice propitius super nos famulos tuos, et praepara AGIAE SOPHIAE dignam in cordibus nostris habitationem.237

Like the rest of the mass-set, this prayer has neither model nor imitation, and the use of the phrase agia sophia is absolutely without parallel in ‘Gregorian’ sacramentaries. Its composition by Alcuin can hardly not be connected with the building and consecration of the York church; but the circumstances in which it was first used can only be guessed.

The Cathedral Community The forms and language of York cathedral’s corporate worship are patchily illuminated, and Alcuin’s experiences there as pupil, amanuensis and teacher are at least dimly discernible; and the occasional references to cellae, whether or not we include here Alcuin’s later 236 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, line 1535, egregias condens uno sub culmine gazas; carm. cv (MGH Poet. I, p. 332), with the title in Vienna Nat. bibl. 808 Ubi libri custodiantur: Parvula tecta tenent caelestis dona sophiae/ Quae tu lector ovans pectore disce pio./ Omnibus est gazis melior sapientia [patris?]/ Quam modo qui sequitur lucis habebit iter; cf. ‘York poem’ lines 1455–6, on Ælberht, iam peragravit ovans, sophiae deductus amore/ si quid forte novi librorum seu studiorum. The two witnesses to carm. cv both have sapientia donis, which cannot be right: for sapientia patris, cf. ‘York poem’ line 1; for sapientia mundi (Dümmler’s suggestion), cf. carm. lxii (Poet. I, p. 275), the Praecepta vivendi, line 10, Omnibus est mundi melior sapientia gazis. 237 Sacr. Grég., ed. Deshusses, 2, no. 1818, using thirteen manuscript-witnesses. One witness, Cambrai 162+163 has as the title of the mass-set not the usual Missa de [sancta] sapientia but De sancta sophia!

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‘poem of exile,’ O mea cella, hint at the community’s residential arrangements.238 The community itself, the human setting of Alcuin’s middle decades, remains however obstinately in the shadows, almost the umbra fantasmatum of other texts. We do not have even a rough guide to its size, including or excluding the infantes—over thirty? in the twenties? even low teens?239 No group of names in the ‘Lindisfarne’ Liber Vitae can be confidently identified with York clerics. Uilhaed (Willehad), however, whether or not he was a fairly-remote kinsman of Alcuin, should probably be reckoned one of them before ca. 770: he was already a priest when a Northumbrian synod licensed his departure for the Continental mission-field.240 The Wulfhere whose grave-marker or stele was found in the Minster area is likely to have been a cathedral cleric of the next generation.241 Ælberht in 767 and Alcuin’s close contemporary Eanbald (I) in 778 (780) were, of course, ‘internal promotions’ to the bishopric.

238

For O mea cella and its interpretation, see below. Among Continental cathedral-churches which are fairly comparable with York, that at Lucca had, on the evidence of its sequence of original charters, an adult community of twelve to fifteen in the years either side of 800 (see H. Schwarzmaier, Lucca und das Reich bis zum Ende des 11. Jahrhunderts, Bibl. des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rome 41 (Tübingen, 1972), p. 271 n. 25), while Notre-Dame at Paris had thirty-nine canons ca. 850 (O.G. Oexle, Forschungen zu monastischen u. geistlichen Gemeinschaften im Westfränkischen Bereich, Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften 31 [Munich, 1978], pp. 91–3). For the involvement of six to eight scribes in the Cassiodorus Expositio psalmorum manuscripts, see above. 240 The (?Echternach) Vita Willehadi, MGH SS II, pp. 378–84 (Pertz), AA SS Nov. III, 843 treats Willehad’s early life very summarily, but is the only evidence for the conventus episcoporum and others, temp. King Alchred: the dating ‘ca. 770’ is purely conventional. For the date and place of origin of the Vita, see G. Niemeyer in DA 12 (1956), 17–35. That Willehad was related to Alcuin via Beornred of Echternach and Sens seems to depend entirely on a statement in Thiotfrid’s, early-twelfth century, Vita Willibrordi: see Niemeyer, cit., 29–30; but compare Alcuin’s ep. no. 6 and (for the name-form) Gerchow, Gedenküberlieferung, p. 320 (n. 967). 241 Lang, Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, 3, 64–6 (York Minster no. 22), as lateeighth/early-ninth century. Higgitt’s discussion of its incomplete inscription is unnecessarily convoluted and obscures the interest of the language used. Cespes in early-medieval epitaphs had long ceased to have any associations with its earlier sense of ‘sod, turf ’, and membra (but not munera) is commonplace: see e.g., for the former, the initial hexameter of an eighth-century Frankish bishop’s epitaph, Praesulis hic tegitur famosi cespite corpus (ed. Strecker, MGH Poet. VI/1 (1955), p. 155); for the latter, the opening line of the epitaph of Count Gerold killed in 799, Mole sub hac magni servantur membra Geroldi (ed. Dümmler, MGH Poet. I, p. 114) or the fourth line of Walahfrid Strabo’s epitaph for Bishop Bernald of Strasbourg (ed. Dümmler, MGH Poet. II, p. 420). Dependence on a shared tradition rather than influence in one or other direction may best explain the two regions’ similar epigraphic language. 239

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A single passage in the Vita Alcuini, which can be accepted as a personal reminiscence of Sigwulf ’s, briefly lightens the scene. It records that, when Sigwulf joined the York community as a boy, an uncle Autbert was already a priest there: another glimpse of the web of kinship between its clerici, comparable to that of better-documented cathedral communities on the Continent. The two of them were sent first to Rome and then to Metz to learn the correct forms of chant— apparently in the 760s but not certainly early enough for Sigwulf to have met Chrodegang (and after rather than before Alcuin’s first Roman journey?). There are hints but no more (as we have seen) of the kind of novelties he may have introduced when, on his uncle’s death, he returned to York and became its custos: this term is always an ambiguous one in the texts, but it seems likely that Sigwulf was the person responsible for liturgical books and vestments, as well as for the care of relics.242 For the rest, we are largely dependent on inference from the later evidence for Alcuin’s English discipuli, men like the younger Eanbald, or (less certainly) Dodo-Corydon to whom Alcuin was to write more in sorrow than in anger in the 790s.243

ADDITIONAL NOTE Alchfrid’s Letter to Higlac: Addenda and Corrigenda This letter, as previously noted, was first edited by Levison, England and the Continent, pp. 295–302, where also the recipient was identified with the person of the same name and dignity whom Æthelwulf recorded as his teacher in his (Alcuin-influenced) poem De abbatibus, ed. A. Campbell (Oxford, 1967), lines 744 and 756, and life described in ch. xvi (lines 507–26)—somewhere in late-eighth-century (?southern) Northumbria, therefore; the writer, Alchfrid anachorita, would also have been the author of prayers in the ‘Book of Cerne’. Chase, commenting on his own ‘semi-diplomatic’ edition of the BL Cotton Vespasian A. xiv text in Two Letter-Books, unnecessarily denied ‘manuscript authority’ for the second identification (cf. above. Pt. I) and refers to the ‘unidentified monk Alcheri’; he also ignored Levison’s textual and philological commentary which, even though it can be amplified and corrected, would have saved him from several misconceptions. Levison had correctly observed that the opening sentence is taken from the opening of Rufinus’s Historia monachorum (E. Schulz-Flügel, Tyrannius Rufinus. Historia Monachourm sive de Vita Sanctorum Patrum, Patr. Texte u. Stud. 242 243

Vita c. 8, ed. Arndt, p. 189; above, ch. 1. For Corydon, see below, ch. 3, and above, Pt. I.

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34 (Berlin, 1990), p. 24. But he (and Chase) failed to notice that the next section, Videte . . . ordinem humanae vitae—possidebis, was taken from Columbanus’s instructio viii (ed. Walker, Columbani Opera, p. 98)—which confirms a terra in ignem. More important, the two editors did not recognise that nearly half the letter, from Quid ergo faciemus to vana sectatur, is simply copying the same author’s instructio iii, ed. G.S.M. Walker, pp. 76–8, with a very few verbal changes and the insertion of a quotation from Ps 72.19,20, ‘Romanum’ version (Berlin, Staatsbibl., Hamilton 553, etc., text)—first reported by Kathleen Hughes (‘Some aspects of Irish influence on early English private prayer’, Studia Celtica 5 (1970), 48–61, at 59). The earlier tag quid sapiens dixit Cui pauca non sufficiunt, plura non proficiunt, the last word correctly proderunt, is Sulpicius Severus, Dial. i. 18.1, and a favourite of Columbanus’s, cf. Walker, pp. 56 (ep. vi), 62 (sermo i) etc. The Alchfrith letter is therefore valuable evidence for the (problematic) early transmission of Columbanus’s Instructiones (sermones). The Paul quotation which immediately precedes the second Columbanus passage (a partially OL. version of Rm 7.24,25) is evidently taken from the probably Irish oratio sancti Gregorii papae which in two early English prayerbooks, the older of the two not necessarily earlier than the Alchfrid letter, and a Tours book of c. 800/5, Troyes Bib. munic. 1742, reads at this point infelix ego [Cerne, Nunn. omm.] homo quis me liberavit de corpore mortis huius peccati nisi gratia Domini etc.: see Cerne, ed. Kuypers no. 15 (p. 105) and Nunnaminster fols 16v–18v, ed. Birch, pp. 59–60, and for the Tours text Wilmart, Precum libelli, pp. 11–13; for its Irish background if not origin, see especially Kottje, Einfluss des Alten Testamentes, pp. 19–20 (in spite of the erroneous reference to BL Harl. 7653). Vesp.’s text before Wulfstan’s emendations was the obviously corrupt Infelix ego homo quis me peccavit de corpore mortis huius nisi etc., which points to an earlier . . . me peccati liberavit . . ., or to a text of the letter with an interlinear correction which became further confused in transmission. Tib. read here, if Gale is to be trusted, quis me liberabit de corpore mei huius nisi [sic].) Wulfstan, who knew his Paul but not apparently the prayer (unlike his successor at Worcester, the second Wulfstan, who included it in his Portiforium, ed. A. Hughes, 2, pp. 15–17) replaced peccavit with liberabit and introduced rei before nisi. The short preceding quotation from Dn 13.22 is printed by both editors as Angustiae mihi sunt undique: but in Vesp. the word sunt is suprascript in the hand of the eleventh-century Wulfstan, and in Tib. it is suprascript in a sixteenth-century hand ( Joscelyn or an amanuensis?)! The reading in the Wearmouth-Jarrow Codex Amiatinus at this point is in fact angustiae + mihi undique, mihi sunt undique being that adopted in the Tours Bibles and subsequently. For the final section, describing how the struggle with the Devil is to be conducted, Levison claimed that ‘the author follows the model of Caesarius of Arles sermo no. 207’. This would be very interesting, if true; but in fact there is very little in common between the two texts. Caesarius lists eight ‘vices’ (and their opponent ‘virtues’) but they are not the standard eight of Cassian nor the later eight of Alcuin in his De virtutibus et vitiis, since they

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begin with infidelitas and end with malitia. Alchfrid lists sixteen or seventeen (!), six of them in Caesarius’s list (including infidelitas as the last) and seven of them in Alcuin’s (omitting accedia). Some of Alchfrid’s additional ‘vices’ figure in Gregory the Great’s Moralia and Isidore’s Sententiae. I do not doubt that Alchfrid had a so-far unidentified source for this section of his letter also, although whether that extended to the concluding section (Levison, p. 300) must remain uncertain—although I think it unlikely. It might even be the case that that source accompanied Alchfrid’s text of the Columbanus Instructiones. A hint of this is given by the Fleury miscellany ( florilegium) in BAV Reg. lat. 140, fols 78–83 (this part ?Loire valley, s. ix1/4), with the rubric Incipit ordo lectionum officii sancti Columbani abbatis: the dubiously Columbanian De homine misero (ed. Walker, pp. 208–10) is followed by instructio iii, a tract De viii vitiis (ed. Walker, pp. 210–12), and finally by instructio xi. The two (later) manuscripts of all thirteen instructiones are accompanied by the De viii vitiis, which gives some credence to Columbanus’s supposed authorship, although it is almost certainly later than him. In the copying and re-copying of miscellanies of this kind, it was not uncommon for a different text on a related theme to replace that in the immediate exemplar. Hence the possibility—it is no more—that Alchfrid’s untraced source was an item in a ‘Columbanian’ miscellany. To a greater or lesser degree, therefore, Alchrid’s letter is a ‘scissors-andpaste’ work. It does, however, throw a little new light on the texts available in (southern) Northumbria in the late-eighth century, and in particular of those that had played a part in the formation of an anchorite, whether he was an ‘urban solitary’ or a rural one.

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CHAPTER THREE

BETWEEN TWO COURTS By the late 770s, as he approached his fifth decade, Alcuin was apparently a well-regarded and influential figure in his cathedral church and, less certainly, a person with an acknowledged standing in the Northumbrian kingdom. During 778–80 both kingdom and church experienced changes of leader.1 Those same years were critical ones for the ‘kingdom of the Franks’ and for the monarch who had dominated it since 771.2 Whatever their immediate local consequences, the separate events in the two countries were indirectly to bring about the York deacon’s translation to a wider stage and historical visibility. The Vita Alcuini, in its most quoted and most familiar passage, declares that: ‘Commanded by Eanbald, Helbert (Ælbert)’s successor, to obtain the pallium for him from the Pope, he went to Rome: and when he was on the way back after getting the pallium, he met King Charles at Parma. With great exhortations and prayers, the king expressed his desire that when Alcuin had completed his mission he should return to Francia: for he had become acquainted with him earlier, when his master had sent Alcuin to him. Wishing to serve to the benefit of others, Alcuin did what was asked of him, with the approval of his own king and archbishop, on the condition that he would come back to them in due course; and so through 1 Ductor might be used in either context, to judge from the earliest testimonies to MGH Capit. 1, no. 22 prol., although later manuscripts generally have doctores here. Edelstein, Eruditio und Sapientia, pp. 148–50 and notes, implies that Alcuin himself used ductor et doctor. His one ‘supporting’ quotation is Et dux et doctor in the verses which conclude the prefatory letter of the De fide sanctae Trinitatis, ep. no. 257 (p. 415): but doctores populi, ductores et gregis almi is already used of bishops in the verses at the end of ep. no. 17 (in the English and K collections: T manuscripts have doctores . . . doctores), and bishops are similarly ductores gregis Dei in the English-formulary letter, ep. no. 288. Perhaps earliest of all is doctores et ductores applied to the leaders of the community at St. Martin’s, Tours—the latter ‘corrected’ in a late manuscript to rectores —in Alcuin’s ep. no. 131 (p. 194). 2 F.-L. Ganshof, ‘Une crise dans le règne de Charlemagne. Les années 778 et 779’, Mélanges d’histoire et de littérature offerts à M. Charles Gilliard (Lausanne, 1944), pp. 133–45; R. Schieffer, Die Karolinger (Stuttgart etc., 1992), pp. 77–80.

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Christ’s guidance, he came to King Charles, who embraced him as if he were his father’.3 Ever since the linking of the biographer’s statement with a diploma that establishes Charles’s presence at Parma on 15 March 781, on his way to Rome for the Easter baptism of his sons,4 this has been accepted as a fixed point in Alcuin’s biography and the moment at which an essentially English career gave way to one in Francia. Alcuin, unlike Paul the Deacon in 782, left no personal record of the year and circumstances of his move to the Carolingian Court: and one of his few references to it in later writings implies that he ‘came to Francia, sapientissimo rege Carolo iubente’ only after the Regensburg council in 792, which is demonstrably false.5 Almost certainly, however, he alludes to his Roman mission in a letter addressed to King Offa of Mercia more than ten years later: answering the king’s query about the proper consecrator of a new archbishop with the words ‘the other archbishop in his kingdom’, Alcuin goes on to say that when subsequently the pallium arrives from the Pope, it is bestowed on the metropolitan in a ceremony involving his suffragans, ‘as very knowledgeable men in Rome informed me’.6 Finally, the appearance of an otherwise undocumented Adeltruda Saxa Dei ancilla filia Adelvualdi qui fuit rex Saxonorum ultramarino as a purchaser of a church at Lucca (Italy) in August 782 has been plausibly linked with Alcuin’s recently-concluded Roman journey: the more justifiably in the light of other evidence for his links with and support for Æthelwald (Moll)’s line.7 Yet the Vita’s account of the encounter and its inferred dating raise problems that have been largely ignored; and the universally-accepted account of its aftermath may be substantially, if not wholly, mistaken. 3

Vita Alcuini c. 9: ed. Arndt, MGH SS XV, p. 190. DK I no. 132, for Comacchio; cf. BM 2 235–235b. 5 Paul: Neff, Gedichte Paulus, pp. 43–5 (no. xi), also Godman, Poetry, p. 82, accompanied by an admirable translation; Bullough, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 99, 136. Alcuin: Adversus Elipandum I, 16, PL 101, col. 251D. 6 Ep. ad Offannum, ed. Lehmann, p. 34, ed. Levison, p. 246 (above, Pt. I): sicut mihi viri Romanorum peritissimi tradiderunt. 7 Chartae Latinae Antiquiores, ed. A. Bruckner and R. Marichal, pt. xxxvii, ed. P. Supino Marini (Zurich, 1990), nos 1082, 1083a (improving on the editions of D. Bertini and D. Barsocchini (1837), V/2, pp. 107–8, 109; H. Schwarzmaier, Lucca und das Reich, p. 32 (with inappropriate references). Compare Alcuin’s open backing for his son Æthelred, deposed in 778/9 but later restored, and his correspondence with Æthelwald’s widow, Æthelred’s (and Adaltruda’s?) mother (below, ch. 4). Indeed, I have at times wondered whether Adaltruda Saxa was not in fact the 4

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To Rome for the Pallium The inference from the Vita and the diploma that Alcuin was in north Italy on his way back to York with Eanbald’s pallium in the spring of 781 is contradicted by the evidence of one and perhaps both of the two versions of the ‘Northumbrian Annals’ incorporated in later chronicles. The ‘York’ text as ‘edited’ by Byrhtferth records under the year 780, as its second item, that ‘In the same year Archbishop Alberht passed from the light of the world to the perpetual light of Eternity, Eanbald having been ordained to the [York] see while he was still alive. Also in the same year Bishop Cynewulf [of Lindisfarne] resigned secular cares and committed the government of his church to Higbald . . . Also in the same year Eanbald received the pallium sent to him by the apostolic see; and having received it, he was solemnly confirmed in his bishopric’. The consecration of Higbald and the death of the bishop of Hexham and the consecration of his successor on 2 October are recorded in the following annal, with the year-date 781. The ‘D’ text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the ‘E’ text derived from it, under the year 779, likewise have as their second and concluding items the statements that ‘Archbishop Æthelberht, in whose place Eanbald had previously been consecrated, died in Ceastre [York? or Chester-le-Street?]; and Bishop Cynewulf of Lindisfarne resigned’. A new entry for the year 780 records successively the change of incumbent at Hexham, with consecration likewise on 2 October, the consecration of Higbald of Lindisfarne (un-dated) and, finally, that ‘King Ælfwold sent to Rome for the pallium and made Eanbald an archbishop’. There is no annal for 781. Since October 2nd was not a Sunday in either 780 (a leapyear) or 781, nor a major feast-day, there is no simple internal argument for preferring one chronology over the other.8 Alcuin’s near-contemporary account of Ælberht’s retirement and death and his replacement by Eanbald, which provides details not

widow rather than a daughter, especially since the queen’s marriage to Æthelwald is recorded as taking place only in 762; but a confusion of this order, even in another land, is perhaps unlikely. The seller of the church was a negotians Fridulo, who had almost certainly built it: its dedication to S. Dalmatius makes it likely that he was an incomer from north-west Italy (cf. Schwarzmaier, cit.). 8 HR ed. Arnold, 2, 47; Plummer, Two Saxon Chronicles Parallel, 1, 53 (text of ‘E’), idem, 2, 55–6 (notes, including the claim that man in Ælfwold cining sende man must be understood as an accusative).

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found in any of the other sources but is silent on his own travels, comes in three separate passages of his ‘York poem’, in a very awkward sequence: evidence, perhaps, of tentative composition and hasty completion. It is only in the second passage, some forty lines after the first reference to Ælberht’s death and previous ‘withdrawal into solitude’,9 that Alcuin gives a chronological indication for that event— two years and four months previously;10 and only in the last of the three does he specify the date of the bishop’s death as November 8th in the fourteenth year of his bishopric, which agrees with the ‘Northumbrian (York) Annals’’ year-dating to 780. The day is repeated in the Vita—from a calendar obit? or from oral tradition?—and independently confirmed by the York ‘layer’ of the calendar in Berlin Phillips 1869, latterly but mistakenly linked with Lorsch and the Frankish Court.11 Nine days previously, on 30 October, the church of Alma Sophia had been consecrated.12 It has been generally, and reasonably, assumed that Alcuin was present at the consecration of the church which he had helped to build: he does not, however, say this nor indicate it in some oblique way. Moreover, to have been at York at the end of October and then to have reached Parma on his return journey by mid-March 781, having previously received the archbishop’s pallium from the Pope—involving a mid-November North Sea or cross-Channel sailing, a winter crossing of the Alps and two winter crossings of the Apennines—although perhaps not 9 Sibimet secreta petivit/saepta, ll. 1524–25; saepta sacer praesul secreta petivit, l. 1566. Alcuin records similarly of Bp. Wilfrid II that in 732, after fourteen years as bishop, specialia saepta petivit (line 1239). His predecessor John of Beverley had also resigned and withdrawn to his monastery there (‘York poem’ line 1212, based on HE V. 6 ex, cf. ed. Godman, p. 94 note) but it was in his time as bishop that he parvula saepta . . . repetit, line 1093 (which in Bede’s account, HE V. 2, is mansio quaedam secretior, nemore raro et vallo circumdata). Aeneid viii. 463 has secreta petebat, Columella vi. 23,3—which Alcuin can hardly have known!—saepta repetit pecus. In early-medieval Saints’ Lives, and no doubt elsewhere, both the singular saeptum and the plural are commonly used of the ‘enclosure of a monastery’: but that usage seems not to occur in any of the Vitae written or re-written by Alcuin, so the word’s associations for him remain uncertain. 10 The calculated date of July 778 is, if correct, too early to be coincident with King Æthelred’s deposition. 11 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1583–4; other references above, ch. 2; the ‘fourteenth year’ had begun on April 24, 780. This is the second of only two month/day dates in the poem, the other being King Oswald’s death on 5 August (line 504), with which Alcuin was doubtless familiar from liturgical commemoration—cf. the Phillips 1869 calendar s.d., although it is absent from the ‘Metrical Martyrology’—and would also have found in Bede, HE III 9. See now, for the Phillips calendar, Bullough, ‘Alcuin’s York, Bede’s calendar’ as above. 12 ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 1518–20.

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impossible, certainly stretches the bounds of credibility: Abbot Ceolfrith of Wearmouth-Jarrow, travelling at the most favourable season of the year in 716 but old and sick, had not got beyond east-central France after sixteen weeks; in 869 the presumably urgent news of Lothar II’s death at Piacenza on 8 August was brought to Senlis, non incerto nuntio, on 23 August; while the record of Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury’s journey from Rome with the pallium in 990 lists eighty stages to the English Channel, thirty-eight of them to the river Po at Piacenza.13 If the Vita-author’s report is authentic, Alcuin’s departure earlier in 780 is clearly demanded. The interpretation of the three texts is complicated by the evidence of the letter-poem inc. Cartula, perge cito and the uncertainty of its dating, Do the itinerary described there and the persons named reflect the mysterious earlier visit to the Frankish royal Court? or are they an account of the first Continental stages of Alcuin’s journey to Rome for the pallium, with a departure from York early enough in 780 for him to have reached Worms before the king and his Court left there for Saxony? Most commentators have opted for the former, although there have been dissenters.14 The alternative view is not incompatible with the report of the encounter in 781; but Alcuin’s ‘if by chance you get to the royal court’ (somewhere in the middle-Rhine region), and indeed the poem as a whole, read very oddly if the Parma meeting was already in the past. Neither 13 Hist. Abbatum auct. anon., cc. 31, 32, ed. Plummer, Bedae Opera Historica, 1, 400; Annales Sancti Bertiniani ed. F. Grat et al. (Paris, 1964), p. 156, with the note in Janet Nelson’s translation (Manchester, 1991), p. 157; Memorials of St. Dunstan, ed. Stubbs, pp. 392–5 (from BL Cotton Tiberius B. v, of which there is a complete facsimile: EEMF, 1983). Ceolfrith’s journey began badly: having left his monastery on June 4, the ship that he boarded in the river Humber on July 4 was driven ashore three times before reaching Francia on August 12! and he then spent six weeks on the road to Langres (eighteen stages of Sigeric’s journey). Sigeric’s submansiones are generally regarded as marking the end of a complete day’s journey (with no allowance for ‘rest-days’); and this is certainly the most likely interpretation, although some of the Italian stages seem very short. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, spring and summer journeys to the Papal Court from London or Canterbury, when an answer was required but in circumstances of no great urgency, normally took seven or eight weeks, winter journeys several weeks longer: R.L. Poole, Studies in Chronology and History (Oxford, 1934), pp. 263–4. 14 Above, ch. 2. A Continental journey beginnning at Utrecht almost certainly indicates a previous ‘direct’ North Sea sailing from the Humber. In his Vita Willibrordi c. 5 (ed. Levison: MGH SSRM VII, p. 120), Alcuin records that the Saint navem conscendit to leave Northumbria for foreign parts, sailing donec prospero cursu ostia Hreni fluminis vela deposuit (proceeding thence to Utrecht), which is unlikely to be an historical reminiscence.

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dating of the journey, nor the dispatch of a reminiscent poem after Alcuin’s return to Northumbria, is reconcilable with the Latin annals’ ‘record’ of the bringing of the pallium already in 780. The most economical resolution of the contradictions is surely to post-date the relevant and related passages in both sets of Annals to the year 781, whether or not they have been subject to subsequent re-writing, but also to conclude that Alcuin had set out for Rome some time before Ælberht’s death; and that therefore both this and the consecration of the Holy Wisdom church occurred during his absence. Alcuin’s reported unconsolable distress15 would belong accordingly to the time of his return in ?late spring/early summer 781. In the end, however, the exact sequence of the reported events at York and in Alcuin’s life, not merely their absolute chronology, are undeterminable on the basis of the existing evidence.

The Move to Francia When and in what circumstances did Alcuin respond to the invitation that Charles is reported to have made to him? The Vita’s story is simply that Alcuin completed his mission, received a qualified permission to leave Northumbria and duly returned to the Frankish king’s Court. It adds, however—reporting in oratio recta an anecdotal exchange between the two men—that Alcuin subsequently urged on Charles the need for him to have the formal permission of both the Northumbrian king and the (arch)bishop if he were to continue to absent himself from the church in which he had been tonsured and ordained. For over a century it has been accepted without discussion16 that Alcuin left his native land after only a brief delay; and that other scholars, beginning with the Italian Paul the Deacon in 782, ‘joined’ him in Francia, where he was to remain with only two interruptions for fourteen years. Moreover, the Court’s subsequent history, the course of early Carolingian learning and the development of the liturgy have all been posited on those assumptions. Departure from Northumbria for a foreign court in 781/2 may seem 15

Above, ch. 1. The doubts cautiously expressed by me in 1985 (Bullough, ‘Aula Renovata’, repr. in Carolingian Renewal, at pp. 136–7) do not seem to have been taken up by any other scholar subsequently. 16

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to be the more likely because of Alcuin’s apparent identification with or active support for the deposed King Æthelred and his line; although such behaviour could well have been interpreted as evidence of infidelitas, as the Vita writer seems to have been aware, and have made Alcuin acutely sensitive later to expressed suspicions or accusations of that offence.17 In fact, the weight of the evidence, even if it falls short of absolute proof, is that Alcuin did not go to Francia until after the Papal legatine visitation in 786, which on the traditional view was the occasion of his first return visit to his patria.18 The starting-point must be the wording of the report to the Pope by George, bishop of Ostia and Amiens, who had crossed the Channel accompanied by the Bishop Theophylact of Todi—the man who (as he says) had brought from Rome the instructions for their legatine visit—and by the Frankish Priest and Abbot (of St.-Maximin, Trier?) Wigbod.19 What had prompted the ending of a century’s Papal indifference to the church in ‘Britain’ is nowhere indicated. However, Alcuin and other Northumbrian envoys had been in Rome and met Pope Hadrian a few years previously. More recently, on one dating of a letter from Hadrian to King Charles, detractors or opponents of the kings of English Mercia and of Francia were reported to be taking false and mischievous accusations against Offa to the Papal Court, which had led to the dispatch of messengers from both monarchs energetically denying their stories, to the Pope’s full satisfaction. (Hadrian had long and painful experience of false accusations against him which might or did reach the Frankish king.)20 There 17

Epp. nos 62, 82 (both, however, to Mercian court-figures), discussed below. In spite, it should be said, of the Vita’s reference, loc. cit., to the three-year absence ending in 793 as the occasion of a ‘second return’ to the Frankish Court (after the ?781 encounter). 19 MGH Epp. IV, pp. 20–9, from the only manuscript, Wolfenbüttel Herzog August Bibl. cod. Helmst. 454, which is apparently of Hildesheim (sec. xi in) origin. The reported sequence of events is correctly represented (almost for the first time!) by P. Wormald, ‘In search of King Offa’s “Law-code”’, People and Places in Northern Europe 500–1600, ed. I.N. Wood and N. Lund (Woodbridge, 1991), pp. 25–45, at pp. 29, 31–2; also, with more detail, Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, pp. 153–8. Kirby, Earliest English Kings, p. 170 has a brief and reliable summary. For Wigbod, see M.M. Gorman, ‘The encyclopedic commentary on Genesis prepared for Charlemagne by Wigbod’, Recherches Augustiniennes 17 (1982), 173–201; idem, ‘Wigbod and Biblical Studies under Charlemagne’, RevBén 107 (1997), 40–76. 20 MGH Epp. III, Cod. Car. no. 92 (pp. 629–30), with the lengthy head-note in the unique manuscript, ibid. p. 629 app. A dating to 784 or 785 is possible, but it could well be later. The substance of the letter is strangely misrepresented by 18

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is, moreover, a passage in one of only two Papal letters firmly datable to 786 which may be relevant. A more cheerful Hadrian had been informed by a royal legate of Frankish successes in the struggle with the Saxons, and of the king’s intention that month-long praises should be sung and litanies performed: the Pope recommended for the latter three days in late June, so that the king would have time to pass on the recommendation to all his territories and to ‘overseas regions where there are Christian peoples’. The subsequent dispatch of a Roman legate with additional instructions for those ‘regions overseas’ was an understandable step by a Pope who had already supported intervention in Spain in the name of orthodoxy.21 The two bishops went first to Canterbury, which had recently come under the political control of the Mercian king, and gave its Archbishop Jaenberht the advice that was necessary. From there they proceeded to the Mercian Court, where both Offa and King Cynewulf of Wessex were present.22 (Cynewulf was killed shortly afterwards, by the brother of the king he had deposed nearly thirty years previously, and succeeded by a Beorthric of unknown parentage, who subsequently married one of Offa’s daughters.)23 At this point the Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Charlemagne and England’ [1965], Early Medieval Europe, p. 157, also Early Germanic Kingship, p. 114; if Offa really ‘had discovered that a pope, like a king, was an office-holder, and as such might be deprived of office if found unworthy to exercise it’ (which is surely implausible), the evidence is not to be found here. Hadrian had been advised ut aliqui emuli vestri [sc. Karoli ] et sui [sc. Offae] . . . INDICARENT threatening proposals supposedly made by Offa to Charles and heard sympathetically, of which (he reports) usque actenus minime audivimus and was happy not to believe: for the significance of emulus, see e.g. Vulg. I Rg 1.6, 2.32, Aldhelm’s Ep. ad Ehfridum, MGH AA, XV, p. 493 and Hrabanus’s ep. no. 28, MGH Epp. V, p. 444; and compare also the legatine report, c. 11, MGH Epp. IV, p. 23. For rumoured accusations against Hadrian, see e.g. MGH Epp. III, Cod. Car. nos 51 of 775, 94 of 790/1 (pp. 572, 633). Note that if the Papal letter is of 784/5, Offa’s reported indiculum to the Frankish king precedes Alcuin’s earliest certain contacts with the Mercian Court as well as (in my view) his taking up residence at the Frankish one. 21 MGH Epp. III, Cod. Car. no. 76 (p. 608). For the Spanish intervention, see idem, Cod. Car. nos 95–7, with Bullough in DA 18 (1962), 223–30 and K. Schäferdiek, ‘Der adoptianische Streit in Rahmen der spanischen Kirchengeschichte’, ZfKg 80 (1969), 291–311, esp. 292–5. 22 I agree with Wormald (‘Offa’s “Law-code”’, p. 33) that this first meeting is the most likely occasion for the promise to send three hundred and sixty-five mancuses annually to Rome, reported in Pope Leo III’s letter to King Coenwulf of Mercia, MGH Epp. IV, no. 127 (transmitted only in the added quire 8 of BL Cotton Vespasian A. xiv), which cannot be earlier than 798, cf. Dümmler, ibid. and Cubitt, cit. n. 19. 23 To the ‘Northumbrian Annalist’, the assassin was perfidus tyrannus: HR 2, ed. Arnold, p. 51, where also his revenge-killing by the dux Osred is recorded.

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two legates separated, Theophylact going round Mercia and perhaps parts of Wales, while George, accompanied by Wigbod, went to Northumbria. Because the king, Ælfwold, was not in York but ‘detained in the far north’, Archbishop Eanbald sent messengers (missos suos) to him: Ælfwold immediately set a date for a council to be attended by the kingdom’s leading laymen and ecclesiastics, and it duly took place, perhaps at Corbridge.24 It is only after the twenty-chapter record of the council’s decrees, and the added subscriptions—the last four of which are two duces, the short-lived abbot of Ripon Al(d)berht and an unidentified Abbot E(c)ghard—that Alcuin makes an appearance in the report. George’s words are quite specific: ‘this having been done and we having given our benediction,25 we went on our way, taking with us the illustrious men, legates of the [Northumbrian] king and archbishop, namely the lectores Alcuin and Pyttel’. It is unlikely that anyone would have interpreted that statement to mean that Alcuin had previously travelled to Northumbria with George, except on the traditional assumption that he had been in Francia for some time before 786. The evidence of the ‘York poem’ is unfortunately ambiguous, but hardly encouraging to the notion that Alcuin left York for the Carolingian Court very shortly after returning from Rome in 781. The continuous historical narrative effectively ends with Ælberht’s resignation from his archiepiscopal office in 778 and his securing the succession for his ‘beloved pupil’ Eanbald. Alcuin says twice (lines 1523–28, 1531–34) that while the latter received the episcopal dignity and control of the church’s lands and treasures, he himself was bequeathed not merely Ælberht’s ‘pattern of learning’ but also the books which he had collected and were so precious to him. This does not, 24 The ‘Northumbrian (?York) Annals’ for 786, in HR 2, ed. Arnold, p. 51, record the consecration of Aldulf as bishop ab Eanbaldo archiepiscopo, Tilberthoque et Hygbaldus praesulibus in monasterio quod dicitur Et Corabrige; Alduulfus Myiensis [Mayo] ecclesiae episcopus is among the signatories to the northern council. For early Northumbrian Corbridge, see Bullough, ‘The place-name Hexham and its interpretation’, Notes and Queries, N.S. 46 no. 4 (December, 1999), 422–7, at 426–7. 25 In the form, probably, of the benedictio super synodum of late-Visigothic origin whose first two formulae are Christus Dei filius qui est initium et finis, conplementum vobis tribuat karitatis; et qui vos ad expletionem huius fecit pervenire concilii, absolutos vos efficiat ab omni contagione delicti: i.e. the one incorporated in the ordo de celebrando concilio, numbered 2 in the edition by H. Schneider, Die Konzilordines des Früh- und Hochmittelalters (MGH; Hanover, 1996), pp. 185–6, and later included in pontificals etc., including the tenth-century English ‘Egberht Pontifical’, ed. H.M.J. Banting, Two AngloSaxon Pontificals (HBS 104; London, 1989), pp. 106–7.

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to me, read like the statement of a man who had left or was on the point of leaving the city, the cathedral and its iuvenes: although if a ‘late’ (790s) dating of the poem were to be accepted, it would suggest that Alcuin was re-asserting his claim to the collection, in a verse counterpart to his reminder to Eanbald II in 796 that he had lawfully inherited those ‘treasures of wisdom’ from Ælberht.26 There may indeed be other and better evidence for his remaining in York for several more years. Included in the ‘personal’ collection of letters are two closely-linked ones, which seem to be earlier than any others now extant: one is to an unnamed monastic recipient, the other to Leutfred, bishop of Mayo ‘of the Saxons’ (northern Ireland), who died not long before the legatine council in 786.27 News of both men had been conveyed to Alcuin by a ‘brother Benedict’, who (he says) will be returning to Leutfred with a written and an oral response; and both this contact and the content of the letter make most sense if Alcuin was resident at that time in Mayo’s metropolitan church. The sufferings of Mayo that were preventing Leutfred from performing his episcopal duties and the military activity in which Alcuin insists the bishop should not become involved, are surely those recorded in the Annals of Ulster s.a. 782 (correctly 783): combustio Aird Machae [et] Maighi hEu Saxonum.28 If, then, a date 783/4 is probable for the letters, the cryptic words (in the second of two apposed clauses introduced by the words Quid vero) ‘brother Benedict will be able to tell you all that has happened to me’ can reasonably be interpreted as referring to Alcuin’s journey to Rome and the Frankish king’s invitation to him, when he had not yet acted on it. His discretion and reliance on the spoken words of a trusted messenger may have been from modesty; but it is far more likely that he was sensitive to possible accusations that he was still giving his loyalty to the deposed Æthelred. Nothing in the evidence from the Frankish side contradicts the proposition that it was only in 786 that Alcuin responded positively to the invitation to join Charles and his Court. Grants, however formulated, which gave the recipient access to the lands and revenues of religious communities ranging from the greatest abbeys to isolated cellae were (or became) in Charlemagne’s time a standard way of rewarding and maintaining those who belonged to the circle of royal 26 27 28

Ep. no. 114 (p. 167); similarly, ep. no. 121 (p. 177). Epp. nos 1 and 2. For the succession at Mayo, see above, n. 24. Annals of Ulster, ed. and transl. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, p. 238.

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advisers and ‘officials’.29 Those who were welcomed at the Court for their scholarly, literary, or other special skills could hope to be similarly supported, although in the case of the first Italian scholarsin-residence (Peter of Pisa, Paulinus, Paul the Deacon) it is not demonstrable that they were.30 Since Alcuin was clearly benefitting from grants of this kind long before he was installed at St. Martin’s, Tours, and on a more generous scale than he was later to acknowledge, it might be expected that the evidence would throw light on the date at which he became a regular member of the then itinerant Frankish Court. In fact it does not. Alcuin never gives himself the abbatial title in either letters or poems written before 796; but even in his years at Tours, when royal diplomas and the occasional letter refer to him as abbas, he prefers to use other epithets to indicate his changed situation. Writing to the brethren of the monastery of St. John the Baptist at Aquitanian Malasti (later Montolieu), Alcuin declared that ‘the first community given to me to rule over’ had the same patron-saint: it has not been identified and it is not absolutely

29 Examples are: Fulrad, apparently a courtier with undefined responsibilities before he became abbot of St.-Denis and Pippin’s (subsequently Carloman’s and Charles’s) arch-chaplain: see the references in ch. 2, n. 208, also J. Fleckenstein, Die Hofkapelle der deutschen Könige, 1. Grundlegung. Die karolingische Hofkapelle, MGH Schriften XVI/i (Stuttgart, 1959), pp. 45–8, 62–3; Maginarius and Rado, whose abbacies (respectively of St.-Denis and St.-Vaast) came, however, later in their careers: Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, pp. 59, 76–7, 105–6; Bullough ‘“Aula Renovata”’, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 128, 130 and nn. (at pp. 151–2) for Maginarius, idem p. 128 and n. at p. 150 for Rado. A more unusual career-pattern and its rewards is discussed in Bullough,‘Baiuli in the Carolingian regnum Langobardorum and the career of abbot Waldo (+813)’, EHR 77 (1962), 625–37, cf. the alternative interpretations of some of the evidence favoured by, e.g., Felten and Kasten. There seems to no evidence as to how ordinary notarii/cancellarii, even very long-serving ones (Carolingian Renewal, p. 128), were maintained. 30 For the grant to Paulinus of property in his—it is assumed—native north-east Italy in 776, see above, ch. 2 n. 106; there is neither record nor tradition that he, Peter and Paul (nor another Italian Peter apparently at the Court 774–81: Bullough, Carolingian Renewal, p. 131 and n. 29 [p. 151]) were granted monasteries or churches north of the Alps. It is a reasonable guess, but nothing more, that Paul was supported by Angilram of Metz while he was writing the Gesta of the previous bishops of that see. In 790 or shortly before, the king’s medicus Uuinter, otherwise referred to only in Eigil’s Vita Sturmi in connection with events in 779, promised Alcuin two waggon-loads (!) of high-quality wine: ep. no. 8; Die ‘Vita Sturmi’ des Eigil von Fulda, ed. P. Engelbert (Marburg, 1968) p. 161 (c. 25). Were these the products of Uuinter’s own estates? or did he receive a regular and generous allowance from the royal vineyards? references to carrata as a measure of the products of, al. rents payable from, vineyards in the eighth-ninth centuries are conveniently assembled in Niermeyer, Lexikon, s.v.

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excluded that it should be sought in England rather than Francia.31 According to the Vita-author, ‘some time after’ Alcuin’s first arrival at the Court the king gave him two monasteries in western Francia, ‘Bethleem which is also called Ferrières’ and St.-Loup (Troyes): neither of them figures in his correspondence until 798, although they may well be the loca sancta which Alcuin was visiting when a York emissary caught up with him in ?794 before he joined the Court at Aachen.32 The one Continental community mentioned by name in a pre-Tours-period letter is the cella and pilgrim hostel of St.-Josse ( just outside Quentovic) which Lupus of Ferrières later recalled as having been entrusted to Alcuin by ‘the great Charles’.33 Unfortunately, there are no surviving charters to give chronological precision to these passing references. The earliest evidence for Alcuin’s control of one or more religious communities, probably in northern or eastern France, and the exploitation of their landed and other resources, is in two letters composed several months apart in 790. Writing from Francia to Northumbria, he concludes with an account of the gifts he has sent, olive-oil for bishops, specie for ‘brethren’, anchorites and others: the latter is measured in sicli (from three to fifty), which in Egberht’s ‘Dialogue’ were

31 Ep. no. 272 (from the H collection). The identification of the monastery to which the letter is addressed as that at Malasti-Montolieu (dioc. Carcassonne, dép. Aude) is established by the name of the abbot Olomundus: cf. BM2 600 of 815 (the best text in Bouquet-Delisle, 6 (1870), no. xli [pp. 485–6]) confirming a previous grant to the abbot by Charles as Emperor, also Theodulf ’s earlier carm. no. 30 Ad monachos sancti Benedicti (sc. Anianensis), MGH Poet. I, pp. 520–2 (S.-K. no. 7454), line 72 Atala te videat, dicque “Olemunde vale”. On the basis of the 815 diploma’s idem Olomundus ipsum monasterium a novo construxisset opere, it has always been supposed that the Malasti monastery was a new foundation of the 780s or 790s by a member of Benedict’s ‘circle’. This may indeed be so: but Alcuin’s Si quicquam pio patri congregationi vestrae placeat inmutare vel renovare congregationis vestrae nolite murmurare inde suggests very strongly (if he were rightly informed) that it was a pre-existing one which was being forced to accept Benedict’s stricter version of the monastic life. The ‘first community’ given to Alcuin can hardly be the one he inherited in south-east Northumbria: the concluding lines of his poetic version of the Vita Willibrordi (MGH Poet. I, p. 220), imply that its dedication was in fact to the Virgin Mary. Could it be the mysterious monasterium In Mercum of ep. no. 62 (p. 106)? 32 Monasteries: Vita c. 9, ed. Arndt, p. 190; ep. no. 153. Loca sancta: ep. no. 43 (p. 89), cf. per loca sanctorum martyrum vel confessorum Christi quo me iter instabilitas deducat in ep. no. 42 (p. 85). 33 Alcuin, ep. no. 25 (dated ‘?794’ by Dümmler but almost certainly from the early part of 796: Martinus in Vicos (Quentovic) apud Sanctum Iodocum remansit infirmus. Lupus: Epist. Lupi ed. Levillain, no. 19, ed. Marshall, no. 11, of 840/41 (ad elemosinam exhibendam peregrinis).

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apparently the equivalent of four or five silver pennies and clearly amounted to a considerable quantity of precious metal.34 Writing from Northumbria a few months later, Alcuin asks his former pupil and fellow-courtier Joseph to arrange for the forwarding to him of five pounds of silver and a further five pounds-worth of other items, and of the distribution of agricultural products (corn, wine, bacon) to ‘our’ widows and orphans and others; and the letter mentions both an un-named cella and Uurmec villa (unidentified) and also their respective administrators.35 Alcuin is not a party to the poetic exchanges of Court scholars, notably Peter of Pisa and his fellow-Italian Paul the Deacon, with one another and with the king in the early 780s; the tentative claims that he was both the egregium fratrem whom Paul should not be backbiting (783) and the true author of a poem in the king’s name inviting Paul to join the Court in its winter camp (784/5) depend substantially on the assumption that he was already a figure in the aula regis.36 Not until many years later, when Peter and Paul were 34

Ep. no. 7, Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/4 (pp. 24–6). For the addressee, Colcu, see above, ch. 2, pp. 276–7 n. 77; for the gift of olive-oil, see idem, pp. 310–11. 35 Ep. no. 8, Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/5 (pp. 27–9). The main passage specifying the items that Alcuin wants sent, from Mittite quoque nobis necessaria ad mare (literally?) to ad picturas, is very obscurely worded: but Dümmler’s layout, which introduces a full stop after mare, starts a new sentence with Et Oduinus and puts the next full stop after vel commutationem, makes it completely unintelligible. Chase’s text and punctuation (ed. cit., p. 27) are clearly to be preferred: the first sentence concludes with nobis deferat i.e. the necessaria; the words V libras argenti vobiscum dimisi ad commutandum vel vendendum form a separate sentence (or sense-unit); and dirigite governs both the preceding Illarum [sc. librarum] pretium vel commutationem and the following et alios V etc. A possible objection to this reading is that the conversion of bullion into ?specie makes poor sense when Alcuin is asking for commodities to be sent to England from Francia; but the list that begins with triplicia vestimenta caprina conceivably refers to items that Joseph was expected to acquire with the first five pounds of silver. An Eanfrigith or Eanfrith is connected with the cella (St.Josse?), a Frotgoneg with Uurmec. Both names may have been corrupted in transmission: Eanfrig- seems otherwise unrecorded, but Eanfrith is very common in early Northumbria, occurring at least twelve times in the ‘Lindisfarne’ Liber Vitae (Gerchow, Gedenküberlieferung, p. 380); Frotgoneg perhaps conceals a Frankish personal-name. 36 Neff, Gedichte Paulus, nos xii, xiii, xvii–xxiii (pp. 56–68, 84–108); for the egregium fratrem, see ibid. no. xvii, line 29 (p. 86), with the editor’s note, an identification admittedly made plausible and attractive by Alcuin’s own carm. iv, lines 41–3. Alcuin’s authorship of Neff, Gedichte, no. xxiii (pp. 107–8) is suggested, with a ?, by S.-K. no. 4459, and cannot confidently be rejected on stylistic grounds; cf. the parallels in Neff’s notes. If the model for lines 5–6, . . . cultro qui colla secare/Hostibus a nostris . . ., really is principibus collata secata dedit in the epitaph of Constantius Chlorus (MGH Poet. I, pp. 78–9), of which the earlier of only two copies is in Paris BNF lat. 528 (at fol. 122, where it is followed by another epitaph known to Paul and

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back in Italy, is Alcuin identifiable as the real author of a poem or poems in King Charles’s name.37 Paul, not Alcuin, composed the epitaphs for Queen Hildegarda (ob. 30 April 783), as well as for two of her daughters who died in infancy—one already in 774, the other a few days after her mother—and for two of the king’s sisters; and while Alcuin’s ‘collected poems’ include an epitaph in elegaic distichs for Fulrad, arch-chaplain and abbot of St.-Denis, who died on 16 July 784, it could have been composed any time after that date.38 The second version of Peter of Pisa’s Ars grammatica may have been written at the Frankish Court in response to criticisms or fuller understanding which the author had found there; but even if this is correct,39 there is nothing to suggest that Alcuin was their source. Paul is not among Alcuin’s later correspondents and is nowhere referred to in his letters, in conspicuous contrast with the north-Italian Paulinus, whom he had apparently encountered on his pre-780 visit to the Court; nor is anything of Alcuin’s included in the Monte Cassino ‘compendium of the Arts’ in Paris BNF lat. 7530, compiled and written a few years before 797.40 Two ‘discipleships’ that are recorded without precise chronological indications in letters from the 790s have been connected with the early 780s: those of Angilbert, given the abbacy of St.-Riquier in 789/90 but still regularly at the Court after Alcuin had departed by his and Peter’s own verses), it would indeed point in the other direction; but (e.g.) Prudentius’s et sub iure fori non noxia colla secare (Contra orat. Symmachi ii, line 655) suggests caution. In his later years Alcuin resisted all attempts by the king to persuade him to join the Court ‘under arms’. 37 Neff, Gedichte Paulus, no. xxxiii, S.-K. no. 11676; Burghardt, Philologische Untersuchungen, pp. 185–8. More doubtfully Alcuin’s (as claimed by Godman, Poets and Emperors, p. 55) is Neff, Gedichte Paulus, no. xxxiv, S.-K. no. 2201, of ‘787–95’: see below, ch. 4, p. 448 at n. 50. 38 Paul: Neff, Gedichte Paulus, nos xxvi–xxviii, xxiv, xxv; and note that no. xxvii (line 4) has a second possible echo of the Epitaphium Constantii (at n. 36). Alcuin: carm. xcii/2, MGH Poet. I, pp. 318–19, which refers both to the tomb in which Fulrad is buried and to haec domus alma (twice) and the relics it holds. A letter of Alcuin’s, ep. no. 72, addressed to two daughters who did survive, Rotruda and Berta, was almost certainly written in the years 790–93 and reflects acquaintance in the late 780s (below). 39 Vivian Law, in Carolingian Culture: emulation and innovation, ed. R. McKitterick (Cambridge, 1994), p. 93, is much more cautious than Bernhard Bischoff in his introduction to the facsimile-edition Sammelhandschrift [Berlin] Diez. B Sant.66. Grammatici Latini et Catalogus librorum (Graz, 1973), at pp. 27–30. 40 Seven surviving letters, in three different collections, are addressed to Paulinus, and there is additional evidence for exchanges and contacts over many years; their first encounter is reflected in Alcuin’s carm. iv, line 42. For BNF lat. 7530, see above, ch. 2, n. 14.

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for Tours, and Richbod, abbot of Lorsch from 784 and (arch)bishop of Trier from ?792. That Angilbert had joined the Court when very young ( pene ab ipsis infantiae rudimentis in Pope Hadrian’s words) is not in doubt, and that he was born in the 760s is very probable. Writing to Adalhard of Corbie in 790, Alcuin asked him to greet Angilbert, whom he described as ‘[my? our?] son—or better, once a son, now a father’; and writing to Paulinus of Aquileia in 796 when Angilbert was about to set out for Italy, he referred to him as ‘as our son in common’, which at least in relation to Paulinus must refer to an association of the two men before 787.41 The emotional poem O mea cella is addressed to Angilbert, as are several of Alcuin’s letters, none of them (in my view) earlier than 795/6.42 It is, however, Peter of Pisa whom Angilbert addresses as his magister in what is probably his earliest surviving poem; and that relationship is implicitly acknowledged by Alcuin in 799 when writing to the king about Peter’s ‘lost’ disputation with a Jewish scholar. Nor is Alcuin named among the courtiers in Angilbert’s letter-poem of ?796, although that could be because he knew that Alcuin was no longer there.43 Richbod, whose later bye-name was Macharius, had been a monk and writer of documents at Lorsch for several years before 778; in that year he disappears from the records until he returns there as abbot.44 It has been supposed that the intervening six years were spent at the royal Court, which would explain the intermittent use of ‘diploma script’ in late-eighth-century Lorsch manuscripts, and where also Richbod would have become familiar with the new minuscule 41 Epp. nos 9, 95. The best recent ‘biography’ is that by D. Schaller in Verfasserlexikon (1978), 1, 358–63 (favouring, however, a birth-date as early as c. 750); the very different account by S. Rabe, ‘Ex patre filioque’: St. Riquier in the Carolingian Age (Ph.D. diss., Loyola University, Chicago, 1986), 187–202 can and should be disregarded. My suggestion in EHR 77 (1962), 635 n. 6 that ep. no. 11—the words primicerium palatii Pipini regis only in the manuscripts T and T *—might be of the early 780s is manifestly wrong: it must in fact be from the late 790s. 42 See below. 43 Neff, Gedichte Paulus, no. xxxix (pp. 163–4) Carmina mitto Petro, dulci doctoque magistro,/Angelbertus ego carmina mitto Petro./Petro magister have etc.; Alcuin’s ep. no. 172 (p. 285). 44 Codex Laureshamensis, ed. K. Glöckner (Darmstadt, 1929–36), 1, Reg.-Nr. 1056 = 2, no. 1081 of July 774 (his first as writer); idem, Reg.-Nr. 1444 = 2, no. 664 of July 778 (his last as writer); idem, Reg.-Nr. 1925 = 2, no. 341 of 24 April 784 (first as abbot). Did Richbod owe his bye-name to his being, like Macarius of Egypt in the Vitae patrum, ‘master of the monks’? the latter’s namesake Macarius of Alexandria figures (intermittently) at 2 January in Latin martyrologies and calendars from the very early ninth century.

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bookhand, penned most beautifully by Godescalc. By extension, it is supposedly in those ‘hidden years’ that Alcuin formed his loving fellowship (communio caritatis) with him and acted as his magister, a relationship which in a letter written in ?794/5 (in.) he complained that Richbod seemed to have forgotten.45 None of this can be conclusively disproved. Indeed, it can be accepted that Richbod was at the Court for some time, although he is not among the courtiers named in Alcuin’s itinerant letter-poem of ?779–80. But nothing in the letter requires us to assume that Richbod’s discipleship was in the period before he became abbot; and three later letters and two poems addressed to him, all largely concerned with the present and future and recalling past encounters only in the most general terms, are of no help.46 The possible indications of Alcuin’s association with future Frankish bishops in the early 780s are not lightly to be dismissed. Otherwise, the thrust of the evidence, led by the report of the English legatine synods, is that in those years he was still at York, winning acceptability (if not respect) from the new Northumbrian king as well as from its archbishop. The received notions of a Carolingian Courtschool, whether broadly or narrowly formulated, and of the associated developments in learning and art which have been based on the assumption that Alcuin was one of its ‘founding fathers’ and even its dominant figure from 781/2 are, like the supposedly biographical statements themselves, simply false, mendacia biographica.47

786: The Synodal Decrees Alcuin’s previous foreign embassies and his acknowledged learning, reflected in the epithet lector given to him by Bishop George,48 are sufficient reason for his being named as a legate of the Northumbrian king and archbishop when Bishop George returned to Mercia, prob45

Ep. no. 13: for its date see below; for their shared studies, see below. Epp. nos 49, 78 (where after long absence conlocutio sapientiae vestrae suavissima meam fatigat memoriam, ‘taxes my memory’) and 191; the thoroughly conventional carm. lxxxvii (MGH Poet. I, p. 305) addressed to Richbod, and carm. xxxi (MGH Poet. I, pp. 248–9), if vv. 3–14 really belong with vv. 1–2, addressed to Mac[h]arius. 47 Compare the evidence for Peter of Pisa, who may have spent a full decade as a ‘teacher of grammar’ at the Court before 786: Bischoff, intro. to Berlin Diez B. 66 Facsimile, pp. 27–30; Bullough, ‘Reminiscence and Reality . . .’, JournMedLat, 5, 188, 193–200. 48 See ch. 1, p. 175 n. 137. 46

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ably in the late summer. The legates took with them a copy of the twenty decrees promulgated in the Northumbrian council, of which someone produced an English-vernacular translation, or more plausibly a glossed text: for at the subsequent southern-English council the several chapters ‘were read out in a clear voice and lucidly expounded tam Latine quam theodisce, so that all could understand’.49 What part, if any, had Alcuin played in the formulation of the decrees? A convincing answer is made more difficult by the lack of any independent evidence for the saluberrima statuta that George says had been brought from Rome or for the canon-law collection(s), including recent conciliar acta, which he may have known: the three decrees of the 757 Compiègne council to which he had ‘consented’ have no counterparts in the 786 decrees;50 and, with one very doubtful exception, there is no identifiable use of the so-called ‘DionysioHadriana’ collection,51 which had been available at the Frankish Court since 774.52 In the view of Patrick Wormald, the report to the Pope ‘makes it relatively clear (!) that the capitulary was a response to the reliqua vicia the legates heard about in the north’, as distinct from matters that had been adverted to in the Papal letters and considered at the earlier Mercian council. Some chapters do indeed ‘seem 49 MGH Epp. IV, p. 28; Wormald, ‘Offa’s “Law-code”’, p. 32. The extensive modern literature on ‘theodisc(a)’, ‘Deutsch’ etc. does not affect the primary meaning of this passage. The unique manuscript of the decisions of the Council of Chelsea in 816 (BL Cotton Vespasian A. xiv fols 149–53; Haddan and Stubbs, 3, pp. 579–84) has a single OE gloss taken into the text by a copyist: æt. vii. beltidum, apparently for canonicis horis. 50 MGH Capit. I, pp. 38–9 (no. 15, cc. 14, 16, 20). But could quia sicut nostris temporibus ad sacerdotium secundum canones etc. in c. 12 of the 786 acta (Epp. IV, p. 24) be a reference to decrees of the Frankish councils of ?743 and ?744, MGH Conc. II/i, pp. 3 and 7 (with the dates 742 and 743). There are no acceptable reasons for crediting George with the Latin version of an originally Greek Chronicon Paschale in the Corbie Maurdramnus-script book Paris BNF lat. 4884, CLA V, 560 (sixteenand seventeenth-century scholars knew better, as did its nineteenth-century editor Frick: A. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: a Study in the History of Classical Scholarship 2, OxfordWarburg Studies [Oxford, 1993], pp. 560–9), still less for further arguments starting from that supposition. 51 That is, if the initial and concluding sentences of c. 16 (MGH Epp. IV, p. 25) have been influenced by the letter of Innocent I, Jaffé-Wattenbach, Regesta no. 404, the Hadriana text of which is PL 67, cols 244–5 (from the Voell-Justel edition of 1661), cf. H. Wurm, Studien und Texte zur Dekretalensammlung des Dionysius Exiguus (Rome, 1939), pp. 128–30. For a suggestion that the opening words Decreto abdicitur refer to secular (Roman) law, see Wormald, ‘Offa’s “Law-code”’, p. 39. 52 Paris BNF lat. 11711 is a copy, presumably from the Court authenticum, in the Corbie Maurdramnus-script. Ganz, Corbie, p. 46, asserts that it ‘must postdate 789’ (or even 794: ibid. p. 136), but the basis of the claim is not clear.

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to have specific local reference, implying a degree of English input’.53 In the second group of ten, which begins with a long sermo directed at ‘kings and princes’ and thereafter addresses layfolk generally, the nineteenth chapter’s condemnation of the pagan practices of (apparently) tattooing and the mutilation of horses is reasonably claimed as one such, although the eighth/ninth-century evidence for either, even in Pictish North Britain, is not very strong.54 The last of the preceding ‘clerical’ chapters (c. 10) brings together several different prohibitions and prescriptions. The fourth of these, bishops’ improper involvement in secular judgements, is introduced by ‘we have seen (vidimus)’: which suggests that the condemnation of celebrating mass bare-legged and of using liturgical vessels made of horn, and are therefore sanguineae, is also a response to observed local practice.55 Insistence on the requirements for lawful royal succession and on the particular wickedness of killing a king, ‘since he is the Lord’s annointed’, and the dire consequences that inevitably follow (already well-known apud vos!) in the twelfth chapter has particular point in a contemporary English context. The extensive and largely inconclusive discussion of one or two phrases only56 has, by its silences on the rest, underlined the lack of any identifiable earlier synodal or other sources for a text which, among other notable features, constructs its argument from a series of Old Testament and Epistle quotations, several of them in markedly non-Vulgate form. Could a (part-)source be some unidentified exegetical work?57 Conspicuously 53 ‘Offa’s “Law-code”’, p. 33. Vollrath-Reichelt, as Wormald notes, took the contrary view: Synoden Englands, pp. 162–70. 54 See Wormald, ‘Offa’s Law-code’, p. 33 and esp. n. 19. 55 But ‘pollution by blood’ is, of course, a widespread traditional concern. Has a word dropped out between saecularia and iudicare (e.g. negocia), or is this a rare example of the substantive saecularia ‘worldly matters’? The quotation of II Tim 2.4 is strikingly non-standard, with ut ei militet in place of ut ei placeat, which is not found elsewhere, although the Latin interpretatio of the Greek text in Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibl. A.145b ( g) (‘from the circle of the Irishman Marcellus-Moengal’: Bischoff, Katalog, 1, no. 1040) has here uniquely ut ei militare cogitet. 56 For the significance of nec christus Domini esse valet and quia christus Domini est, and their connection (if any) with the report in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that Ecgfrith son of the ruling King Offa of Mercia was ‘hallowed to king’, almost certainly in the year 787, compare e.g. E. John, Orbis Britanniae (Leicester, 1966), pp. 28–35; Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship, pp. 113–15 (whose ‘reconstruction’ is vitiated by a reliance on the long-discredited 787 dating of the legatine visit also); J. Nelson, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London and Ronceverte, 1986), pp. 285, 319 n. 3 and 324, who rightly insists that the Chronicle’s terminology is evidence at the very least ‘of ecclesiastical participation in the ceremon[y] of king-making’. 57 Thus, Ecl 10.20 is quoted in the form In ore tuo ne detraxeris regi et in corde tuo

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lacking are recognisable links with the writings from which Alcuin reputedly derived his ‘insular slant on kingship’, and particularly the De duodecim abusivis.58 Other chapters have no specifically English focus or relevance, but equally have no clear textual links with or very obvious precedents in earlier conciliar decrees, oecumenical or Gallic: notably, c. 9, on ecclesiastics who only pretend to fast by eating in secret; c. 14, forbidding impositions on churches greater than those allowed by ‘lex Romana and the ancient customs of earlier emperors, kings and princes’; and c. 18, on the honouring of vows and promises to God (essentially a list of Old Testament exemplars).59 The third chapter prescribes twice-yearly councils, and lays down some of the responsibilities of bishops and their proper conduct; exceptionally, most of its second half, from propheta dicit to pauperum inquietet plus the quotations from the prophet Ezekiel (part) and from St. John’s Gospel, are taken, with some re-arrangement and verbal changes, from Isidore’s Sententiae.60 C. 17 begins with the requirement to pay tithes as prescribed in the Pentateuch and in the saying of a sapiens, perhaps Caesarius of Arles or an unknown Irishman, since the closest textual parallel seems to be in the then-recent addition De ne maledixeris principi quia aves caeli portant illud et qui habet pennas anunciabit verbum, where the Vulgate text is In cogitatione tua regi ne detrahas et in secreto cubiculi tui ne maledixeris diviti quia avis caeli portabit vocem tuam et qui habet pinnas adnuntiabit sententiam; Dn 4.22 is quoted in the form Scitote quia Dominus dominator est in regno hominum et ipsius est regnum et cuicunque voluerit dabit illud, in contrast with the Vulgate Donec scias quod dominetur Excelsus super regnum hominum et cuicumque voluerit det illud; and the apparent quotation from I Sm (I Rg) only partly corresponds to the Vulgate text of 26.11. Bede is not the textual source; but compare his commentary on I Sm 26.8–11 (ed. Hurst; CCSL CXIX (Turnhout, 1962), pp. 244–5). 58 Above, Pt. II, ch. 2, pp. 274–5 and n. 71. According to ‘pseudo-Cyprian’ (ed. Hellmann, p. 53) one consequence of a king’s iniustitia is that it filios suos et nepotes, ne post se regni hereditatem teneant, obscurat. But this is a very different notion from the synod’s nec christus Domini esse valet et rex totius regni et heres patri[a]e qui ex legitimo connubio generatus, supported by a quotation from Daniel (last note); and while Alcuin refers in several different contexts to the heres of something or someone (but not in the letter to Ecgfrith of Mercia, ep. no. 61, which listed the qualities he should be acquiring from his royal parents), the two instances of heres patriae in the ‘York poem’ (ed. Godman, lines 562 and 1215) apply the term respectively to the Northumbrian people after the victory on the Winwaed and to Bishop John as inheritor of his heavenly homeland ( patriae caelesti ). 59 For cc. 15 and 16, on unlawful marriages and their consequences, compare above; for c. 20, omnibus generaliter, see below. 60 Lib. III. xlv, 1–5, xlvi, 1: ed. P. Cazier, CCSL 111, pp. 288–90. Isidore quotes Ez 3.18 in the non-Vulgate form Si non fueris locutus ut se custodiat impius a via sua, ille in iniquitate sua morietur; sanguinem autem eius de manu tua requiram; the acta (MGH Epp. IV, pp. 21–22) combines clauses from the Vulgate Ez 3.18,19 and 20 (in peccato suo morietur) but inserts before tu animam liberasti the words et non egerit poenitentiam!

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decimis to one version of the Collectio canonum Hibernensis.61 It concludes with the forbidding of usury, linking an adapted Psalm quotation with two aphorisms wrongly credited to Augustine, and the prescribing of ‘equal weights and measures’: difficult as it is to envisage these as English clerical innovations, they could be a reflection of Northumbrian and Mercian commercial activity in recent decades.62 The long opening sentence of c. 4 is an early attempt to make a clear distinction between monks and ‘canons’, which at this date probably meant clerics generally.63 The shorter final sentence might be an oblique reference to a canon-law collectio available in England, such as that in the originally Northumbrian(?) Cologne Dombibl. cod. 213; but there is nothing to prove that it is, and no links have been established between the decrees and the second Book of the Northumbrian Disciple’s text of ‘Theodore’s Penitential’ or the corresponding chapters in other versions of the archbishop’s rulings, although that may be because no-one has looked.64 The fullest and most positive statement of Alcuin’s involvement in the 786 decrees is due to Dr. Catherine Cubitt.65 Her arguments 61

I.e. the B-version: see R. Kottje, Einfluss des Alten Testamentes, p. 65. The interrogative Ps 14.1 becomes Dignum fore habitatorem tabernaculi sui; since the standard Psalm-heading (Ro. and Ga.) is Psalmus David, the preceding dicente Domino ad David suggests that the dictator may have been influenced by the psalm’s titulus in the ‘Bedan’ series, P. Salmon (ed.), Les “Tituli psalmorum” des Manuscrits Latins, Coll. Bibl. Lat. 12 (Rome, 1959), p. 154 (from a very incomplete manuscript base). For Augustinus quoque ait etc., Dümmler cited his sermo 8 (new ed. by C. Lambot, CCSL 41 (1961), pp. 87–8), the resemblance with which is only general. The acta text’s meaningless Quia habet etc. clearly requires to be amended by the insertion of nemo; and the source is Caesarius of Arles, sermo 222, 3, ed. G. Morin, CCSL 104, 878–9 (as was first pointed out by Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, p. 241), but almost certainly via Defensor of Ligugé’s Liber scintillarum (Livre d’Étincelles, ed. H.-M. Rochais; SC 77, 86 (Paris, 1961–2), c. 78, 8–12). Alcuin in his De virtutibus c. 19 (PL 101, cols 627D–628A) paraphrases the text at some length, without direct quotation: cf. Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, p. 180, heroically translating the unemended acta text. 63 G. Constable, Three Studies in Medieval and Religious Thought (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 275–6 and esp. n. 88, summarises the evidence of early-Carolingian texts. 64 In fact, compare c. 19 ad fin. with Theod. II xi. 4; for links between Theodore Bk. I and Cologne 213, see Brett, ‘Theodore and the Latin canon law’, p. 136. No-one would gather from R. McKitterick, ‘Knowledge of Canon law in the Frankish kingdoms before 789: the manuscript evidence’, Journ. Theol. Stud. n.s. 36 (1985), 97–117 (repr. Books, Scribes and Learning in the Frankish Kingdoms, Aldershot, 1994, art. II) that Book II was circulating widely in north-east Francia by the turn of the century, on the evidence of the manuscripts Paris BNF lat. 1603 (CLA V, 531: post789, but apparently ‘Hofnahe’) and the early post-800 Berlin Hamilton 132 and BNF lat. 3846 (incomplete). 65 Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, pp. 164–84; Wormald, Making of English Law, p. 107 n. 372. 62

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are partly founded on verbal parallels with his letters and with the De virtutibus et vitiis, and partly in the realm of ‘ideas’—shared notions of social order and good government, of peace and concord, and of the vices that destroy them. Collectively they are undeniably impressive, even though almost all the evidence from Alcuin’s side is inevitably later than the synod. Links with letters to the archbishop of Canterbury and to the Northumbrian king in 793 are particularly close. Thus, the former shares with the synodal acta (c. 11) a characterisation of bishops not only as shepherds of their flock and, through the apostles, as recipients of ‘the key of heaven’ with the power of binding and loosing but also as ‘angels of God’: the source of this conceit is a verse from the prophet Malachi (2, 7) which the decree cites verbatim, while the letter offers a free adaptation although crediting it to its OT author by name. The second letter repeats almost verbatim the final prescription in that same decree (the only one not supported by a Biblical quotation) that kings should ‘have wise and God-fearing counsellors, who are adorned with honest morals’.66 Similarly, there are anticipations of the language of the Frankish so-called Admonitio generalis of 789, Alcuin’s substantial contribution to which seems certain: the latter’s c. 62 on ‘peace, unity and concord’ corresponding to the synod’s c. 14, with a shared quotation from John; and c. 74 on ‘equal weights and measures’ corresponding to the end of the synod’s c. 17, with a shared quotation from Proverbs. Either they are the work of the same author or the 786 decrees were available to Alcuin or someone else at the Frankish Court in 789; and the acta’s expression dicente Salomone becomes standard Alcuinian usage. Doubts whether a provision on ‘weights and measures’ would have originated in England have, however, already been raised; and there are other difficulties in crediting to Alcuin a major part in the formulation of the synodal acta. When, towards the end of his life, Alcuin was forced to defend vigorously the rights of the religious 66 MGH Epist. IV, pp. 22, 23, 27–8, 46 (ep. no. 17), 51 (ep. no. 18). The previous history of consiliarius in Anglo-Latin is not clear: both Stephen (Vita Wilfridi c. 5: ed. Colgrave, p. 12) and Bede (HE V. 19) refer to the Roman archdeacon Boniface, c. 655, as a Papal consiliarius; and those whom Edwin consulted about his conversion (HE II. 13) are characterized as amicis principibus et consiliariis suis. The most relevant earlier parallel seems to be senes et sapientes et sobrios consiliarios habere in the De XII Abusivis’s characterisation of the ‘just king’, ed. Hellmann, p. 51. (For Carolingian Frankish usage, see below.) In later letters Alcuin varies the epithets: consiliarios prudentes Deum timentes iustitiam amantes in ep. no. 123 (to King Coenwulf of Mercia) for example, cf. ep. no. 217.

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community for which he was responsible and his own reputation, he specifically quoted sixth-century conciliar canons relating to sanctuary for criminals—apparently from more than one collection. In 799, Alcuin ‘recalled having read’ in what are now known as the ‘Symmachan forgeries’ canons that protected the bishop of Rome from secular justice.67 But earlier letters of his refer only twice to the sancti canones, and in the most general terms: in 792 in relation to (archi)idocesan organisation and royal authority, in 794 (or 795) with regard to potential outside interference with episcopal election.68 The 786 decrees include an important statement about the conducting of baptisms at the proper time and of the responsibilities assumed by those who have acted as the infants’ sponsors ( fideiussores), all of which is to be drawn to the attention of people. Neither Theodore’s Canons earlier nor Alcuin’s writings on baptism later use that term, referring only to those who should receive (suscipere) the child from the font; it figures exceptionally, however, in two episcopal capitula from Charlemagne’s last years and in the Arles text of the 813 conciliar decrees.69 Baptism is a very rare topic in the letters to English clergy: only when writing to the fugitive Æthelheard of Canterbury in 797 does Alcuin specify ‘the sacrament of baptism’ as one of the the responsibilities that the archbishop should again be assuming; and the context suggests that what preoccupies him is its general neglect among the Kentish clergy.70 If he was ever invited to assume the role of sponsor or compater for any of King Charles’s illegitimate children—he arrived at the Court too late to play any part in the baptism of the legitimate ones—there is no hint of this in his letters or elsewhere; and the one cleric of a younger generation whose name might suggest Alcuin’s sponsorship was almost certainly too young and from the wrong part of the Empire for this to be possible.71 67

Alcuin’s reliance on memory in 799 was not necessarily ingenuousness, since at the time he was travelling between Aachen and Tours. 68 Epist. ad Offan[num], ed. Lehmann; ep. no. 44. Cubitt, pp. 169–70, reinforces my long-standing doubts (cf. Wormald, ‘Offa’s law-code’, pp. 34–7) that Alcuin had in mind the 786 decrees or any other written ‘laws’ when he referred in two of his letters (epp. nos 101, 122) to mores established by Offa. 69 C. 2, MGH Epp. IV, p. 21. 70 Ep. no. 128. 71 Cf. the Ann. reg. Franc.’s account of Pippin’s baptism at Rome in 781 by Pope Hadrian, qui et ipse eum de sacro fonte suscepit, and of Gisla’s subsequent baptism by Archbishop Thomas of Milan, qui et ipse eam a sacro baptismo manibus suscepit (an expansion of the annal for 781 in Ann. Laureshamenses): ed. Kurze, p. 56. Alchuinus subdiaconus

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Some of the textual arguments in support of Alcuin’s authorship of other canons may in fact point in the opposite direction. Thus, Dr. Cubitt parallels the quotation of Mt 25.34 (Venite benedicti, possidere [corr. possidete] paratum vobis regnum ab origine mundi ) at the end of c. 13 with Alcuin’s frequent use of the same text, particularly as a letter-ending; but Alcuin invariably quotes it in its liturgical form, with the wording . . . benedicti patris mei percipite regnum quod vobis paratum est etc.72 Among the other ‘non-standard’ New Testament quotations, that of Rm 6.16 (+20) in c. 16 is closer to Continental traditions, including the Tours Bible, than to the text in the Amiatinus Bible, notably in the readings quia (for quoniam) and peccati ad mortem.73 The Psalter citations are very mixed, including just one that seems to be from the ‘Roman’ version (in c. 11) and at least one that is unequivocally ‘Gallican’. The abbreviated and partly paraphrased version of Ez 3.18–20 which immediately follows the Isidore quotation in c. 3 is significantly different from that in a late letter of Alcuin’s; and the distinctive non egerit poenitentiam (in place of the Vulgate non fuerit conversus) is not exploited in his long exposition of confession and penitence for the young men of St. Martin’s, Tours, only a few years later, even though he cites there other verses of the same Book.74 Alcuin’s substantial responsibility for the concluding chapter 20 has much in its favour, including clausal endings such as imparatum inveniat and a verbal link with his letter of ?784; but again there are serious difficulties.75 It is concerned with personal conversion ‘as called for by the prophets’ (three of whom are quoted) and penitence, the urgency of both and the consequences of dying unforgiven. The assertion that those who die in sin may not be prayed for is, in this unqualified form, almost certainly in conflict with contemporary orthodoxy; and a letter of Alcuin’s a decade later leaves little doubt that was a member of the Verona cathedral chapter in 844, Cod. Dip. Veronese, ed. Fainelli, 1, no. 176 (Archdeacon Pacificus’s testament: had Pacificus been his sponsor?). 72 Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, p. 181. Note, however, that this is in a part of the acta that is known only from the sixteenth-century Magdeburg Centuriators’ edition. 73 For the origins of the Tours text of the Pauline Epistles, see Frede, Vetus Latina 21 and 24/2; Fischer, ‘Alkuin-Bibeln’ [1971], Lateinische Bibelhandschriften, pp. 335–8. 74 MGH Epp. I, p. 22; ep. no. 267 (p. 425), cf. Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, p. 181. See below for ep. no. 131. 75 The arguments in favour are well presented by Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, pp. 177–9.

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he held the opposite view.76 The chapter’s first half concludes with the words et fructus dignos poenitentiae facite (i.e. Lc 3.8 with a changed word-order), fructuosa namque poenitentia est admissa deflere et fleta in postmodum non admittere. The first clause, with agere in place of facite, recurs near the beginning of the letter to St. Martin’s, where it is linked with a characterisation of penitential healing. When, in his last years, Alcuin wrote his De virtutibus et vitiis he ‘glossed’ those same words in the chapter on ‘Penitence’ (13): Fructus est dignus poenitentiae, transacta flere peccata, et eadem iterum non agere and, a few clauses later, qui praeterita plangit, et iterum flenda non admittit. The whole passage, with the same scriptural quotations, recurs verbatim (except for flenda) in a sermon printed among the spurii of Augustine as no. 254; moreover, most of the rest of that sermon is textually identical with chs. 12 (on ‘Confession’) and 13 of Alcuin’s work, their ultimate source being in large part two or three different works of Isidore.77 The Maurist editors supposed that the sermon was dependent on the treatise, with the implication that Alcuin had derived the Isidore passages from his own reading and combined them with others, the sources of which have not been identified. More recently it has been maintained that the sermon, or more precisely its second and third parts, was already known to and quoted by the late-seventh century author (Defensor) of the Liber scintillarum and that it is the probable source of the short passage in the synodal acta as well as of the corresponding sections of Alcuin’s works.78 There are difficulties in both hypotheses: no medieval manuscript-source of the printed sermontext has been identified, while in a Carolingian (Bavarian?) sermonary of which a number of copies are known—the oldest already of the first quarter or third of the ninth century—the two Alcuin chapters 76 Ntedika, Prière pour les morts, and especially pp. 110–13 for the views of Isidore and Bede (although Dryhthelm’s vision in HE V 12, = ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, lines 905–1007, associates Purgatorial punishments with those who had repented only at the point of death); ep. no. 105, asserting that even if forte in peccatis suis mortuus est [Æthelredus rex], his mother’s intercessions can still secure eternal life for him. 77 Ep. no. 131 (p. 194); PL 101, col. 622; pseudo-Augustine, sermo 254 (CPPM 1, no. 1039), PL 39, cols 2215–16. The De V. et V./sermo text combines passages from the Sententiae (especially II, 13: ed. Cazier, pp. 120–24), the Synonyma, the pseudoIsidorian Testimoniae divinae scripturae et patrum (CPL 3 no. 385) but not certainly from the De ecclesiasticis officiis. 78 Defensor de Ligugé: Livre d’Étincelles, ed. H.-M. Rochais, 2 vols., SC 77, 86 (Paris, 1961, 1962), especially Bks. 8 and 9 and the Index, at 2, 332; Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, pp. 240–1; most fully in CPPMI 1, no. 2441, although neither the 786 decree nor Alcuin’s ep. no. 131 is cited there.

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figure as successive sermons, with attributions to Albinus in the oldest and in at least one later manuscript; Ps 31.5 is quoted in the sermon and in the De virtutibus in the Gallican and not the Roman version; Alcuin’s ep. no. 131 already has the sermon’s and De virtutibus’s maxim (a conflation of two different verses in Ezechiel) In quacumque die peccator conversus fuerit, vita vivet et non morietur which becomes standard in eleventh/twelfth century Scholastic texts; an aphorism otherwise known only from Alcuin and the sermon is quoted by Defensor with an attribution to Jerome, and the following passages are indeed from letters of Jerome; Defensor’s text in more than one place seems to be closer to Isidore’s than it is to the sermon and its putative copy by Alcuin.79 Any inference that the author(s) of the last of the 786 decrees was making use of a pre-existing pseudo-Augustinian sermon is obviously hazardous, although not excluded. Uncertainty about which penitentials were available at York in the mid/late eighth century has already been noted. A fortiori, without new evidence it is impossible to determine whether Alcuin’s later notions of penance and confession already existed in nucleo while he was still there, and to what extent he relied and continued to rely on older texts to give expression to them.80 79 Sermonary: the Freising Hitto-period manuscript, Würzburg Univ. bibl. M. ph. q. 15 (Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 1, 104–5), fols 64v–66, ‘L. DE CONFESSIONE. ALBINI’ and fols 66–67, ‘LI. DE PENITENTIA. ALBINI’; the mid-century Freising-area Munich clm. 6310 (ibid. p. 143), fols 97v–101 (without attributions); the eleventh-century Regensburg Munich clm. 14445, fols 165–6, ‘DE CONFESSIONE. ALBINI’, and fols 166–7, ‘DE PENITENTIA. ALBINI’. For further details and other copies of the sermonary, see J.-P. Bouhot, ‘Un sermonnaire carolingien’, Revue d’Histoire des Textes 4 (1974), 181–223, and G. Folliet, ‘Deux nouveaux témoins du Sermonnaire carolingien récemment reconstitué’, Revue des Études Augustiniennes, 23 (1977), 155–98. Maxim: Ez 33.12 + 15 (or 18.21); ep. no. 131 (p. 195); highmedieval examples listed (not wholly reliably) by A.E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei. A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification: the Beginnings to the Reformation (Cambridge, 1986), p. 216 (n. 10). Aphorism: Liber Scintillarum 9, 17, ed. Rochais, 1, 160; and immediately preceding it in both Alcuin and the sermon, of course without an author ascription, Lib. Scint. 9, 12, ed. Rochais, 1, 158, ‘ORIGENES DIXIT: Paenitentia quamvis exigua etc. (the source unidentified). Defensor and Isidore: e.g. Lib. Scint. 8, 61, ed. Rochais, 1, 172, where the readings non operamur and ponemus are those of Sententiae II 13, 11 (ed. Cazier, p. 122) against Alcuin and the sermon’s poenitentia non proficit and reddituri sumus. 80 M.S. Driscoll’s recent Alcuin et la Pénitence à l’Époque Carolingienne, pp. 45–180, is purportedly a detailed re-examination of the origins and development of Alcuin’s notions of penance (penitence) and confession. Regrettably, and in spite of the book’s publication in a highly-reputed series (Liturgiewissenschaftliche Quellen u. Forschungen, Münster), the book cannot be regarded as a serious contribution to scholarship. Driscoll’s account of Alcuin’s life is the traditional one (complete with ‘A l’école

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Particularly if Alcuin had not already spent time at the Frankish Court, inferences from his reported status when he travelled with the Roman legates from Northumbria to Mercia could be equally valid for his fellow-lector Pyttel. The case for his substantial contribution to the capitula that are known to us only from Bishop George’s report is at best ‘not proven’. If it is the case that Alcuin had helped compose admonitory and other letters for Archbishop Ælberht before 778/80, it is the more likely that he played a part in the discussions at ?Corbridge and even helped to formulate some of the resulting decrees. The apparent reflections of parts of the synodal acta in what Alcuin wrote in Francia during the last eleven years of his life have, however, to be balanced against the substantial element which has no echoes in those writings and is indeed often contradicted by them; and the similarly contradictory character of the Biblical citations in the decrees and in the letters cannot be ignored.81 It may well be that the main influence is in the opposite direction—that the English legatine synods were one further contribution to Alcuin’s pre-789 formation.

At the Frankish Court: Beginnings It was only after the conclusion of the synods that, ‘with the approval of his own king and archbishop’, Alcuin left England for Francia and the Carolingian Court, in company with his colleague Pyttel, of whose later career nothing is known. Wigbod similarly makes no further appearance in the documentary record; nor does he figure in Alcuin’s correspondence, a silence which is the more conspicuous if he is the same man as the ‘author’ or compiler of the ‘encyclopedic Commentary on Genesis’ and (verbatim from Isidore) on the other books of the Old Testament Octateuch, dedicated to Charles in the ?780s. Nineteen distichs addressed to Theophylact, sophiae tu doctor honestus, master in ‘great Rome, capital of the world’, and recogpalatine 782–796’), apart from errors of his own making; and there is hardly a page on which letters or other texts are not confused, mis-dated or misunderstood. An extensive but uncritical Bibliography has innumerable errors and startling omissions; and it is apparent from Driscoll’s text that he has either never read some of the key items listed there or, if he has, he has failed to understand them. For his equally egregious errors about the manuscript basis of Alcuin’s ep. no. 131, see above, p. 66 n. 160. 81 Compare the quotations both in the Admonitio generalis of 789 and in the letters from Frankfurt in 794.

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nisable hereafter as magnus scriba, read more naturally if he is the Papal bibliothecarius of that name in 781 rather than the bishop of Todi in 786 (although they are probably the same person) and subsequently at Frankfurt in 794. This letter-poem of ‘friendship’—and flattery—has good claims, therefore, of being an early one, composed and sent not long after Alcuin’s return to York from his journey to Rome in 780/81.82 Alcuin did keep up a link with Bishop George, although not a close one, to judge from the request made to Abbot Adalhard of Corbie in 790 ‘to greet my father George and ask him not to forget his son Alcuin’s spiritual comfort’.83 Worms and its ‘palace’ were again the setting of the summer and autumn court in 786. We cannot know whether Alcuin and the other legates arrived in time to witness the savage punishment of eastFrankish (Thuringian) rebels who had been persuaded to surrender— a ruthless and powerful ‘Christian’ king’s response to infidelitas. It is an intriguing fact that a mid-twelfth-century forgery names Alcquinus insignis predicator as among those who counselled the king on the foundation of the bishopric of Verden (Saxony) ostensibly in June of that year: but attempts to identify eighth/ninth century elements in the text are generally regarded as entirely fallacious; and the nature of the tradition which encouraged the forger to incorporate Alcuin’s name is seemingly irrecoverable.84 The new arrivals must very soon 82 Ep. no. 9 (p. 35); obliviscor with the ablative (or dative) is non-Classical. Corbie was in George’s diocese. 83 Carm. xxi, MGH Poet. I, pp. 242–3: in the ‘York poem’ Bosa is doctor moderatus honestus (line 849), Ælberht a iuvenis honestus who became a prudens doctor (lines 1425, 1427). 84 Worms court: DK 1 nos 153, 154; Ann. Lauresham. s.a. 786, MGH SS I, p. 32; BM2 272a for other annalistic evidence for the treatment of the rebels, and see the translation of the fullest source-text, the Annales Nazariani (which attributes a major part in the betrayal to Abbot Baugulf of Fulda), by King, Charlemagne Sources, pp. 154–5; Ann. reg. Franc., Ann. q.d. Einhardi s.a. 786: ed. Kurze, 72, 73. The background to the rebellion remains unknown: so most recently M. Becher, Eid und Herrschaft: Untersuchungen zum Herrscherethos Karls des Grossen, Vorträge u. Forschungen Sonderbd. 39 (Sigmaringen, 1993), pp. 83–4. The rejection by F.-L. Ganshof (‘Note sur deux capitulaires . . .’, Miscellanea Historica in honorem L. van der Essen (BrusselsParis, 1947), 1, 128–32) of the editorial date 786 for the Capitularia missorum, MGH Capit I, no. 25, uniquely preserved in Paris BNF lat. 4613 (Mordek, BCRFM pp. 469–76), fols 67v–69 amongst ‘Italian’ capitularies, has been generally accepted; his alternative dating to 792/3 has not, and Becher, Eid u. Herrschaft, pp. 79–87 argues powerfully for 789. Verden: DK 1 no. 240a, with Mühlbacher’s comments, ibid. pp. 334–5, cf. Tangl ‘Die Urkunden Karls des Großen für Bremen und Verden’, in MIÖG 18 (1910), fere pp. 53–68 and B. Negelke, ‘Zur ältesten Geschichte des Bistums Verden’, Niedersächsische Jahrb. 17 (1940), 136–44, esp. 140, 144.

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have been aware of the changes taking place in the circle of leading courtiers. Following the death of Fulrad in 784, the chapel had a new head: perhaps briefly Alcuin’s acquaintance or ‘friend’ of some years’ standing, Riculf, if a neglected line of his epitaph, Inclitus officio regis in aede fui, is rightly so interpreted; certainly thereafter Archbishop Angilram of Metz, who a year or two previously had been Paul the Deacon’s patron.85 Paul himself had recently returned to Italy, apparently with a commission to ask the Pope for a ‘pure’ Gregorian sacramentary; and at some point (perhaps already in 786) Abbot Adalhard of Corbie, whose once strained relations with the king were long past and whose importance for Alcuin’s intellectual development he was later to recall, returned from that country.86

85 Riculf is named, with the ‘Chancellor’ Rado, among the Court officials in Alcuin’s carm. iv l.49, MGH Poet. 1, 222, reflecting a visit to the Court and subsequent maintaining of contact in the late 770s: earlier evidence, therefore, than Ann. reg. Franc. s.a. 781 (ed. Kurze, 58), missi domni regis Caroli [ad Tassilonem ducem] Ricolfum diaconem et Eborhardum magister pincernarum; cf. Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, 1, 59–60, idem, K.d.G., 1, 38, where he is also misleadingly described as ‘Alcuin’s pupil’. Riculf ’s epitaph is MGH Poet. I, p. 432; the phrase quoted can hardly refer to his simple chaplaincy, and he is antistes famosus in the previous line, but makes good sense if he had been principal chaplain between Fulrad and Angilram. This is perhaps also hinted at in Angilbert’s verses (?ante Oct. 791), Sis memor atque pii patris, precor, Angelramni/ Necnon Rigulfi sis memor atque pii, in a letter-poem to his one-time magister Peter (of Pisa), MGH Poet. I, p. 75 (no. xlii) and Neff, Gedichte Paulus, pp. 163–4 (no. xxxix) (from Berlin, cod. Diez. B 66 p. 220). In which case the (copied) Tironian notes in DK 1 no. 154 of 5 Nov. 786 which, according to Tangl’s reading (AfU, 1 [1908], 105–6), name Angilram as the person conveying the royal order for its preparation, could well mark the change-over from Riculf ’s (brief ) period of office. Detailed accounts of Angilram’s career are O.G. Oexle, ‘Die Karolinger u. die Stadt des heiligen Arnulf ’, FmSt 1 (1967), 250–364, especially 294–7, and T. Martin, ‘Bemerkungen zur “Epistola de litteris colendis”’, AfD 31 (1985), 227–72, at 255–68, the evidence for the beginning of his headship of the chapel being discussed, but without reference to Riculf, by Oexle at 296–7 and by Martin at 259–60; LThK 3, 1 (1993), 659 (H. Mordek) is a good summary. 86 Paul: for his return to Italy (before September 786) and request to the Pope, see MGH Epp. IV, pp. 508–9, Neff, Gedichte Paulus, p. 129 (the prefatory letter to Abbot Adalhard in the contemporary manuscript St. Petersburg cod. F. v. I. 7 [CLA 1603]), MGH Epp. III, p. 626 (Cod. Car. no. 89), and my comments in ‘Ethnic History and the Carolingians’, Carolingian Renewal p. 116 (n. 7). Adalhard: that, having been appointed abbot of Corbie in his predecessor’s lifetime (780/81), he was sent to the regnum Langobardorum as King Pippin’s ‘regent’—previously doubted by me, among others—has been effectively argued by Brigitte Kasten, Adalhard v. Corbie (Studia Humaniora—Droste Verlag; Düsseldorf, 1986), pp. 42–7. But the further proposition that Adalhard was one of several baiuli simultaneously (compare my discussion of the evidence for early-Carolingian baiuli in EHR 77 (1962), 625–37, esp. 628–31) still fails to convince me; the assertion that Paul’s letter and the accompanying collection of Gregory the Great’s correspondence were sent to Italy is hardly

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Alcuin would have found at the palatium a growing if miscellaneous ‘library’ of Patristic and earlier Latin texts, including works unread and uncopied for centuries, and a few works of recent composition.87 That he came with books in his baggage (in locked chests, like Boniface’s?)88 which helped to expand the collection is not directly documented, but commonly inferred. There is, however, nothing to connect Alcuin specifically with the ‘Moore’ manuscript of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, which was certainly at the Court ca. 800, when a short text De consanguinitate was added at the end; nor with another Insular and probably Northumbrian copy of that work, now lost but the exemplar of a book written probably at Lorsch before the end of the century. The first ‘medieval’ copy of part of Pliny’s Naturalis historia, written in Northumbria, likewise has no demonstrable connections with either York or the Court library.89 There is a much better case for believing that Alcuin brought with him his personal collection of computistic-astronomical texts, mostly of older origin; and that at the king’s request he later organized them, or simply made a copy of what he had brought, in a perhaps compatible with its opening words: Cupieram . . . aestate praeterita videre faciem tuam, quando ILLIS IN PARTIBUS FUI; and Alcuin’s ep. no. 9 (analysed more fully below) is independent and weighty evidence that Adalhard had been in residence at the northern Court for some considerable time before 790. 87 B. Bischoff, ‘Die Hofbibliothek Karls des Grossen’, MaSt 3, 149–69, esp. 150–5, 165–7, Engl. transl. ‘The Court library of Charlemagne’, pp. 56–75 (pp. 57–62, 70–3); Bullough, ‘Charlemagne’s Court library re-visited’ [forthcoming], where Prof. Claudia Villa’s transferring of the supposed ‘Court library catalogue’ of c. 790/1 to Verona (‘Die Horazüberlieferung und die “Bibliothek Karls des Grossen”. Zum Werkverzeichnis der Handschrift Berlin, Diez B. 66’, DA 51 (1995), 29–52 and elsewhere) is accepted and some of the implications pursued. Bischoff himself gave a different account of the collection’s beginnings (which I would reject!) in SMBGO 92 (1981), 171–2, Engl. transl. ‘Benedictine monasteries and the survival of Classical literature’, p. 141. Alcuin’s own references to the Court book-collection or ‘library’ are all later than 796: ep. no. 162 (p. 260) (unless apud vos is ‘at St.-Riquier’; mention in De animae ratione of works possibly in armario imperiali; and, by implication, ep. no. 170 (p. 280 line 33). 88 ‘Lintheum . . . in theca librorum repone’ when Boniface started on his last journey down the Rhine; his assassins confractis librorum repositoriis etiam pro auro volumina et pro argento divinae scientiae cartas reppererunt: Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, ed. Levison, pp. 46, 51; cf. idem, p. 50, where the thecae were reportedly carried off obserratis ut erant vasculorum clustris. 89 ‘Moore’ Bede: Cambridge Univ. Libr. Kk. 5. 16 (CLA 2, 139; complete facs. EEMF 9 [1959]), with Bischoff, ‘Hofbibliothek’, pp. 160–1, Engl. transl. p. 67; the text De consanguinitate is ed. L. Machielsen in Sacris Erudiri 12 (1961). Lost exemplar of ?Lorsch (Wolfenbüttel Weissenb. 34), Würzburg and other copies: Mynors, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, xliv–xlv, with Bischoff, Lorsch 2, pp. 33, 74.

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two-quire libellus, probably preceded by a distinctive calendar and with the dedicatory poem uniquely preserved in a mid-ninth-century (Court origin?) manuscript.90 Professor Arno Borst has indeed claimed, in his comprehensive re-examination of post-Bedan ‘time studies’ and what he calls ‘Carolingian calendar-reform’, that the king asked Alcuin for a synthesising handbook ‘bald nach 789’, which, when completed (at Aachen!) in or shortly before 793, fell far short of what had been hoped for; and that Charles then commissioned a quite different Annalis libellus in seventy chapters, inc. ‘1. Quot modis soleat annus nominari’, which was prepared at (in his view) Verona. Alcuin’s three-and-a-half year absence from the Court during 790–793 (below), when it was never in fact at Aachen, is clearly irreconcilable with those datings; and the reasons for connecting the 70-chapter ‘computus of 793’ with the North-Italian see are very weak—no more than the Verona origin of the ?earliest copy (in any case, not before the second decade of the ninth century) in Berlin, Staatsbibl., Phillips 1831, and some remarks of my own about Verona learning, which have no obvious bearing on computus studies.91 It is clear only that the compilation combines computistic items of very diverse origin, Insular and continental, many (most?) of which are found also in other and distinct ninth-century assemblages. Whether or not Alcuin’s putative collection(s) contributed many items or only one to the Berlin-Monte Cassino computus, I would, on the evidence available, favour an origin somewhere in the region in which the pre-Aachen 90 Above, ch. 2. The dedicatory poem is carm. lxxii, MGH Poet. 1, 294 (S.-K. no. 16886). Note that the title Libellus Annalis seems to be properly that of the calendar and not of the collection as a whole. 91 In c. 4, Argumentum qualiter per annos ab incarnatione domini invenire possis etc., which is printed in full in Rose, Verzeichnis, 1, p. 283 (above, ch. 2, p. 289 n. 113), where are also references to other manuscripts), the annus praesens is dccxciii. For Borst’s views see his ‘Enzyklopedie v. 809’ and idem. Kalenderreform (above, ch. 2, p. 290 n. 114), with a reference in the first of these to my Karl der Grosse (1966/1979). If the ‘Encyclopedia of time-studies, 793 version’ (Borst’s title) was put together at Verona from material available there, it is difficult to understand why so little of this recurs in the very practical manual put together by Pacificus a quarter-of-a-century later (Florence, Bibl. Medicea-Laurenziana, pl. XVI. 39; G.G. Meersseman and E. Adda, Manuale di Computo con ritmo mnemotecnico dell’Arcidiacono Pacifico di Verona (+844), Italia Sacra 6; Padua, 1966). On textual grounds, the editors supposed that the excerpts from Bede’s De temporum ratione in the second part of the ‘Manuale’ were copied from the complete text in the Berlin manuscript, or perhaps from its exemplar: their own collations, and Jones’s for the DTR, are sufficent to throw considerable doubt on this.

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Court was to be found when not campaigning, in Austrasia or west Germany, rather than further south; although that hypothesis may yet be disproved!92 There is no comparable objection to supposing that the so-called libellus with its royal dedication was produced during Alcuin’s first years at the Court; and this would accord well with Einhard’s familiar account of Charles’s teachers, in which Alcuin is said to have given instruction in several subjects but particularly in astronomy. In the light of the subject-matter of the ‘astronomical’ text(s) in the Tours letter-collection manuscripts and by analogy with the Me legat antiquas headings of the two versions of Alcuin’s De orthographia, it could be that we have the heading composed or adapted for it, in the distich inc. Me legat annales: He reads me who wishes to know the cycles of the years, the passing of the seasons and likewise the stars in heaven.93

When Alcuin joined the Frankish Court he must also have had with him much of the material (as loose fiches or in a ‘commonplace book’ of excerpts?) from which the four books De laude Dei were subsequently organized, together with prayers of Insular origin that were left out of it, and perhaps brief texts on other topics, such as confession and penitence.94 In the letter-preface to his ‘Questions and Answers on Genesis’, written (I believe) a year or two later, he notes the difficulty of carrying around ‘a load of books’ when travelling and the importance of something to read; a decade and more later he was still complaining that books he wanted were available at York but not in Francia.95 92 Jones thought it ‘probable’ (Bedae Opera de temporibus, p. 371) that the opening chapter had been in the Irish computus used by Bede, providing him with much of the material for and wording of DTR c. 36. It figures in very varied contexts in early-ninth-century (and later) computus collections, including Geneva, Bibl. publ. et universitaire, 50 (Massay? 805 or later?), fols 165v–166; Vienna 387 (Salzburg) and Munich clm. 210 (upper Austria), i.e. the ‘3-book Court computus’, as Lib. I, item ‘xxxix’; and in Pacificus’s collection, with some disordering and additions at the beginning and end, as Lib. I no. xii (ed, Meersseman and Adda, pp. 97–9). 93 Me legat annales vult qui cognoscere ciclos/Tempora qui varia qui simul astra poli: Vatican BAV Pal. lat. 1448, fol. 1v, Milan Bibl. Ambrosiana M 12 sup., p. 46, etc., compare S.-K. no. 9481. Causas for ciclos seems to be of later date; the text in Strecker, MGH Poet. VI, p. 186 is incorrect. 94 Cf. above, ch. 1 at nn. 140, 141. 95 Epp. nos 80 (a summary text ut habeat fessus ex itenere viator quo se recreat, licet ex pondere portantis manus non gravetur), 121 (p. 177).

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The re-fashioned Court did not remain together for very long. Surprisingly late in the year, when winter had already begun, the king left Worms on the first stage of an expedition to Italy that was to last seven months. Queen Fastrada and the younger royal children remained behind, as (apparently) did several of the clerics who staffed the chapel and writing-office. Among these was Richulf, who was consecrated as archbishop of Mainz (left vacant by Lul’s death on 10 October 786) while the king was still absent.96 Other ‘courtiers’, including Alcuin’s best-documented friend in later years Arn, simultaneously abbot of St.-Amand and bishop of Salzburg, wintered in their church or monastery.97 Angilram, demonstrably, accompanied the king. Among the chaplains and clerics who also did so were (if the identification is correct) Alcuin’s Irish-born pupil Joseph, who stayed on in the peninsula after the king’s return north as a royal legate and negotiator. Another was the apparently native Italian notary Jacob who dictated (and wrote?) diplomas only for Italian recipients; still active in 792 (at Regensburg), he has been plausibly identified with the king’s famulus Iacobus who was responsible for putting into circulation the undistinguished Liber Medicinalis of Quintus Serenus and, less certainly, with the Jacob whose contributions to the collective Lucca manuscript, Bibl. Capitolare 490 (c. 798–816), include a correctly-attributed extract from one of Alcuin’s letters to the king.98 96 Fastrada etc.: ARF, Ann. q.d. Einh. s.a. 787 (where the latter’s et omnem comitatum seems to be the earliest usage of this term in any of the Carolingian-period annals [to be added to MLWB s.v.]). Richulf: his date of consecration (4 March 787) is provided by Marianus Scotus Chronicon, MGH SS V, p. 548, who evidently used a trustworthy older source; he states correctly that the day was a Sunday. 97 Arn and the abbot of Mondsee arrived in Rome ca. April 787 as envoys of the duke of Bavaria, ARF s.a., ed. Kurze, 74, other refs. BM2 286b. The bishop’s presence at the 786 Worms court is not securely demonstrable. On one interpretation of the palaeographical evidence, however, the copy of the Latin version of the acts of the VIth Oecumenical Council (680/81) in Vat. Reg. lat. 1040 (CLA I, 112) was made during the Roman visit by several scribes from Arn’s north-French abbey, St.-Amand: see Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen 2, pp. 64, 103 (no. ?46); but R. Riedinger, ‘Erzbischof Arn v. Salzburg und die Handschriften Vat. Regin. Lat. 1040 und Vindob. Lat. 418’, Mitt. d. Gesellschaft f. Salzburger Landeskunde, 124 (1984), 305–18, with the modifications in the introduction to his edition (ACO ser. 2, vol. 2/1 (1990), ix–xi), explains the conjunction of a Roman curial and St.Amand hands very differently. 98 Angilram in Italy: inferred from ep. no. 90, on which see below, Jacob: DK 1 nos 157, 158, 164, ?174, 175 (and p. 566), with Bresslau, Urkundenlehre 21 (1912), p. 377 n. 3, compare Tangl in AfD 2 (1909), 171–2; MGH Poet. I, pp. 97–8 (S.-K. no. 6202); Bullough, ‘Aula Renovata’, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 138–9, 157 (n. 50). The Alcuin letter in Lucca 490, at fols 321–23, is ep. no. 148 of shortly before July 798.

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Alcuin was evidently, and unsuprisingly, one of those who remained in Francia. The fact that the systematic retention or assembling of his letters had not yet begun largely denies us contemporary evidence for his contacts with others who had been drawn to the Court. It deprives us, too, of possible testimony to his activities as teacher or scholar, at a time when his only serious rival would probably have been Peter of Pisa—whose attitude may already have been a cause of concern to Alcuin and whom later he would not admit to having known!99 A letter to Damoetes, i.e. Archbishop Richulf, could none the less belong here: the characterisation of the addressee as someone called to be a ‘fisher of men’ accords best with his recent promotion, and the description of the qualities he should henceforward display supports this; and Alcuin is eagerly awaiting a letter. There are unmistakeable links with the language of the prologue of the great 789 royal capitulary; while the playfulness and assertions of intimacy in letters and a poem addressed to Richulf in the 790s and of ones to Richbod of Lorsch and Trier in the same years are here conspicuously lacking.100 An even stronger case can be made for dating the earliest of the extant letters to Paulinus of Aquileia to 787/788, with Alcuin’s years back in England (790–93) the possible but less likely alternative.101 The transmitted text is defective in different ways in its two manuscript-sources, the ‘English collection’ (A1) and the ‘basic Tours collection’ (K ). Accepting Jaffé’s and Dümmler’s reconstruction—which is not necessarily or even probably the version that was sent to Paulinus!—Alcuin proclaims a ‘love’ for him that physical apartness cannot diminish and asks to be particularly remembered whenever he celebrates the Eucharist; he trusts that relics that have long been promised, including one of ‘Christ’s life-giving cross’ will indeed be forthcoming; and if the alae fidei in 99

Ep. no. 172, on which see above; and compare Angilbert’s recalling of Richulf and Angilram (but not Alcuin) in his letter-poem of 790/91 to Peter (above). But he is usually identified with the Petrus to whom Alcuin sent greetings in ?779 in his poem Cartula, perge. 100 Ep. no. 4, from the H manuscripts only, the terminus post quem provided by the date of Richulf ’s consecration: its abrupt opening Qui iuxta mare is completely without parallel; has one of Alcuin’s usual formal introductory sentences been omitted in the copying? Compare with this letter the passage in MGH Capit. I no. 22 (p. 54) quoted below; ep. no. 26, together with carm. v (MGH Poet. I, p. 223), and ep. no. 25 (of 796?) to Richulf; epp. nos 13 and 49 to Richbod. A possible argument against so early a date, however, is the Virgilian by-name by which he is addressed. 101 Ep. no. 28. I hope to discuss the text of this letter more fully elsewhere.

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palatio regis who can bring them back are rightly explained as missi currently acting for the Frankish king in Italy, these are independently documented precisely in 787/8.102 Paulinus, now patriarcha, is reminded (vide quam sublime est hoc nomen) of the high responsibilities of that office, and the qualities he should display are expressed in a sequence of imperatives taken verbatim or as easily recognisable paraphrases (apparently influenced by earlier exegesis) from Prophets, Proverbs and the New Testament;103 there is no reference to the challenge of ‘Adoptionism’, the Spanish Christological heresy to which Frankish Court-scholars were reacting vigorously by ca. 790.104 The most probable occasion of Paulinus’s appointment to the patriarchate of Aquileia is (it is now generally agreed) during Charles’s time in the regnum Langobardorum and Rome;105 and Alcuin’s letter would have been written not long after news of this had reached him. Certainly in the latter part of 789, Alcuin wrote to an unfortunately unidentifiable correspondent asking that ‘a thousand greetings be conveyed to my beloved Bishop Willehad’, separation from whom he deeply regrets. Willehad, who died on November 8th of that year, had been consecrated to the bishopric of Bremen at Worms in July 787, shortly after Charles’s return from Italy; but he and Alcuin must have known one another in York, two decades earlier.106 102

Bullough ‘ “Aula Renovata”’, in: Carolingian Renewal, pp. 130, 140–1. Thus Prv 30.31 gallus succinctus lumbos et aries nec est rex qui resistat ei (a wellknown crux, since the Hebrew text is unintelligible here) becomes Tu gallus in praedicatione succinctus in castitate; tu aries in veritate fortissimus, cui nullus regum resistere poterit! The cue for this particular re-phrasing is surely Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Iob, XXX. iii (CCSL 143B, p. 1497), as excerpted by Bede, In Proverbia Salomonis, ed. D. Hurst (CCSL 119B [1983], pp. 146–7): Gallus succinctus lumbos, id est praedicatores sancti . . . qui succincti lumbos sunt quia a membris suis luxoriae fluxa restringunt; and Quem alium hoc loco arietem accipimus nisi primum intra ecclesiam ordinem sacerdotum . . ., the filii of which spiritaliter recteque viventibus nullus rex sufficit omnino resistere. 104 See below. 105 What seems to be the most reliable of the Aquileia episcopal lists (E. Klebel, ‘Zur Geschichte der Patriarchen von Aquileja’, Beiträge zur älteren europäischen Kulturgeschichte. Festscrift für R. Egger (Klagenfurt, 1952), pp. 418 ff.) credits him with a fifteen-year pontificate which would have ended in 802/3, his successor Ursus having a six- (five-) year pontificate before 810. Again, recent wordy accounts of Paulinus have nothing to offer on the chronological problem. 106 Ep. no. 6 (written in Francia, although preserved only in the main English collection; cf. the just-discussed letter to Paulinus); Vita Willehadi, cc. 1 (dispatch from York by King Alchred and a synod), 7 (refugee at Echternach, where he copied manuscripts), 8 (consecration at Worms on 13 July 787—which was a Friday, not a Sunday), 9, 10 (dedication of Bremen cathedral on [Sunday] 1 November 789 and death one week later), MGH SS II, pp. 380, 382, 383–4, AA SS Nov. iii, 843, 845, ?846, the consecration recorded also in Chron. Moiss. s.a. 787, MGH SS I, p. 298. (For a 103

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For the rest the evidence is necessarily inference from the language of later correspondence and, very occasionally, his verse: primarily in the letters sent from England after his return there in mid-790, but also (usually with caution) allusions to earlier years in those written in Francia after 793. One at least in this second group is unambiguous: a reference to Angilram, archbishop (of Metz) and principal chaplain (sanctae capellae primicerius) as the person through whom Alcuin had once ‘commended himself ’ to the community and abbot of S. Salvatore di Rieti (not far from Rome) and probably other monasteries. The York church’s, and Sigwulf ’s, contacts with Metz may have led to his early acquaintance with the archbishop; and poems sent to Vasco, a disciple of Angilram’s and his successor as abbot of St.-Avold, Metz (where the archbishop was buried after his death ‘in the field’ in October 791), on the completion of the monastic church’s reconstruction suggest close links in the late 780s. The letter of 795/6, however, is the only specific evidence of their past familiarity.107 Among letters in the first group is an epistiuncula to the (probably) royal chaplain and outstanding scribe Dag(u)lf: Alcuin addresses him as ‘beloved friend’ and scriniarius, and refers to him in the text of his letter, with a show of respect or gently mocking, as ‘your wisdom-of-age’ or even ‘your hoariness’!108 Most capellani in supposed second episcopal consecration on the same day, see K. Honselmann in AfD 30 (1984), 19: but the evidence is very thin.) When Alcuin writes Utinam videam eum et sit cursus vitae meae consummatus in peregrinatione, is he really asserting, as some modern translations have implied, that he ‘would die happily’ (an almost blasphemous echo of Io 19.28,30) if he could meet Willehad once more? or is he simply saying that a meeting would make perfect his (their) life ‘in exile from Northumbria’? 107 Ep. no. 90; carm. cii, MGH Poet. 1, 329–30, S.-K. (as two poems) nos 12123 and 1724; but see also the evidence of the royal Epistola de litteris colendis, discussed below. For the dating of ep. no. 90 and the identification of the congregatio to which it is addressed, see below ch. 4, p. 452 n. 65. Note that although Vasco—himself a levita—certainly seems to be the closer friend, the Bis septena carmina alluded to in carm. cii (2) are (contra Oexle in FmSt 1, 294) merely the fourteen lines of the preceding titulus, carm. cii (1). Vasco had sent to Alcuin two butristae (a nonce-word: for a possible etymology, see J. Hubschmid, Romanica Helvetica 54 (1955), 59–60) of wine, which filled fourteen goblets. Angilram’s death and burial: Ann. Laureshamenses s.a., ed. Pertz, MGH SS I, pp. 34–5; Metz episcopal list, ed. O. Holder-Egger in MGH SS XIII, p. 306. 108 Ep. no. 73: complete with address-clause only in the larger English collection in Tib., reduced to a formulary-text also in the ‘basic Tours collection’ (K ). Dated ‘c. 789–796’ by Dümmler, its dispatch from England (790 × 93) is established both by Alcuin’s reference to himself as longe positus and by the misrendering of Insular letter-forms in the head-note (lemma) in Tib., where it immediately follows the letter to the king’s daughters, quoted below: see above, Pt. I. This is the only example of canicies used as a form of address in the letters (in ep. no. 181 (p. 300 l. 14)

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the late 780s were probably Alcuin’s juniors in years. It would not be surprising, however, if he had found the most literate element at the Court to be his natural companions, whether or not he was himself regarded as a member of the Chapel—which neither these personal links nor his putative contribution to letters in the king’s name can establish (but in the contemporary context the issue is probably an unreal one); and they may also have provided him with scribes.109 An energetic nurturing of newly-formed friendships with leading figures at the Frankish Court is apparent in Alcuin’s correspondence during his three-year return visit to England (790–93). Written in the opening months are letters respectively to ‘Charles’s kinsman’ Abbot Adalhard of Corbie, and to Bishop Arn of Salzburg who was simultaneously abbot of northern-French St.-Amand. That to Adalhard is widely quoted because of its allusions to the political situation in his homeland and to the Frankish monarch’s difficulties with Offa of Mercia.110 Less attention has been paid to the earlier part of the letter. In the address-clause Alcuin describes himself (unusually but not uniquely) as the recipient’s germanus; he laments their physical separation and recalls the familiarity they have previously enjoyed. A consequence of this familiarity was that ‘your eloquent encouragement (consolatio eloquii tui ) made me feel that, with God’s mercy, I could start something worthwhile’, which suggests a rather different relationship between Alcuin and others in the Court circle than that usually supposed. He enlarges on this with the striking phrase ‘God, by His grace, inspired your mind to speak and prompted my will to listen’. The source of Alcuin’s distinctive language here is revealing: it is surely the recently-discovered De imagine Dei, in two key passages where, having simplified and adapted Augustine on the soul’s composition from the trinity of intellect, will and memory, its author draws an analogy between the Son’s being begotten of the Father and the will’s being born of the intellect, and then after further ‘argument’ declares that nec solus sufficit de eo intellectus, nisi fiat in amore eius voluntas.111 In return Alcuin expects to hear what is going on at the it is simply ClL. ‘old age’): but there are comparable usages in Claudian and again in the later tenth century. Dagulf is the principal scribe of the psalter written ?794/5 for presentation to Pope Hadrian, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek 1861. 109 Bullough, ‘Aula Renovata’ Carolingian Renewal, pp. 127–30. 110 Ep. no. 9, only in BL Cotton Tiberius A. xv (Tib.): for the propinquum Karoli head-note, cf. above, Pt. I. 111 Germanus: compare ep. no. 272, Olomundum . . . familiari pietate accepimus, quasi

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Frankish Court; and among those to whom he wishes greetings to be conveyed are Bishop George of Amiens, Angilbert the recentlyappointed abbot of St.-Riquier at Centula, and members of the community at Corbie.112 Alcuin’s letter to Arn (who also preserved a copy) is quite different in tone: addressed to a man who could only have been a few years younger than himself although he was later to characterize him as pater meritis, frater caritate, filius aetate,113 and using language partly taken (without acknowledgement) from Jerome, it initiates a fourteen-year sequence of expressions of passionate friendship, on Alcuin’s part at least, forged in the heady atmosphere of an élite group at a foreign Court. In contrastingly-cool terms he also asks to be remembered to a ‘colleague and friend’, Arn’s fellowBavarian Leidrad (the later bishop of Lyons).114 Among the letters included in the English manuscript-collections and dated by Dümmler—here, unusually, following Sickel—loosely to the years 789–796 are several others that almost certainly were written while Alcuin was back in Northumbria. Two of them, both very brief and the first entirely without literary embellishment or explicit Biblical quotation (epistiunculae, in fact), are addressed to younger members of the Frankish royal family: respectively, to the king’s teen-age daughters Rotruda and Berta, and to the equally teen-age Pippin, king in Italy.115 Writing to the girls, Alcuin recalls unius familiae germanum. For consolatio ‘help, encouragement’, compare e.g. Reg. Ben. 1, securi iam since consolatione alterius. De imagine Dei: ed. Marenbon, From the Circle of Alcuin, pp. 158–61, here p. 160. 112 Bishop George: see above; Angilbert: see above; but see now C. Villa, ‘Die Horazüberlieferung u. die “Bibliothek Karls des Grossen”’, DA 51 (1995), 29–52, especially 40–4, with the main bibliographical references at 40 (n. 22). 113 Ep. no. 193 of ?autumn 798. Accepting the usual identification with the Freising deacon who witnesses documents there from 765 onwards (ed. Bitterauf, no. 23) and was presbyter in the same church in 776 (ed. Bitterauf, no. 72), he can hardly have been born later than ca. 750 and possibly some years previously, although he lived until 821. 114 Ep. no. 10, Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/6, quoted above, with the characterization of McGuire, Friendship and Community, p. 118; for the use of Jerome, see ch. 2, p. 264 and esp. n. 38. The ‘recipient’s copy’ of Alcuin’s letter, in Vienna Nat. bibl. cod. 808, preserves final clauses omitted in the English collections. 115 Epp. nos 72, 29, the third and first of a group of three letters to ‘royals’ in Tib. (above, Pt. I). No. 72 has in its opening the characteristically late-Latin usage of dilectio et pietas, pietas here in the sense of ‘charity, kind behaviour’ as, on its own, in epp. nos 29 and perhaps no. 15 (to Gisla: below); for pietas in its earlier sense, although directed of course to the Christian God, compare ep. no. 98 (to a duke). Alcuin’s ‘we shall be faithful workers together (cooperatores) . . . in earnest [al. assiduous] prayer (orationum instantia)’ in ep. no. 72 is essentially Vulg. NT. (Io 8, Phil

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the ‘affection and kindness’ which they have previously shown to him (shades of Lewis Carroll!) and promises to support them with prayers and brotherly love. His wider purpose is clearly to maintain, even in absentia, his standing at the Frankish Court, above all with the man he calls ‘my lord David’: what will subsequently become the standard by-name for King Charles here makes its first appearance in Alcuin’s correspondence (and perhaps anywhere), although the Old Testament David had been an exemplar of kingship for at least two centuries, most recently in Cathwulf ’s letter to Charles.116 The even-briefer letter to Pippin, addressed to him as eximiae dignitatis iuvenis as well as king, nowhere suggests that he and Alcuin were personally acquainted: it was prompted by the need to recommend a priest (another argument for its having been written from Northumbria) who was visiting Italy. It concludes with two lines of verse the opening words of which, Vive Deo felix, Alcuin had almost certainly picked up at York.117 To the step-mother of the young king and

2.25 etc.) and Patristic generally, although the particular combination appears to be found only later, as (e.g.) in Lanfranc of Bec and Canterbury’s commentary on Rm 8.28: non solum orationis cooperator est Spiritus Sanctus in his qui diligunt Deum etc. 116 Thus, in poetic and prose addresses to Merovingian kings in the late-sixth and early-seventh centuries: Anton, Fürstenspiegel u. Herrscherethos, pp. 51–3; for Fortunatus’s carm. VI. 2 (ed. Leo, pp. 131–4), see also Judith George’s excellent notes to her translation in Venantius Fortunatus: Personal and Political Poems (Liverpool, 1995), pp. 34–8; and note that the only extant copy of the acts of the council of Clichy (626/7), where the address to Chlothar II includes the phrase velut illi David et regni imperium (Concilia Galliae A.511–A.695, ed. de Clercq, p. 291), is in the late-eighthcentury Salzburg manuscript, Munich clm. 5508 (CLA IX, 1247). The principal references to the OT. King David in Isidore are collected in Anton, Fürstenspiegel u. Herrscherethos, pp. 56, 59; for Papal letters (all in the Codex Carolinus) in which King Pippin I and his achievements are compared with David, see MGH Epist. III, pp. 505, 540 (anointed and the founder of a dynasty), 552 etc.; Cathwulf: MGH Epist. IV, pp. 502–5. Despite Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship, p. 77 and Index s.v. (p. 155), Bede’s commentary In Samuelem I, ed. D. Hurst (CCSL 119, pp. 226–70) has nothing on David’s (as distinct from Saul’s) kingship, while custos capitis (I Sm 28.2; Bede cit., p. 253) is simply our ‘bodyguard’ and unlikely to have the further associations suggested there; and the name of David does not occur in HE except in Pope Gregory’s responses to Augustine and in two quotations from Adomnan’s account of the Holy Places. 117 S.-K. nos 17446–17452 are couplets or short poems which begin Vive Deo felix, all but two of them ‘signing off’ letters written by Alcuin; the exceptions are respectively in Theodulf ’s Bibles and—the earliest of all—the conclusion of the unique letter from Archbishop Ælberht-Coena to Lul (above, ch. 2). A letter to Pippin in 796, ep. no. 119, concludes with four lines of verse beginning Vive Deo florens (S.-K. no. 17453).

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princesses, Queen Fastrada, no letter exists.118 The ‘personal’ collection preserves a much longer and more elaborate letter to the king’s ‘much loved’ sister Gisla, abbess of the Merovingian-founded double-monastery at Chelles, which was evidently writtten during the last months or even weeks of Alcuin’s stay.119 Referring in his initial exordium to being cheered ‘by your friendly good feelings’ or perhaps even ‘prayerful good feelings’ (tuae familiaritatis pietate)’, Alcuin recalls that he had made a pactum caritatis with her, expressed subsequently in supportive prayer.120 The declared hope that he will soon be in her presence, together with the rhetorical expression of his compliments on the education from which she has benefitted since her earliest years and the assumption that she is a regular reader of both the Scriptures and their Patristic commentators (doctores), shows that his relationship with Gisla was on a different plane from that with the royal children. But it is also very different from that with male members of the Court: neither here nor in subsequent letters, even when he had been encouraged to expressions of greater warmth, did he use the familiar language of ‘friendship’—a constraint imposed, it may be, by her sex rather than her royal blood.121 118 Charles’s own letter to Fastrada, MGH Epist. IV, pp. 528–9 (uniquely in the St.-Denis manuscript, Paris BNF lat. 2777, the source also of the Cathwulf letter) of autumn/winter 791, complaining that she has not written to him, shows that her step-daughters were with her at Regensburg while the king was ‘at the front’. Note that although the letter reports the performance of litanies, penitential fasting (with the possibility of monetary commutation) etc. by the royal host, and recommends that the queen should consult with her ‘court’ about what similar actions they should take, it does not include a single Biblical citation. 119 Ep. no. 15. The early history of the house is summarized in F. Prinz, Frühes Mönchtum im Frankenreich, 2nd edn (Munich, 1988), pp. 174–5; manuscripts (overwhelmingly Patristic) identifiable as probably written there in the eighth and earlyninth centuries were the subject of a seminal study by B. Bischoff, ‘Die Kölner Nonnenhandschriften und das Skriptorium von Chelles’, MaSt 1, 16–34. The earlyCarolingian Vita Bertilae (MGH SSRM VI, pp. 5–109) could well have been composed during Gisla’s abbacy; it is acceptable evidence that the community was still a double one (monk-priests and nuns). 120 On Alcuin’s vocabulary for reciprocal prayer in early letters, see above, ch. 2, p. 315 n. 198. For his use of pietas, compare above, n. 115. 121 So McGuire, Friendship, pp. 125–6. But his assertion (p. 125) that ‘Like his anglo-saxon predecessors [Alcuin] did not use the word amicitia in addressing women’ is mistaken. Writing to the ‘pious woman’ Hundrada at the Mercian royal court (ep. no. 62), he declares that from her greetings and gifts in te agnovi condictç olim amicitiae bonum abundare memoriam; and in a later letter to Gisla (ep. no. 216 of 801), having recalled that semper ab initio cognitionis vestrae optime nostris partibus vestrum bonitatem fidelem invenimus, Alcuin continues by thanking God who has granted him tam indignis, tam clarae dignitatis et tam probatae fidei . . . amicitiam.

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Notably different, and unusual on several counts, is a letter addressed to a high-ranking layman jointly with his wife, regrettably unnamed. Its manuscript context, in the early part of the English Tiberius collection immediately before a letter to a Mercian abbot, Alcuin’s claim that other peoples’ reports of their qualities have been confirmed recently by direct acquaintance with them (a nobismetipsis novissime experte fuerunt), his remark that among the benefits to be derived from their mutual affection is seculare subsidium—apparently material reward, not merely moral support—and the letter’s explicitly admonitory character: all might seem to point to a Northumbrian locus, the recipient being among the potentes with whom Alcuin tried to work in 790. This would, indeed, give real point to his further comment that while it is right to serve an earthly king devotedly, seculare servitium is often uncertain and is terminated by death, unlike service to the Heavenly King. However, the head-note reads epistola . . . ad quendam ducem et ad uxorem illius in Francia; and Alcuin’s defensiveness (which I do not find elsewhere in his writings) about giving advice as a foreigner, alienigena, someone who was subject to a different ‘law’—yet Moses listened to the Midianite Jethro, whose daughter had borne him a son called Gershom ‘a stranger in a foreign land (advena in terra aliena)’—confirms this.122 Furthermore, the unique designation ‘leader and law-giver(?)’, which is evidently intended analogically for the male addressee although applied to Moses,123 suggests 122

Ep. no. 69. Unlike seculare servitium, seculare subsidium seems not to occur elsewhere in the letters. However, in his ‘Commentary on St. John’s Gospel’, Bk. VII, cc. xliv–xlv (PL cols 100, 102B), Alcuin temporarily interrupts his otherwise verbatim copying of Bede’s Homil. II, 22 (ed. Hurst, p. 345) with an abbreviated paraphrase beginning SAECULARIBUS quoque SUBSIDIIS eos quantum valeat adiuvare, where Bede’s fuller text speaks of a rector’s obligation to ensure that his subjects do not lack terrena subsidia. Bede himself in his account of the Germanic invasions in HE I 15 has the phrase pro accipiendis alimentorum subsidiis aeternum subituri servitium (which he would not have found in Gildas’s De excidio, c. 25 or 23), which is the part ‘source’ of ‘York poem’s’ lines 61–3, exercitus . . ./ venerat . . ./ subsidium sociis referens, although both context and meaning are different. Interestingly, Peter of Pisa in his De nomine dicit Donatus: ‘Partes orationis sunt octo’, probably composed during his years at the Frankish Court, unusually uses advena for a first-declension noun paradigm: see Berlin Diez B. Sant. 66 (facsimile edition; Graz, 1973), p. 71 lines 6–13. 123 Dümmler prints dux et legista, which would be remarkable if true, since legista is not otherwise recorded before the twelfth century, when it is used of the ‘commentator on Roman law’; but in the manuscript, which the editor had not himself seen, the letters after legis are es (the former certain, the latter very probable) followed by a badly-damaged letter which might be a t (as Dr. Michelle Brown has kindly confirmed). I do not know what the original manuscript reading might have been. Carolingian usage and context suggest legis lator or even legis scriptor: for the

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a magnate responsible for one of the major subordinate territories in the Carolingian dominions. Certainty is obviously impossible: but a plausible identification would be with Gerold, brother of the deceased Queen Hildegard (mother of Pippin, Rotruda, Berta etc.), who in 790/791 replaced the deposed Duke Tassilo as comes and Baioariae praefectus and whose death in action in 799 was to prompt both a letter of lament to Archbishop Arn and (probably) an epistola consolatoria to the king, although his name does not figure in either.124 The letter concludes with a list of the qualities and virtues in this world that follow from an observance of ‘the two Commandments on which hang all the Law and the Prophets’, providing a partial pattern for Alcuin’s admonitions to other lay persons over the next decade.125

Renovatio, Imitatio, Correctio The few letters attributable to the (late) 780s nowhere allude, even obliquely, to Alcuin’s involvement in teaching; and the earliest retrospective reference to his time at the Court, in the letter to Adalhard, reveals him as a learner rather than as a teacher.126 It must none the less be in those years, if the earlier part of the decade is ruled out, that Angilbert was briefly Alcuin’s spiritual filius; and that Abbot Richbod was his discipulus and studied sacred letters (sacrarum litterarum latter compare Cicero De inv. 2.47, Vg. Dt 31.9 (scripsit itaque Moses legem hanc et tradidit eam sacerdotibus), and the prologue to the eighth-century Lex Baiuuariorum. But preferable, perhaps, is emending to legifer, a standard epithet for Moses since Tertullian and Lactantius, in verse since Prudentius and Paulinus of Nola, and used by Alcuin himself in dedicatory poems for Bibles: see Blaise, Dictionnaire, s.v., p. 491; Paul. Nol. carm. xxii, 39, Legifer antiquo venerandus nomine Moyses (ed. Hartel, CSEL 30, 188); Alcuin, carm. lxix (MGH Poet. I, p. 288), line 35, Legifer ille pius quicquid iam scripserat olim, also line 72. Moses himself is never dux in Vg. Exodus or any other OT book. The epithet was common usage, however, in eighth-century Northumbria: see (i.a.) Bede, In Lucam VI (xii, 15), ed. Hurst, CCSL 120, pp. 376–7, Moyse quippe mortuo Iosue dux ordinatur quia lege traditionibus Pharisaeorum corrupta Christus incarnatur; and Alcuin carm. lxix, line 64. 124 For Gerold and his relatives see M. Mitterauer, Karolingische Markgrafen im Südosten: Fränkische Reichsaristokratie und bayerischer Stammesadel im österreichischen Raum, Archiv für österreichische Geschichte, Bd. 123 (Vienna, 1963), pp. 8–13, with my corrections and alternative interpretations in EHR 85 (1970), 78–9, and the precise summary in ArtLexMA 4 (1987–9), 1350–1 (W. Störmer). The letters on the death of Gerold (and almost simultaneously of Duke Eric of Friuli) are epp. nos 185 and 198. 125 For these letters and some of their implications, see Bullough, ‘Alcuin and Lay Virtue’, pp. 71–91, Preaching and Society in the Middle Ages, eds L. Gaffuri and R. Quinto (Padua, 2002). 126 See above.

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studium desiderabile) with him, both of which he was accused some time later of neglecting for Virgil. (Contrary to what is commonly asserted, Alcuin’s carefully-crafted letter to Richbod as ‘monk and bishop’ in ?794/5(in.) does not say that they had read the poetry of Virgil together, still less that this was part of his teaching; and while the first of these may be implicit, it is hardly self-evident that it is: indeed, Alcuin’s rhetorical climax ‘Flaccus is away, Virgil has come and Maro has nested in the master’s place’ suggests rather the opposite.)127 Contemporary evidence finally emerges at the very end of the decade, however, for his membership of the circle of scholars and poets aspiring to emulate the achievements of Ancients and Fathers, and for a direct involvement in the royally-directed correction and renewal of Church and kingdom. The inter-weaving of literary activity, pedagogy and public policy is one of Charles’s court’s most striking features; and if Alcuin’s part is hardly the familiar ‘headship of a palace school’, it is not less significant in its outcome.128 The first and most substantial part of the manuscript now Bern, Burgerbibliothek, cod. 212 is an early-ninth-century Mainz text of a Court-connected handbook of ‘secular letters’ that was to be widely copied during the next two centuries.129 At an unknown date this was combined with a previously independent libellus of sixteen folios, evidently designed for display rather than for use in a school-room 127 Ep. no. 13 (pp. 38–9); and note the rhythm of Fl[accus] recessit, Virgilius accessit at in loco [locum codd.] magistri nidificat Maro. A subtle and complex analysis of the letter, which does not entirely persuade me, is offered by Edelstein, Eruditio et Sapientia, pp. 99–100, who argues for the ‘implicit’ interpretation in his n. 63. He may well be right, however, that semper ante oculos luderem tuos is a deliberate allusion to Prv 8.30–31, where Wisdom is proclaiming herself the link between God and His Creation. Unlike sapientia sanctarum scripturarum etc., the term sacrae litterae is not part of Alcuin’s regular vocabulary, and what he understood as their scope is not clear; they can perhaps be equated with the subject-matter of Cassiodorus’s Institutiones Bk. I, or more specifically its chs 1–24. See below, pp. 399–400 n. 217, for the date of the letter. 128 Compare almost any ‘biography’ of Alcuin or account of Charlemagne’s Court: but also, and especially, Godman, Poetry and Politics, ch. 2, esp. pp. 55–63, even when I interpret very differently the texts on which he relies. 129 The fullest description of the manuscript is still that of O. Homburger, Die Illustrierten Handschriften der Burgerbibliothek Bern (Bern, 1962), pp. 162–3, who dated it much too late; for this and other corrections see the writings of Schaller, Polara and Bischoff, cited next note. For the ‘handbook’, of which the principal item is Cassiodorus’s Institutiones Book II in its second interpolated version, see R.A.B. Mynors’ introduction to his edition of the Institutiones (Oxford, 1937), pp. xxx–xxxv, Bischoff, ‘Hofbibliothek’, pp. 155–6 (Engl. transl. p. 62) and Bullough, ‘Charlemagne’s Court library re-visited’; for the character and origin of its version of Inst. II, see P. Courcelle, ‘Histoire d’un brouillon Cassiodorien’, RevEtAnc 44 (1942), 65–86.

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and penned by three (or more) scribes of different formation, working together not far from or even at Aachen at the end of Charlemagne’s reign or in the early years of his son’s. The texts they copied—even ‘facsimiled’—are the contrived picture-poems, carmina figurata, composed by the fourth-century Optatianus Porfyrius to gain the Emperor Constantine’s favour, followed by seven other similarly decorative and technically-skilled poems, found only here: two of these are compositions of Alcuin’s, framing four by his pupil Joseph; the seventh is credited to a another member of the Court circle, the ‘Goth’ Theodulf.130 The conjunction of these three men and the internal evidence of the poems argues that they were composed and first written down c. 788/90. The poets were inspired and challenged by the Porfyrian corpus, and almost certainly also by the sixth-century Venantius Fortunatus’s related cross-poems.131 The multiple-acrostic form with internal designs, making ‘a double appeal to the mind and to the eye, provide[s] an ambitious poet with a unique opportunity to display his virtuosity’; the Frankish Court in the late 780s was evidently also able to provide a scribe or scribes who possessed the calligraphic skills to match that virtuosity.132 The first poem of Alcuin’s, inc. Crux, decus es mundi (carm. vi), is constructed from thirtyseven hexameter lines each of thirty-seven letters (of which there is a single example in Porfyrius’s carmina), plus acrostic, mesostich, telestich 130 D. Schaller, ‘Die karolingischen Figurengedichte des cod. Bern. 212’ [1960], Studien zur lateinischen Dichtung des Frühmittelalters, Qu. u. Untersuchungen z. lateinischen Philologie des M.a.s., Bd. 11 (Stuttgart, 1995), pp. 1–26, 399–403 [important addenda and corrigenda]. Bischoff, who was for long unwilling to locate the production of Bern, Burgerbibl., cod. 212 pt. ii, at the Aachen Court, says in his posthumous Katalog, 1, no. 553 ‘Entstehungsort unbekannt (Hof?), Beziehungen zu Saint-Amand und Mainz’; for earlier views, see his entry in the Karl der Grosse—Werk und Wirkung Exhibition Catalogue (Aachen, 1965), no. 362 (and ibid. no. 365), with the unfortunate misprint ‘Nordwestfrankreich’ for ‘Nordwestdeutschland’ (or perhaps ‘Nordostfrankreich’) and ‘Das benedektinische Mönchtum und die Überlieferung der klassischen Literatur’, SMGBO 92 (1981), p. 170 n. 17 (Engl. transl., ‘Benedictine monasteries and the survival of classical literature’, p. 139 n. 17, where the words ‘written at Mainz’ have been improperly inserted); also pers. comms., 1985–89. Optatianus: ed. E. Kluge (Teubner; Leipzig, 1926); ed. G. Polara, Publii Optatiani Porfyrii Carmina (Turin etc., 1973), with a detailed account of Bern cod. 212, fols 111–22, at p. viii. Alcuin, MGH Poet. I, pp. 152–9, 224–7, 480–2. 131 The earliest extant manuscript of the cross-poems (Venantius, carm. II. 4 and 5: MGH AA IV/i, pp. 30–3), in which they are written in uncial with the acrostic-verses picked out in red, is the St.-Denis (and Dungal)-connected ‘school canon’ book, Milan, Ambr. C. 74 sup. (Glauche, Schullektüre, pp. 31–2). 132 Godman, Poets and Emperors, p. 56; Bullough, ‘Charlemagne’s Court-library revisited’.

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and four diagonals, the latter forming a lozenge that encloses—as mandorla?—the central cross; they are metrically correct almost throughout and use very few aberrant spellings.133 In its first nineteen lines it essays, unusually among Alcuin’s verses, a complex theological statement about the Cross as an instrument of salvation on which Christ, God and King, shed His blood and died that fallen man might be redeemed (Rector in orbe tuis sanavit saecla sigillis).134 Yet direct reflections of New Testament language are surprisingly rare; and there are no very specific links with Alcuin’s own mass De sancta Cruce, although there are several possible echoes in the poem of the distinctive ‘Old Gelasian’ mass for the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.135 Furthermore, the formulaic final and initial feet that Alcuin often took over from earlier poets and which recur so frequently in his verses are very much the exception, and ones not found elsewhere surprisingly numerous—caeleste tribunal (l. 2), hostia fixa (l. 4), even ille redem[p]tor (l. 33), among others.136 In the more obviously Porfyrian 133 Porfyrius’s most favoured line-length is 35 letters, which is that also of Fortunatus’s carm. II 4 and 5 (last note); lines of 34, 36 or 38 letters, which are almost equally common in Vergilian hexameters, are incompatible with a true mesostich. The spellings Iessu and redemtor are not entirely unprecedented. 134 The fullest analysis is that of H.B. Meyer, ‘Crux decus es mundi. Alkuins Kreuzund Osterfrömmigkeit’, Paschatis Sollemnia. Studien zu Osterfeier und Osterfrömmigkeit ed. B. Fischer and J. Wagner (Basel-Freiburg-Vienna, 1959), pp. 96–107; but see also H.-G. Müller, Hrabanus Maurus «De laudibus sancta[sic] crucis», Beihefte zum “Mittellateinischen Jahrbuch 11 (Düsseldorf, 1973), pp. 130–1. For notions of the cleansing efficacy of the blood shed on the Cross in Alcuin’s later writings, see Celia M. Chazelle, ‘To whom did Christ pay the price? the soteriology of Alcuin’s epistola 307’, Proceedings of the PMR Conference (Villanova University) 14 (1989), 43–62, with the other texts cited there in nn. 9, 32 and 47. 135 For NT ‘sources’ compare, however, lines 6–7 (. . . ligni venerabilis ore/ absolvendo trahit praedam carnale ligamen) with, especially, I Pt 2.24; and Hbr 11.22 and 12.1–3 are the probable basis for Joseph as a figure of Christ in line 16. The Gelasian mass is II. lvi, ed. Wilson, p. 198, Mohlberg nos 1023–25. Alcuin’s mass is Sacramentaire Grégorien, ed. Deshusses, 2, no. 9 (p. 44). The super oblata and the Praefatio are regarded as Alcuin’s own compositions; his collect is the Sacramentary of Trent’s alternative one for the Feast of the Exaltation. The Secreta in ‘Trent’ begins Haec hostia quaesumus Domine (and not Haec oblatio Domine, Alc.) and continues mundet nostra delicta quae in ara crucis immolate totius mundi tulit offensa, where Alcuin has purget offensis, quae in ara crucis etiam totius mundi tulit offensa. Compare, therefore, the poem’s lines 3–4, Victor tollendo mala . . ./ Xristus, nostra cruci grandis en hostia fixa, and lines 6–7, quoted above. 136 L. 1’s final sanguine sancto is not recorded until much later, although sanguine sacro is quite common (including Alcuin himself ); caeleste seems never to be used as a fifth foot in early verse. Hostia fixa is otherwise unrecorded, although hostia viva is a line-ending in a later, probably English, hymn (S.-K. no. 5629) and the first two feet of fourth/fifth-century verses; Hostia summa patris pretioso sanguine Christus is the fifth line of ‘Alcuin’ carm. cxvii (a), which according to Schaller (‘Bemerkungen zur

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thirty-five line second poem, inc. Magna quidam pavido, Alcuin quickly overcomes his proclaimed self-doubts, and proceeds to acclaim his royal patron’s triumphs—without any specific Christian colouring— and future greatness; and he does so with ‘an array of classical and metaphorical terms for the act of composition’ repeated only rarely in later verse, even in isolation.137 The element of Roman revivalism, an early foreshadowing of Frankish ‘empire’, must not be overstated. None of the characteristic later terminology occurs in the poem; Constantine is neither named nor recognisably alluded to. Flavius Anicius Carlus, with which the rubricated verses 9, 18 and 27 begin, is found only here; and although Flavius is one of Constantine’s epithets in, e.g., the Constitutum Constantini, it had been adopted as a title by Visigothic and Lombard kings; while Anicius is unique in such a context and not satisfactorily explained.138 If there are ‘implicit parallels’ with Constantine or any of his successors in Alcuin’s verses, they would surely have been apparent only to a select few fellowscholars—those also familiar with Porfyrius’s carmina.139 The ‘great king’s’ nurturing of the literary (and artistic) renewal that now characterises his Court can indeed be celebrated without a specific model; Inschriften-Sylloge von Urbana’ [1976], Studien zur Lateinischen Dichtung, pp. 188–92 and idem, p. 373) is probably in fact an inscription of Italian origin of which a copy was among Alcuin’s ‘raw material’ for his own compositions. Redemptor is not part of the language of Ambrosian hymnody; Theodulf is among the first to use it as a line-ending (although never with ille). For Alcuin’s apparently novel usage of corona (l. 37; also carm. vii, l. 10), see Müller, Hrabanus Maurus, pp. 130–31. 137 Godman, Poets and Emperors, p. 59. Similar language will be found in, e.g., carm. xiv, MGH Poet. I, pp. 237–8 (S.-K. no. 11901, addressed to one of Charles’s sons. Burghardt, Philologische Untersuchungen, pp. 181–2, questioned Alcuin’s authorship, partly because of its vocabulary and partly because it is too good metrically! But its manuscript transmission—Munich, clm. 18375 (a Tegernsee book but not written there and possibly imitating west-Frankish hands, and the lost Regensburg manuscript known to Forster, as well as Q—strongly favours authenticity; and ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, line 1319, is rather closer to carm. xiv, lines 1 + 15, than is Neff, Gedichte Paulus no. xxiii (which I deny to Alcuin) line 4. 138 Schaller, ‘Karolingischen Figurengedichte’, Studien zur lateinischen Dichtung, pp. 16–17, 400–1, with references to other literature; for Flavius in the Constitutum (not referred to by Schaller), see Constitutum Constantini, ed. H. Fuhrmann (Fontes Iuris Germani Antiqui x; Hanover, 1968), lines 2 and 305. The two courtiers Richulf and Angilbert are addressed as Flavius in Alcuin’s epp. nos 25 (probably of 796) and 162 (not before 796) respectively. 139 Thus, O lux Ausonidum (l. 7) = Porf. carm. XVI, 38, cf. carm. XV, x (Ausoniae decus, o lux pia Romulidum, both naming Constantine; with suscipe . . . Dryadum de nomine Musas (l. 28) compare Porf. carm. XXVII, 5 (dryadumque choros) +12 (animavit Marsyas Musas). But resonato fistula laudes/Lege et Castalia (ll. 19–20) is anticipated by ‘York poem’ ed. Godman, line 1438, Castalida instituens alios resonare cicuta.

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Alcuin, with his fellow-poets, is there to do so with an exuberance of language lacking in the poems of his Italian predecessors.140 Royal authority and acquisitiveness and the resident scholars’ curiosity now regularly enhanced the Court book-collection: typically, with works that enlarged the framework of inquiry as well as the vocabulary of its users, and were to have more enduring consequences than Porfyrian imitatio. One of them is the De imagine Dei or (in some later-medieval copies) De dignitate conditionis humanae, an exegetic ‘meditation’, prompted by Gn 1.26 ‘We have made Man in our image and likeness’, about Man’s potential for Godlikeness, which none the less requires individual effort for its fulfilment. Deriving in part from Augustine’s parallelling of the divine Trinity with the human mind or soul, it probably originated in southern Gaul in the ?fifth/sixth centuries. The shorter of two versions (the original one?), typically four to six manuscript pages, circulated widely from the last decade of the century, the longer of the two from at latest the second quarter in the ninth century.141 Alcuin’s possible familiarity with it before he returned to Northumbria in 790 has already been noted; and Book I of the Opus Caroli regis contra synodum (the so-called Libri Carolini ), composed by Theodulf ca. 791/2, includes two substantial quotations that follow directly on a correctly-attributed short passage from Ambrose’s De fide.142 Early copies and quotations by other writers have close links with the Frankish Court. Before the end of the century, the circle of Alcuin’s disciples at Tours may already have regarded the De imagine Dei as their master’s own work. Whether he had in fact been responsible for its emergence from obscurity a decade or so earlier, and if so where he had found it, remain uncertain. There is less ambiguity about the ‘re-publication’ of the De categoriis decem or Paraphrasis Themistiana, a late-fourth-century Latin version of Aristotle’s work on the Categories. Isidore had used brief extracts from it in the second Book of his Etymologiae, but it has no known history in the intervening one-and-half centuries.143 Alcuin,

140 Compare especially the Versus Petri [sc. Pisani ] in laude regis, inc. Culmina si regum, ed. Neff, Gedichte Paulus, pp. 159–62 (nr. xxxviii). Despite Neff, this could well have been written in the 780s, while Peter was still at the Court; its unique manuscriptsource is Paris, BNF lat. 528. 141 See Bullough, ‘Charlemagne’s Court-library re-visited’. 142 Alcuin’s ep. no. 9; Opus Caroli regis, I.7, ed. Freeman, pp. 138–40, cf. ibid., ‘Einleitung’, pp. 65–6. 143 Ed. L. Minio-Paluello, Aristoteles Latinus I/1 (Bruges, 1961), pp. 133–75;

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who regarded it as a work of Augustine’s (as translator), not improbably on the basis of a heading in his manuscript-source, added— without including his own name—a ten-line prefatory poem, inc. Continet iste decem naturae verba libellus before offering it to the king whom he hails, as his teacher Ælberht previously, as a ‘devotee and admirer of Learning (sophiae)’.144 The Paraphrasis is one of several ‘philosophical’ texts used by Theodulf in the composition of the Opus Caroli, where it is twice cited verbatim: firstly, on the notion of Simultaneity, with a specific attribution to Augustine; and secondly, on the convertibility of statements. It is also the ultimate source or inspiration of a third passage, explaining how the (cardinal) Virtues occupy a mid-point between two opposed evils. Here, however, Theodulf uses a re-phrasing by Alcuin, from which the grecisms of the original had been eliminated, which he was later to incorporate in his De dialectica—evidence so far unique that his pedagogy in that area goes back to his first period of residence in Francia. Not improbably, the Court manuscript of the Paraphrasis already had fragments of Alcuin’s teaching-material on Dialectic attached to it.145 The definitive text of the De dialectica, composed in the mid-790s, was to draw extensively on the older work. The latter’s impact subsequently on ‘beginners’ in philosophy was all that its late-Antique author(s) could have hoped for. Its widespread copying and dissemination ensured that for generations to come students in the West approached the problem of the Categories though a work which is best described as ‘a summary [of Aristotle] interspersed with commentary’; and indeed it is the divergences from the original work, Marenbon, From the Circle of Alcuin, pp. 20–3 is a concise and clear account of its contents. Themistius died ca. 388; the documented circle of his disciples in the next generation centres on Vettius Agorius Praetextus. For Isidore’s (limited) use of the De cat. in Etym. II 26, 13 and 14, see P.K. Marshall, Isidorus Hispalensis: Etymologiae II (Paris, 1983), p. 123 notes. 144 Carm. lxxiii, MGH Poet. I, p. 295, ed. Minio-Paluello, Aristoteles Latinus, p. lxxxvii (S.-K. no. 2716); compare line 9, Quem tibi rex magnus sophiae sectator amator, with carm. ii (Poet. 1, 206–7) line 4, Qui semper sophiae magnus amator erat. Headings asserting Alcuin’s authorship do not figure in the earliest manuscripts, the oldest of all being the Leidrad of Lyons manuscript (from a Court exemplar), Rome, Casa Madre dei Padri Maristi s. n. (CLA IV, 417), fol. 28v; they occur, however, in several of mid/late-ninth-century date. Additions to Minio-Paluello’s listing of manuscript testimonies (pp. lxxx–lxxxiii) are in S.-K.; add further Gotha, Forschungs- u. Landesbibl., Cod. membr. I 58 (Mainz, s. x2), fol. 1v. 145 Opus Caroli regis, ed. Freeman, pp. 108–9, 146–8, 327–8; ibid. ‘Einleitung’, pp. 60–1. For teaching-material from the Court combined with other texts, see Bullough, ‘Charlemagne’s Court-library re-visited’.

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making it ‘far more sympathetic to the concerns and aims of most thinkers’ in the ninth and tenth centuries, that largely accounts for its popularity.146 The six-line poem, inc. Gens Bragmanna quidem miris quae moribus extat/ Hic legitur, with which Alcuin prefaced a combined edition of the letters supposedly exchanged between Alexander and Dindimus, king of the Brahmans, and the equally pseudo Paul-Seneca correspondence, includes his name in the form Albinus but no (other) chronological indication; and the oldest manuscripts, although not improbably directly dependent on the Court dedication-copy, are hardly earlier than the 820s.147 It does, however, hint at why a modern monarch may find something of interest in the ‘pagan’ text: Alcuin, like later readers, was evidently attracted by the Brahmans’ moral stance and perhaps also by the passages in which philosophermonarchs are characterised. Indeed, in the St.-Germain-des-Prés codex (Brussels, Bibl. Royale, 2839–42) which has the earliest and only complete copy of the joint edition, it is sandwiched between a small pastoral-theological collection (Augustine, Eraclius, Chrysostom)

146 Marenbon, From the Circle of Alcuin, pp. 16–17. Marenbon’s ‘nineteen manuscripts of the paraphrase from these two centuries . . . many of them with extensive glosses’ is slightly too low a figure: compare Minio-Paluello’s list (at n. 146). Not all of them retain Alcuin’s poem; but interestingly, I have never seen a text of the De categoriis claimed for Alcuin on the strength of it, either in a manuscriptcopy or in a medieval library-catalogue. Equally noteworthy are the major ninthcentury libraries which cannot be shown to have had a copy, among them Lorsch and Corbie. 147 Poem: carm. lxxxi, MGH Poet. I, p. 300; ed. C.W. Barlow, Epistolae Senecae ad Paulum et Pauli ad Senecam (quae vocantur) (American Academy, 1938), p. 96 (S.-K. no. 5562). Alcuin is Puplius Albinus in his carm. iv and carm. vii (one of the figurepoems), Albinus already in ep. no. 2 as well as in later letters and poems. Quae tibi, magne decus mundi et clarissime Caesar (l. 5) might be a pointer to a later date, although I have not noted any other example of the epithet Caesar in letters or poems; but compare Porfyrius’s Sancte, tui vatis, Caesar, miserere serenus three times in his carm. no. II, the second instance being followed by (l. 19) alme, salus orbis, Romae decus, inclyte fama. Dindimus letter-collection (collatio): ed. B. Kübler, Iuli Valeri Alexandri Polemi Res gestae Alexandri Macedonis (Leipzig, 1888), pp. 169–89; Seneca letters: ed. Barlow, Epistolae Senecae, pp. 122–38. For Alcuin’s edition, see idem, pp. 94–104; for supposed progeny of ‘Alkuins Widmungsexemplar’, see Bischoff, ‘Hofbibliothek’, MaSt 3, 158 n. 44, Engl. transl. p. 65 n. 44. Barlow, Epistolae Senecae, pp. 58–64 and 96–104, argues that distinctive readings in a group of eight manuscripts of the Seneca-Paul correspondence are evidence of their dependence on Alcuin’s ‘combined edition’, the other copies collated by him descending from the pre-Alcuin text. In the absence of similarly detailed collations of the Alexander letters, the affinities of their manuscript testimonies and the distinction—if any—between the Alcuin and a pre-Alcuin version are undefined; but cf. Barlow, p. 97 and next note.

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and the doubtfully-Gregorian concordia testimoniorum of passages in Paul’s Epistles.148 Involvement at a very different level is inferrable from the text of the so-called Admonitio generalis, Charles’s second major legislative pronouncement, promulgated—probably—on 23 March 789 at Aachen, where the Court had wintered. (No extant diploma was issued in those months, nor indeed during the rest of 789; and the assembly and its proceedings are, characteristically, ignored by the Royal and other Annals.)149 This remarkable document, the most copied of Carolingian royal and Imperial capitularies, extends over nine pages in its standard modern edition and fills fifteen manuscript leaves in an early, unusually stylish, copy.150 Preliminary memoranda or drafts, such as exist for some later capitularies, have left no trace, unless (as I am inclined to believe) the prohibition on monks taking part in secular courts, improperly appended to copies of the royal letter De litteris colendis, is one or part of one.151 But the final version is 148 The contents of the Brussels manuscript are listed, not quite completely, in Van den Gheyn, Catalogue, 2, no. 1101; for its origin and date, see Bischoff, Katalog, 1, no. 706 (p. 152). The fact that Leyden Voss. Q. 20, in which the Dindimus correspondence is combined with other Alexander material, is a Tours book of c. 830 suggests that its text of the Collatio may also derive from Alcuin’s edition: but this has yet to be established. Alcuin’s prefatory words Lector mente fidem videat are based on two sentences in Dindimus’s prima responsio, ed. Kübler, p. 171. For the Concordia (CPL3 no. 1717, its authenticity defended by P. Meyvaert), see I. Fransen in RevBén 73 (1963), 247–73, who edited it from seven ninth-century manuscripts, not including the St.-Germain one: the geographical pattern of these early copies suggests that their archetype was likewise ‘Court’. The assertion by L.D. Reynolds (Text and Transmission, p. 360) that the apocryphal correspondence was ‘a frequent companion of the [genuine Seneca] Letters from the early Middle Ages’ is hardly correct. 149 MGH Capit. I, no. 22; the more than forty manuscript-copies are fully described in Mordek, BCRFM Compare ARF, s.a. 788, ed. Kurze, p. 84; Charles’s court had previously wintered at Aachen only in 768/9. Doubts expressed by some earlier scholars, and reflected in Boretius’s edition, that the dating-clause, unique in early capitularies, may not have been part of the original Admonitio text but was taken over from some other administrative document (e.g. the Duplex capitulare missorum, MGH Capit. I, no. 23) seem to be mistaken: see Mordek, cit., and note especially his comment (pp. 783–4) on Vatican BAV Pal. lat. 582, where the dating-clause is copied without its preceding text. 150 I.e. the Fulda manuscript Wolfenbüttel, Hzg. August Bibl. Helmst. 496a (short texts, predominantly homiletic, on Trinitarian doctrine and the Lord’s Prayer filling the other leaves, fols 15–27): for its status, see Mordek, BCRFM, pp. 949–52. 151 T. Martin, ‘Bemerkungen zur “Epistola de litteris colendis”’, AfD 31 (1985), 227–72, at 234–5; for the letter proper and the interpretation of its two variant copies, see below. In the earlier O (?Würzburg) text, the appended passage reads: Hoc ut fieret ortamur ut nullus monachorum foras monasterio iudiciaria teneat neque per placita et mallos discurrat; in the later M (Metz) text, it is: Et nullus monachus foris monasterio iuditiaria teneat nec mallus et publica placita pergat. The corresponding phrase in Adm.

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surely the result of a collaborative effort involving notaries or chaplains and more than one of the resident ‘international’ scholars, as well as those referred to in its prologue as sacerdotes et consiliarii nostri. It begins, uniquely, with an elaborate address-clause, incorporating a distinctive royal title: rex ET RECTOR regni Francorum et DEVOTUS sanctae aecclesiae defensor HUMILISQUE ADIUTOR.152 Equally without parallel in Charles’s later capitularies is the extended prologue or exordium: weaving together phraseology from more than one tradition of Christian rhetoric including even epigraphic verse, it appeals finally to the example of ‘the holy Josiah’ who ‘by visitation (circumeundo), correction and admonition, strove to recall the kingdom which God had given him to the worship of the true God’.153 The Old Testament exemplar (IV (II) Rg 22 and 23) is unlikely to be due to Alcuin, whose later writings offer nothing similar; it is a reasonable possibility that it was provided by the newly-arrived and learned ‘Goth’ Theodulf, who was to use it again in one of his major poems, specifically apostrophising the king as one ‘who removed the ungodly shrines of ancient wickedness and renewed as much as you could the laws of your forefathers ( patrias leges qua potes usque novas)’.154 It is equally unlikely that Alcuin played any part in the formulation of the first fifty-nine chapters: these are summary versions of canonlaw decrees and decretals of current practical concern, selected from the collection presented to the king by the pope in 774, the so-called gen. (c. 73: ed. Boretius, p. 60) is Et monachi ad saecularia placita non vadant. Mordek’s suggestion (BCRFM, pp. 254 and 407) that it came from ‘einem unbekannten Kapitular Karls des Grossen’ seems to me much less likely. 152 Best discussed by H. Wolfram, Intitulatio I. Lateinische Königs- und Fürstentitel bis zum Ende des 8. Jhs., MIÖG, Erg.-Bd. 21 (Vienna, 1967), pp. 239–44. The supposedly earlier instance, MGH Capit. I, p. 44, is generally recognised as a forgery. The next examples of defensor sanctae Dei ecclesiae (but not rector) are in the addressclauses of letters composed for the king by Alcuin in the mid-790s: MGH Conc. 2/i, ed. Werminghoff, p. 158; epp. nos 87 (to Offa) and 92 (to Angilbert of St.-Riquier). Compare, however, Tu decus ecclesiae rector defensor amator in Alcuin’s carm. xxvi (MGH Poet. I, p. 245: v. 6) of (probably) late 796; and Alcuin’s addressing the king as dilectissime et honorande ecclesiarum Christi defensor et rector in the text of a letter to him in (early) 798, ep. no. 136 (p. 209). Ep. no. 41 (p. 84), in which the king is rector et doctor, is dated much too early by Dümmler. 153 For circumire as an episcopal activity in pre-Carolingian Francia and England, see above, ch. 1, p. 312; as one of the obligations of domanial maiores, see Cap. de villis c. 26, MGH Capit. 1, 85. 154 I.e. carm. no. 28, the so-called Versus contra iudices, MGH Poet. I, pp. 493–517, the verses quoted at p. 495 (lines 79–80). Josiah is also named, but in a totally different context, in Theodulf ’s carm. no. 21, idem, p. 478. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship, p. 107 assumes that Charles found the model himself: I am sceptical.

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‘Dionysio-Hadriana’;155 and in this part there are no verbal links with the English synodal decrees of 786. In contrast, the imprint of Alcuin’s thinking and language, as we know them from his subsequent writings, are apparent in the address-clause, in the first part of the prologue (as in its characterisation of both king and bishops), in chapter 60 which is effectively a second prologue, and in almost every one of the chapters 61 to the end: whether in straightforward textual parallels, including the characterisation of bishops as both ductores gregis eius and clarissima mundi luminaria, with the associated ne lupus insidians; in the precise forms of both Old Testament and New Testament quotations; or in the cadences of longer clauses and sentences.156 The recourse to Biblical precepts and direct quotation was not to be repeated in later royal/Imperial capitularies. Those incorporated in the 789 Admonitio give to a reform programme, an all-embracing correctio, its tenor and form. The king’s responsibility for carrying it out is already implicit in the expanded royal title. For many centuries rector had been an epithet or title for those in whom the governance of things secular and divine had been vested, including (although infrequently) the supreme governor of the Universe.157 Church patrimonies had been in the care of ecclesiae defensores since 155 Mordek, Kirchenrecht und Reform, pp. 151–60, 241–9; Bullough, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 14, 29 (n. 46), 154–5 (n. 33). There is no edition, nor any identified single manuscript, of the Dionysio-Hadriana that can be used for precise textual comparisons; the confused, even chaotic, nature of older part-editions is briefly but graphically indicated by M. Brett, ‘Theodore and the Latin canon law’, Archbishop Theodore, ed. M. Lapidge (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 120–40, at 138–40. 156 F.C. Scheibe, ‘Alcuin und die Admonitio Generalis’, DA 14 (1958), 221–9; Bullough, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 142, 218; W. Hartmann, ‘Die karolingische Reform und die Bibel’, Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 18 (1986), 58–74, at 61–2. Perhaps even the rare word aequiparabilis in the sentence immediately after the characterisation of Josiah and the following clause (sed quod nobis sunt ubique sanctorum semper exempla sequenda) can be credited to Alcuin: compare the possibly earlier ep. no. 4, Sint prae oculis exempla sanctorum . . . ut . . . [antecessorum] meritis aequiparare (so H2) dignus efficiaris . . . For the clause-ending conservare dignetur (prol. line 20: ed. Boretius, p. 53), see already the Northumbrian royal letter, Epist. select. 1, ed. Tangl, p. 258. 157 There is a single occurence in Ambrose’s hymnody, Deus creator omnium/ polique rector . . .: Ambroise: Hymnes, ed. Fontaine et al., p. 237; Augustine uses it of God intermittently, as do other Patristic authors, but Gregory the Great apparently never (although using the synonomous rerum omnium gubernator in, e.g., Reg. epist. III, 51: ed. Norberg, 1, 196). For pre-Christian usage, both of lay governors and of the supreme god, see Ambroise: Hymnes, pp. 241–2 (M. Perrin). In Gregory’s writings and in the seventh and eighth centuries rectores are most commonly officials, lay or ecclesiastical, or bishops. The capitulary’s last chapter (ed. Boretius, p. 61) refers to bishops as pastores et rectores ecclesiarum Dei; Alcuin in his letters characterises Arn as summus terrarum rector (ep. no. 158 (p. 256)) but also addresses King Coenwulf of Mercia as clarissimus rector (ep. no. 123 [p. 181]).

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at least the sixth century and more recently Popes had called on the Carolingians ‘to defend’ the Roman church and its lands, but the title and the epithet of adiutor linked with it had not previously been applied to a king; and while the second of these was not repeated, the several examples of defensor sanctae [Dei] ecclesiae in royal styles during the 790s are all from the pen (or dictation) of Alcuin. Law (lex) in Alcuin’s view is as much to be found in the books of the Old Testament as in any modern written legislation, ius scriptum.158 ‘First of all’ the catholic faith is to be taught, as demanded by the First Commandment, i.e. Dt 6.4–5, although the version quoted is closer to that in St. Mark’s Gospel (12.29–30). C. 63 calls on those ‘to whom has been given the power of judging’ to judge justly, uninfluenced by gifts or flattery; the supporting quotations are from Psalm 57 in the Roman version, passages from Exodus and Deuteronomy conflated, and a genuine quotation from Deuteronomy, this last demanding justice for both citizen and alien ( peregrinus, a word of particular resonance for Alcuin).159 Chapters 66–9 and 81 appeal directly to the lex Domini, on such sins as hatred and malice, killing (even causa ultionis, although judicial execution is permitted) and false testimony, and in regard to Sunday observance. The condemning of avarice, however, relies on a conflate quotation from St. Paul; and the giving of tithes, sicut in lege scriptum est in 786, is strikingly absent from the capitulary’s precepts.160 The demand that ‘there should be peace and concord and harmony throughout the whole Christian people’ (c. 62), on the other hand, does invoke the Gospels and only through them the original Tenth Commandment.

158 Lex est omni populo scriptum ius quid cavere vel quid observare debeat: Alcuin, De rhetorica, ed. Halm, p. 549, ed. Howell, p. 150, interestingly adapting Cicero, De inventione II 54.162. 159 Ps 57.2 (cf. Capit. I, p. 58 n. 86): iuste [corr. -a] iudicate against Ga., Hebr. recta i.; Ex 23.8, Dt 16.19 (identically in some manuscripts of the De virtutibus et vitiis, ch. 20; PL cols 101, 628C–D; compare the slightly different ‘misquotation’ in ep. no. 188, corda sapientum, and the preceding phrase there); Dt 1.16,17. Warnings against the bribing of judges are in epp. nos 188, 217 and 254 (p. 411), all with the same Exod. + Deut. quotation; also in carm. xlv, lines 47–8 (MGH Poet. I, p. 258). Alcuin subsequently uses the civis-peregrinus contrast in support of other arguments: see e.g. ep. no. 181 (p. 300, lines 24–5). 160 Hartmann, ‘Die karolingische Reform u. die Bibel’, p. 62, boldly connects this omission with Alcuin’s authorship of this whole section of the capitulary, in view of his later objections to the enforcement of tithe-giving.

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The eighty-second and last chapter begins by requiring all bishops to ensure that the priests in their dioceses teach those for whom they are responsible only what is in conformity with the Scriptures, excluding anything that is ‘new or non-canonical’. The topics of that instruction are then specified in the form of a little-noticed credal statement, the distinctive wording of which is on the whole unfavourable to Alcuin’s involvement. Its opening clauses read like a summary of the beginning of the ‘Athanasian creed’ (Quicumque) with the inappropriate addition of invisibilem; the extension of ‘who created heaven and earth’ with the words ‘the sea and everything that is within them’ (mare et omnia quae in eis sunt: from canticles) seems, however, to be without parallel. The unusual conjunction of a future Judgement of ‘all men according to their proper deserts (secundum merita propria)’, the wicked going to eternal fire while the righteous enjoy eternal life with Christ and the holy angels, with an insistence that people should be taught about ‘the resurrection of the dead (resurrectionem mortuorum, as in the ‘Niceno-Constantinopolitan’ creed) that they may know and believe that they will receive the rewards of their merits ( premia meritorum) in their own same bodies’ suggests familiarity with Toledan conciliar creeds as well as with the ‘Athanasian creed’.161 A conspicuous omission is the standard credal ‘(one baptism for) the remission of sins’.162 The chapter’s concluding section, more homiletic in tone, is on the other hand almost certainly to be credited to Alcuin: it includes a lengthy quotation from the Epistle to the Galatians (5.19–21), in a non-standard form in which animosities and heresies are added to 161 The Toledo creeds (symbols) are conveniently available in Concilios Visigóticos, ed. J. Vives (Barcelona-Madrid, 1963); but for the relevant sections of the symbols of the Sixth and the Eleventh councils, see especially J. Madoz, Le Symbole du XI e Concile de Tolède, Spic. Sacr. Lovaniense 19 (Louvain, 1938), p. 104. The ‘Athanasian creed’ is the only widely-current one to include the statement that qui bona egerunt ibunt in vitam aeternum, qui [vero] mala in ignem aeternum; J.N.D. Kelly, like earlier commentators, offers no parallels, although the term ignis aeternus goes back to Tertullian. The notion that at the general resurrection the material particles of a dead body will be re-assembled and revivified was the contemporary view, inherited from Augustine and from Jerome before him (a majority of modern theologians take a different view): see the excellent summary by Caroline W. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body (New York, 1995), pp. 86–104. 162 Compare Alcuin’s ep. no. 138 (p. 217): in symbolo dicitur ‘Confiteor unum baptisma’ et cetera quae sequuntur’, i.e. the ‘Niceno-Constantinopolitan’ and not the ‘Apostles’’ creed—in any version. For a different credal statement in a later (Imperial-period) Admonitio, which does include credite quod in baptismum omnium peccatorum suscepisti, see Boretius, no. 121 (p. 239) of ?802.

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the works of the flesh for which sinners will find themselves ‘assigned with the Devil to eternal punishment’; to be matched, however, with a fervent preaching of the Christian virtues.163 Finally, not only the events before the Last Judgement but also the intellectual battles of the coming decade are foreshadowed in the imminent threat from pseudodoctores—possibly a term newly coined by Alcuin at this time, although he might have encountered it in a Patristic text that had recently been added to the ‘Court library’: he was to use it twice subsequently in his letters, on both occasions with specific reference to the heretical Adoptionists.164 Connected in some way with the Admonitio Generalis, and specifically with the two chapters (72 and 73) which call for ‘schools for boys’ in monasteries and episcopal residences, for accurate copying and for the maintaining of a ‘regular life’ and with the warning against false teachers, is the royal Epistola de litteris colendis.165 The problems of its original text-form and the range of its intended recipients were greatly clarified by a comprehensive study in 1985, although uncertainties persist. The only known manuscript copies both preserved a text-version in which Abbot Baugulf of Fulda ‘and all his congregation’ are the joint-addressees, and to which the memorandum forbidding monks to take part in secular courts has been attached.166 Yet the later of the two (in a Metz codex, destroyed in 1944) was demonstrably not a copy of the earlier, which had been entered at ?Würzburg, ca. 800, on the blank first page of a manuscript of 163 The same passage is quoted in Opus Caroli II, 23, ed. Freeman, pp. 284–5, likewise with the addition of hereses but also of inpudicitia and not animositates. At least one VL version existed with hereses (see Das Corpus Paulinum des Ambrosiaster, ed. H.J. Vogels, Bonner Biblische Beiträge 13 [Bonn, 1957], p. 117), and there is evidence that it persisted in liturgical pericopes, as Lectionnaire de Luxeuil, ed. Salmon, p. 69 (where also inpuditicia!). 164 Ed. Boretius, p. 62. Mt 24.11 (and II Pt 2.1) speaks of pseudoprophetae, while pseudoapostoli are referred to in II Cor 11.13; but pseudodoctores is unknown to Vg. NT. However, Vincent of Lérins, in the course of his challenge to heretics’ misuse of Scripture and alluding specifically to Paul’s epistles, had spoken of pseudo-apostoli vel pseudoprophetae vel pseudodoctores: Vincentii Lirinensis Commonitorium, ed. R. Demeulenaere (CCSL 64; Turnhout, 1985), p. 184; for the possibile presence of this work at the Court before 800, see Bischoff, ‘Hofbibliothek’, MaSt 3, 156–7 (Engl. transl., p. 63), also Bullough, ‘Charlemagne’s Court-library Re-visited’. The letters are epp. nos 74 (p. 117) and 280 (p. 437). 165 Cited henceforward from T. Martin’s critical, semi-diplomatic, edition of the two manuscript-copies (below) in parallel: ‘Bemerkungen’ (as above n. 151), pp. 231–5. Martin’s edition completely supersedes that of Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, pp. 198–226, at pp. 202–4. 166 Above, p. 379.

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Augustine’s De Trinitate written half a century previously at—probably—Chelles (or Jouarre).167 The Metz text, indeed, has not only some quite significant verbal and syntactical differences in the body of the text (‘context’), but an additional passage immediately preceding the attached memorandum which orders the distribution of copies: Huius itaque epistolae exemplaria ad omnes suffragantes tuosque coepiscopos et per universa monasteria dirigi non neglegas . . . The language used here clearly reflects the newly-current canon-law terminology, and in conjunction with the singular tuos leaves little doubt that the first recipient of this royal letter or mandate (it has features of both, which doubtless worried contemporaries less than it worries historians) was a metropolitan bishop or a bishop with a distinctive, superior, position in the regna.168 Dr. Martin’s ingenious, and on the whole satisfying, interpretation of this complex text-history is that a ‘Konzept’ prepared in the Court writing-office—before, contemporaneously with, or after the drafting of the 789 capitulary is still debatable—would have been entrusted to Angilram as arch-chaplain and archbishop, who was expected to ensure that other copies were prepared and distributed; and that the Metz text was a copy of that ‘Konzept’ and accompanying royal order (si gratiam nostram habere vis), penned and long preserved in his church.169 The vocabulary and concepts of the ‘context’ (narratio), from Notum igitur to redeat (al. recedat), leave little doubt that this, perhaps through Angilram’s instrumentality, was essentially the work of Alcuin. (The inclusion of only a single Biblical quotation—from St. Matthew’s Gospel, in not-quite-standard Vulgate form—is characteristic of letters in the king’s name, whether composed by Alcuin or others.)170 The stated reason for the royal letter is that writings have latterly 167 Oxford, Bodleian Libr., Laud. misc. 126; CLA II (rev. ed., 1972), 252, with bibl. The identification of the text of the De litteris colendis is due to Paul Lehmann in 1926/27. The ascription of the manuscript to Chelles was originally made by Bernhard Bischoff in his seminal ‘Die Kölner Nonnenhandschriften . . .’, MaSt 1, 16–34; R. McKitterick has proposed an alternative ascription to Jouarre, for no very good reasons. 168 For its ‘Textkategorie’, see now Martin, ‘Bemerkungen’, pp. 242–6. Professor Wallach’s claim (Alcuin and Charlemagne, p. 218) that the assumed intervention of a metropolitan is unnecessary because ‘the abbot of the politically powerful and exempted monastery of Fulda . . . could very well be called an episcopus’(!) is hardly acceptable. 169 Martin, ‘Bemerkungen’, esp. pp. 251–2, 265. 170 Authorship: Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, pp. 204–11; Martin, ‘Bemerkungen’, pp. 247–50. For Angilram’s links with Alcuin, see above, pp. 365–6.

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‘been sent to us from several monasteries’ in which was displayed their congregations’ ‘zeal on our behalf in their holy and pious prayers’, but unfortunately combining ‘right sentiments’ with ‘uncouth language’: ‘because that which pious devotion faithfully composed internally, externally . . . the uneducated tongue could not express other than faultily’. Since none of those writings have come down to us, the supposed deficiencies remain unspecific. Levison, it is true, thought that he had found an example in the margins (!) of a twelfthcentury copy of the Carolingian Vita s. Germani; but it is now clear that the letter, of which there are other copies in the same context, is of the 850s.171 From failings of that kind, however, others will inevitably follow, and specifically a misunderstanding of Scripture: its rhetorical figures will only make sense to those previously instructed in the discipline of literature (litteraturae magisterio).172 Hence, moreover, the importance of identifying suitable teachers. The letter may be, in Professor Laistner’s words, ‘the fullest expression of Charlemagne’s zeal for monastic education’; but its manuscript-history, which contrasts strikingly with, for instance, that of the king’s letter on the significance of the Sundays Septuagesima, Sexagesima etc.,173 raises serious doubts whether it is, as often claimed, the key text in a royally-promoted ‘revival of learning’. As the personal if programmatic formulation of an anonymous ‘author’ composing in the king’s name, its importance should be seen rather as a stage in Alcuin’s public career. Perhaps also composed during Alcuin’s first stay in Francia (although a dating ‘793–95’ cannot be excluded) and in this case in his own name is a letter-treatise of very different character, directed to the community of St. Martin’s at Tours.174 It is both an outsider’s admonition and its author’s longest, although discursive, statement (and indeed the fullest statement by any ‘Carolingian’ before Jonas of

171 W. Levison in: MGH SSRM, p. 250, from Namur, Bibl. munic., 53; Th. Delforge, ‘Une “Vita sancti Germani” pour Lothaire II’, Scriptorium 22 (1968), 39–42. 172 Not a characteristically Alcuinian term; compare Opus Caroli regis, ed. Freeman, pp. 499, 513 etc. 173 Ep. no. 144 (sent to Alcuin). Dümmler’s listing of the manuscript testimonies is both incomplete and not always accurate: seven or eight ninth-century copies are extant and at least that number of a later date. Laistner’s judgement is in Thought and Letters, ed. 2, p. 195. 174 Ep. no. 131: for its manuscript tradition as possible dating-evidence, see Pt. I, pp. 66–7 at n. 160. I infer that it is certainly earlier than ep. no. 51, which I would date 794–5, and possibly earlier than ep. no. 52 (to Abbot Itherius).

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Orléans) about Christian penitence and the confessional practices that were its precondition. When, at the beginning of the next century, Alcuin was asked to compose a letter ‘on confession and penitence’ for the young men of the Salzburg community, he felt he could do no better than send them a copy of the one written for St. Martin’s, although only a year or two previously (i.e. 798/9) he had passed on to Arn a copy of a shorter and more focussed letter on the topic, originally sent to ‘the members of religious communities in Septimania’.175 Shortly afterwards he included a copy also in a devotional manualis libellus prepared for and sent to Archbishop Arn.176 Modern scholarship, exemplified by Cyrille Vogel’s excellent short history of penance constructed around the key texts in translation, has tended to regard the later letter as the better expression of Alcuin’s ideas.177 This was clearly not the medieval view. Of all Alcuin’s letters, none was to be so widely disseminated in the three centuries after his death as that to St. Martin’s: at least nineteen manuscript-copies are extant (not all of them complete or in the exact original form, so there may be others still unidentified), at least half of them apparently derived from the re-issued ‘handbook’ text. The scribe, or a subsequent reader, of the Hincmar-period Rheims copy has entered in the margin the words optima admonitio; in at least one extant version of the early Carolingian (?Bavarian) sermonary, that in Munich clm. 14445, three successive sermons De paenitentia et 175 Response to Salzburg: ep. no. 258; letter to Septimania: ep. no. 138. The latter, which is in both versions of the ‘basic Tours collection’ (and, incomplete, in the letters copied from a T-collection manuscript in Paris BNF lat. 3244 [Q ]), is already included in Vienna Nat. bibl. 795 (S ) at fols 167v–171v, written by Bischoff ’s hand (22), the copyist also of the preceding letter on baptism, ep. no. 137. There is no extant ‘recipients’ text’ of the letter to Septimania: the only other copy is in a north-Italian book of s. ix/x, Milan. Bibl. Ambr. I, 89, fols 166–9, which has a heading declaring that this letter of Alcuin’s De confessione peccatorum mirifice edocet. The Salzburg’s magister Baldo’s added heading in S, fol. 168, is Contra eos qui nolunt sacerdotibus dare confessionem. 176 Ep. no. 259. Dümmler supposed (p. 416 n. 3) that this copy was or replaced the one sent to the Salzburg cathedral clergy (ep. no. 258). But this is not the natural sense of the two letters; and since at that time Arn was frequently absent from his (arch)diocese on ‘Imperial’ business, it would be natural for him to have a personal copy distinct from the one available at his cathedral. 177 C. Vogel, Le Pécheur et la Pénitence au Moyen-Age (Paris, 1969), pp. 142–6; a small part of ep. no. 138 was earlier translated by McNeill and Gamer, Mediaeval Handbooks, pp. 397–8. The one merit of Driscoll’s Alcuin et la pénitence is that he rightly regards ep. no. 131 as Alcuin’s major statement: see pp. 144–76, with a French translation of the letter at pp. 147–51.

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confessione are based on parts of the letter-text, and the group might already have been present in its original nucleus.178 The unusually elaborate address-clause, longer even than that of a letter composed for circulation among the bishops in Britain in 796,179 suggests that Alcuin felt some unease in writing to the community of St. Martin’s and its abbot and other seniors in the terms he then did. The text is discursive and repetitive, appropriate to a letter that was almost certainly intended to be read aloud, not necessarily all at once. The notion of penance for sins as ‘the medicine of the soul’ and of its wounds and sicknesses, and even the comparison with worldly doctors who have different forms of treatment for different bodily ills, is (as was observed earlier) already a feature of Columbanus’s penitential for clergy and laity, here developing a notion that he would have found in writings of the Fathers; without the comparison with worldly doctors it forms the prologue to Cummian’s penitential and is a recurrent theme in Jonas’s Vitae; it was elaborately developed in the Penitential ‘of Egberht’.180 Which of those texts were already known to Alcuin in York is not certainly determinable: but the introduction of confession, oral confession to another person, near the beginning of his letter to St. Martin’s and his insistence on its imperativeness entail a major shift of emphasis and a corresponding adaptation of the medical metaphors. Repeatedly, confession and not merely penitence is the medicine that heals the wounds inflicted on the soul by human failing; and the doctor of souls is not only God but the person to whom the confession is made. This, of course, raises again the question of whether Alcuin was drawing on a pre-existing sermon in which the changed empha178 The annotation is in Vatican City BAV Reg. lat. 272, fol. 119v. For the sermons, see Bouhot, ‘Un sermonnaire carolingien’ (above, n. 79), p. 195; the second of the three has the greatest number of departures from Alcuin’s text. An incomplete description of the early-ninth century, south-east Bavarian, Prague, Knihovna metropolitní kapituly A.CLVI suggests that the group will be found there also. 179 Ep. no. 104: discussed below . . . ego Alchvinus . . . in the present letter is highly unusual; but Dümmler’s apparatus and my notes on other copies suggest that ego was an addition to the manualis libellus version at some stage in its transmission. 180 Above, ch. 1, pp. 231–34; for medicamentum p(a)enitentiae in Jonas’s Vitae sanctorum, see the Index to Krusch’s 1905 edition, p. 360, and compare Charles-Edwards, ‘Penitential of Columbanus’, p. 219 and esp. n. 10. Note also Theodore’s discipulus Umbrensium’s address to the animarum medicis, and the references in his Prologue to Jesus’s preaching to those who lacked the means of healing (medicamenta male habentibus) and had therefore been sent that he might control ‘this most effective treatment of wounds (utilissima curatio cicatricum)’: Canones, ed. Finsterwalder, p. 287.

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sis and the choice of Scriptural texts are already to be found, and which he would later copy in its entirety in his De virtutibus et vitiis; or whether the language shared with those texts is substantially his own, first used here to expound a distinctive moral-theological theme and involving unusual words, such as the reduplicative resauciare, ‘to wound again’.181 The penitential ‘shedding of tears’, the fourth ‘remission’ in the Prologus de medicinae salutaris animarum of Cummian’s Penitential, gets a single mention, in the distinctive form Lava te lacrimarum fonte: Alcuin’s language here suggests a link with Gregory Nazianzen’s account, in its Latin version, of the penitential Baptismum lacrimarum, evidently known in some form to Archbishop Theodore or to his Northumbrian discipulus.182 Remission of sins and admission to everlasting bliss (at the Resurrection) may, however, be earned by ‘works’ previously specified in a free adaptation of the evangelist Matthew’s words (25.35–44).183 If Alcuin is in favour of the tariffed 181 For the sermon, Pseudo-Augustine no. 254, see above, pp. 354–55. Concordances do not report any early examples of resauciare other than ep. no. 131 (p. 194)’s ut vulneribus vulnera non superadiciant et sanata non resaucient and the sermon and De V. et V.’s nec priorum cicatrices vulnerum resauciare. What version did Alcuin know of the Lenten week-day collect that figures in the ‘Old Gelasian’ sacramentary (I. xxvi: ed. Wilson, p. 37, ed. Mohlberg, no. 220) in the obviously correct form Praesta, quaesumus, omnipotens Deus ut dignitas conditionis humanae per immoderantiam SAUCIATA, medicinalis parsimoniae studio reformetur, but in the Hadrianum Gregorian sacramentary as . . . per inmoderantiam SATIATA medicinalibus parsimoniis studio reformetur and in the ‘Sacramentary of Gellone’ (at the ‘Gelasian’ date) as . . . per immoderantiam SATIÇTAS medicinalis parsimoniç studio reformetur (Sacr. Grég., ed. Deshusses, 1, no. 300; Sacr. Gell., ed. Dumas, no. 439)? After a period of uncertainty, sauciata was restored in later ‘Gregorians’. 182 Profusio lacrimarum in Cummian: Irish Penitentials, ed. Bieler, p. 108; Gregorius Nazianzenus dixit . . .: Canones II. iv, 4, ed. Finsterwalder, p. 317; Rufinus’s translation of Gregory’s sermon De luminibus, ed. J. Wrobel and A. Engelbrecht (CSEL 46; Leipzig, 1910), pp. 130–1. Theodore could, of course, have read the original Greek version; but while it might seem more likely that a Northumbrian discipulus would have known it from the excerpts in Isidore’s De eccl. officiis (II. 25: ed. Lawson, pp. 102–3) than directly from Rufinus, he would not have found Gregory’s name there. The complicated history of the passages in question and of their misunderstandings is admirably explored by T. O’Loughlin and H. Conrad-O’Briain, ‘The “baptism of tears” in early Anglo-Saxon sources’, ASE 22 (1993), 65–83. Alcuin’s ‘weeping’ in carm. ix, lines 7–8 (MGH Poet. I, p. 236), surely has nothing to do with ‘penitential tears’ ( pace Cramer, Baptism and Change, p. 184 n. 21); but for washing (abluere) with such tears, see the letters written in 793 to Princess Gisla and to the WearmouthJarrow congregations, epp. nos 15 and no. 19 (p. 56), and subsequently to the formerly captive Lindisfarne monk, ep. no. 22 (p. 60). 183 A similar notion, differently expressed, in ep. no. 16 (p. 44), Chase, Two LetterBooks, II/4 (p. 56), to King Æthelred in 793: Hoc solum de suo labore potest homo secum adferre, quod in elemosinis vel bonis operibus gerit . . .; et adquirite vobis regnum Dei et eternam beatitudinem . . . Sempiterna al. (a)eternae beatitudo, but not ep. 131’s perpetua b., are standard expressions for ‘everlasting bliss’ after the Judgement in ‘Gelasian’ funerary masses and elsewhere.

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penances of the now widely-circulating Penitentials, this is merely implicit in his view that different types of wounds (to the soul) will require different treatments, and is nowhere explicitly stated. Alcuin was to exploit the medical metaphor subsequently in different ways and in other contexts. Moreover, this seems to reflect a real interest in and respect for ‘orthodox’ medicine as he had encountered it on the Continent, although no medical text can be associated with him. It is surely not pure chance that the only two early Carolingian doctors whose names have been recorded both figure in his letters; and that soon after his return to Northumbria in 790 he was asking that ‘medicaments’ be sent to him.184 That even at the end of 789 and the beginning of 790, Alcuin was still uneasily positioned on the outer edge of the circle of royal confidants, consiliarii and others,185 is none the less strongly suggested by the letters that mark the real beginnings of his surviving correspondence. In the former year he wrote to an unidentified friend, who was either with the royal army in the north-east or in the jurisdiction of the bishop of Bremen, asking how the work of conversion was proceeding among the Saxons and the Slav ‘Wilzi or Wends’; at the same time he wished to know what the king was intending to do about the Avars who had attacked Bavaria and north-east Italy the year before (788).186 The Avars and their conversion will figure prominently in Alcuin’s correspondence in the later 790s; the Franks’ Slav neighbours are never again mentioned except in a retrospec-

184 Uinter, the king’s doctor who had promised him two carrata of wine before 790, and Basilius, recently dead (794/5), who had once given medicines to a ?York traveller in montanis Romam pergenti: epp. nos 8 (p. 34), 45. The request for medicaments is in ep. no. 8 (p. 33): see below, at n. 207. 185 For consiliarii at this period, see H. Keller, ‘Zur Struktur der Königsherrschaft’, QFIAB 47 (1967), 123–223, at 123–30; J. Hannig, Consensus Fidelium (Monographien zur Gesch. des Mittelalters 27; Stuttgart, 1982), esp. pp. 229–37. 186 Ep. no. 6, unfortunately only in Cotton Tiberius A. xv: the formulary-type address clause, Dilecto amico N., seems certain even though none of the other letters in this section of the collection is similarly treated. The letter is the only evidence that Alcuin was an old friend (one-time teacher?) of Bishop Willehad, who died on November 8th: but see above, ch. 2. For the very distinctive 789 campaign, which brings the Wilzi for the first time into the written record and which involved both bridge-building across the Elbe and co-operation with a Frisian naval force (Ann. reg. Franc. s.a. and the interestingly fuller account in the Annales q.d. Einhardi: ARF ed. Kurze, pp. 84–7), see L. Dralle, ‘Wilzen, Sachsen und Franken um das Jahr 800’, in: Aspekte der Nationenbildung im Mittelalter. Ergebnisse der Marburger Rundgespräche 1972–1975, ed. H. Beumann and W. Schröder (Sigmaringen, 1978), pp. 205–27. According to the ‘Royal Annals’ the expedition was undertaken cum consilio Francorum et Saxonum.

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tive allusion to the 789 expedition in a letter to the ‘Scot’ Colcu a few months later, where it follows an optimistic statement about the conversion of the north-Germans, Saxon and Frisian.187 A darker note is sounded in a brief letter, a mere seven lines in the printed version, written from England quite soon afterwards to the scriniarius (royal notary) Dagulf. Here for the first time but certainly not the last, Alcuin hints at jealousies at the court which have led to the spreading of lies about him—the ‘wind of falsehood’, which he is none the less sure will not destroy their particular friendship.188

‘The English Connection’ To what extent and in what mood Alcuin kept in touch with York and its community during his first stay in Francia is largely irrecoverable. It is possible that the stylish springtime letter-poem, ‘Now has the cuckoo sung in the lofty branches . . .’, addressed ‘to the hallowed youth of York’—a counterpart, as it were, to the one written from York a decade previously to acquaintances in Rhineland Francia and the Court—belongs to these years. The poet’s proud claim that he is ‘giving utterance to the highest arts for noble ears’ and ‘leads through Patristic meadows, and is duly followed by, him who rules with the glorious crown of lofty wisdom’ is admissably an effusive tribute to the king who had previously been sent a text of the De categoriis decem: but it would be at least equally appropriate some years later. Characteristically juxtaposed with it, however, is a warning to former pupils not to be distracted by the temptations of the flesh!189 187 Ep. no. 7, Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/4; for the identification of Colcu and his community (in Northumbria? Mayo-Inishboffin?), see above, ch. 2, pp. 276–7. Does this reflect a change of perspective on Alcuin’s part, which other courtiers may have shared at the time but is largely concealed from us by the lack of earlier correspondence? compare the ‘Royal Annalist’s’ treatment of Charles’s relations with the western Slavs with Einhard’s up-beat retrospective view, Vita Karoli, cc. 12 and 15. Alcuin’s Antiqui Saxones follows Bede, HE, V 10, etc. 188 Ep. no. 73. 189 Carm. lix, (MGH Poet. I, p. 273; S.-K. no. 10727), transmitted by the two lost ninth-century manuscripts Q and Rat. At lines 26–7, did Alcuin write raptet per inania mundus/vertice submergens (as ed.) or ‘vortice submergens’? The latter is the more likely: Caper’s Vortex fluminis est, vertex capitis in his De orthographia (Gramm. Lat. ed. Keil, 7, 99) and the manuscript testimonies to the related passages in Alcuin’s ep. no. 65 ( per libidinum vortices caro rapuit) and carm. lvii (MGH Poet. I, p. 269) (summersus in undis/ vorticibus raptis . . ./ . . ./ qui rapiet iuvenes vortice pestifero) are unanimously for vort-. The improbus ille puer of line 25, which has sometimes been misunderstood,

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Writing to Colcu magister et pius pater (then in northern England?), almost certainly from Worms early in 790, Alcuin refers to previous correspondence, including unexpectedly some account of ‘Saracen aggression’.190 The querulous tone that he found it difficult to avoid in later letters to friends is already evident: ‘I do not know what sin I have committed that I haven’t seen your writings for a long time, although I am sure you are praying for me’. But having heard that Colcu is fit and well—further evidence of comings and goings between the two regions for which there is no other evidence at this date— Alcuin is sure he would like to know what is happening to himself and to the Franks. He has unhappily to report a recent breach in friendly relations between the Frankish and Mercian kings. On the other hand, he can list Charles’s numerous successes against his stillpagan neighbours and other enemies, concluding with the annexation by the king’s ‘dukes and tribunes’ of a substantial part of north-east Spain along ‘almost 300 miles of coastland’: unusually the summary reports, in reverse chronological order, include indications of date except for the advance into Spain—because he did not know when that had happened? Collectively, they justify the claim that the church on the Continent ‘has peace, gains and grows’, to which he had previously skilfully alluded in his Cross-poem (Dein/Alma crucis vexilla canunt gentilia saecla [‘barbarian peoples’]).191 is of course Amor, as in Vergil’s Eighth Eclogue. P.D. Scott, ‘Alcuin as a Poet: Rhetoric and Belief in his Latin Verse’, University of Toronto Quarterly 33 (1964), 233–57, at 251–3, provides an interesting critique of the poem, although in terms with which I do not in general have much sympathy; and ibid. p. 257, n. 31, adds substantially to the ‘models’ in Virgilian and other verse. 190 Ep. no. 7; Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/4 (pp. 24–6). Both epithets are reserved for a very select group of his acquaintances. 191 The ‘Frankish Royal Annals’ and related texts ignore the episode completely; the only other early evidence is the record in the Chronicon Moissacense in Paris, BNF lat. 4886 (s. xii; ?Ripoll) and in the annalistic entries added to BAV, Reg. lat. 123 (1056; Ripoll) of Gerona’s ‘surrender’ to the Franks in 785: MGH SS in-fol. 1, 297; 23, 2. Is christianissimi regis duces et tribuni (a word Alcuin uses nowhere else) merely ‘literary’? or had he a Septimanian source, written or oral? The similarity of his instante rege Karolo, alios premiis et alios minis sollicitante, ad fidem Christi conversi sunt to a passage in the original version of Eigil’s Vita Sturmi (c. 22, ed. Engelbert, p. 158: partim bellis partim suasionibus partim etiam muneribus maxima ex parte gentem illam ad fidem Christi convertit) seems more than accidental. It is unlikely that Eigil knew the letter, since it was sent to Northumbria and preserved only in the English collections: which raises the possibility of a common written source. Note that none of the events reported in the letter, including ‘the conversion of the Old Saxons and of the whole Frisian people’ (partly but not completely recorded in the Ann. reg. Franc. s.aa. 788, 789: ARF ed. Kurze, pp. 80–4), earns a mention in the ‘Northumbrian Annals’. For the allusion to conversion, see MGH Poet. I, p. 224, lines 26–7.

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The letter concludes with a list of gifts, in money and kind, that Alcuin would like distributed in Northumbria, de elemosina mea or of the king and others named. This may not be quite so straightforward a record of gratuitous offerings—a ‘beneficence’ or ‘munificence’— from accumulations of personal wealth as it has been usually understood. An anonymous sermon that circulated unusually widely in the eighth and early-ninth centuries and could have been known to Alcuin (although there is no firm evidence that it was) begins Remedia peccatorum, fratres, medicina est eleemosynarum. Behind this lie several passages in the Old Testament declaring that ‘your sins shall be redeemed by alms’ and Matthew’s report of the ‘Sermon on the Mount’. The third of the ‘medicines’ that can provide remission or healing for wounded souls, according to the Prologue of Cummian’s Penitential, is ‘the fruit of alms’; while the more diffuse Prologue of ‘Egberht’s’ Penitential, in its final section, links alms with fasting, weeping and prayers as penance (veram penitentiam) for wrongdoing. Alcuin here, therefore, may be ‘redeeming’ or hoping to redeem his own sinful conduct.192 In (apparently) 789 tension had arisen between the Mercian and Frankish kings which led to both parties closing their sea-ports to the other’s merchants. According to the Fontanelle (St.-Wandrille) Chronicle compiled in the 830s from good material, which is our only source for the cause of the dispute, Charles took exception to Offa’s demand that in return for a Mercian bride for his third son Charles (temporarily in charge of a ‘duchy of Maine’), his daughter Bertha should become the wife of his own son Ecgfrith. There must be at least a suspicion that other factors were at work.193 When 192 Vulg. elemosyna is from the Greek of the Septuagint, where it translates Hebrew words with a different sense: see, accordingly, OT Tb 4.11, 12.9, Dn 4.24, etc.; and NT Mt 6.2–4. Sermon: PL 39, cols 2340–2342 (ps.-Aug. no. 310), CPPM 1, no. 1095 (where Vienna, Nat. bibl. 994 is in fact c. 800, Salzburg, and Chicago, Newberry Libr. f1 is s. x2, S. Fr.); it was not used by Alcuin for De virtutibus et vitiis, ch. 17. Penitentials: Irish Penitentials, ed. Bieler, p. 108, and ibid. p. 116, where avarice ( filargiria) elymosina et ieiunio sanetur iudice sacerdote; Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3, 418. 193 Gesta sanctorum patrum Fontanellensi coenobii, ed. Loewenfeld (1886), pp. 46–7, ed. Lohier and Laporte (1936), pp. 86–7: but Alcuin’s ita ut utrimque navigatio interdicta negotiantibus cessat (ep. no. 7 [p. 32]) is obviously to be preferred to the Fontanelle chronicler’s assertion that Charles ordered ut nemo de Brittania insula ac gente Anglorum mercimonii causa should touch Frankish shores. It is not possible to deduce from the sources whether the younger Charles was put in charge of the ‘duchy’ (or perhaps more correctly, in the context of 789/90, a geographically ill-defined regnum Neustriae: cf. Ann. S. Amandi cont., MGH SS I, p. 12 and Ann. Mett. pr., p. 78) before or after the severing of relations between the two countries. The assertion of J.M. WallaceHadrill that ‘Charles had been made a king in 788’ (‘Charlemagne and England’

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Alcuin wrote to Adalhard from Northumbria in the latter part of 790, he claimed not to know ‘what has caused the dissension between those who were once friends’, although he was ready and willing to be sent on a peace mission.194 This profession of ignorance is hardly convincing, even if he had still not been admitted to the inner circle of Frankish royal councillors. Alcuin had first-hand knowledge of the Mercian king and his court, going back to at least 786, a fact of which the Frankish king is unlikely to have been unaware, however reliant he might choose to be on one of his longer-standing courtiers (Gervold). More important, Alcuin had previously put on record in his letter to Colcu that he knew about the breakdown of friendly relations between the two kings and the prohibition on merchants sailing between their respective kingdoms; furthermore, he could report with evident satisfaction rumours that he was to be sent to Mercia to smooth things over (sunt qui dicunt nos pro pace esse in illas partes mittendos). The picture conveyed by the letters is of a person eager to be involved in a ‘political’ (diplomatic) process, or perhaps to be thought by others as being so involved. In fact, as he disingenuously reveals in his letter to Adalhard, Alcuin never went to Mercia; and by the time he wrote it the dispute was probably well on the way to being resolved, perhaps indeed had already been resolved. The key-date in negotiations between the two courts could be as early as April (12), 790, if we can accept as substantially reliable a privilege ostensibly granted by Offa to St.-Denis, in response to a request from Abbot Maginarius brought by the monk Nadelharius.195 [1965], Early Medieval History (Oxford, 1975), pp. 155–80, at p. 161) perpetuates an error—an easily explicable one—begun by the mid-ninth-century Ann. S. Amandi breves (in Ghent, Univ.-Bibl., 224): Charles was only made king on Christmas Day 800, as we know from Alcuin himself (ep. no. 217 (pp. 360–1); similarly Lib. pont., 2, 7, although referring to anointing, while Alcuin speaks of crowning. According to Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘E’ etc. s.a. 836, Offa’s support for his son-in-law Beorhtric as king of Wessex in 789 led to his rival Ecgbeorht’s exile on Fronclond. The Chronicler’s ‘three years’ has been challenged and the alternative ‘thirteen’ suggested, although it hardly imposes itself. Conversely, there is no evidence that even the three years were spent at the Frankish royal court: if they were, Ecgbeorht would necessarily have spent most of the time at Regensburg or in camp on the middle Danube. 194 Ep. no. 9. The concluding rhetorical flourish, Pacis enim seminatores simus inter populos christianos (Alcuin’s own coining?), is of a type that will become increasingly common in later correspondence. 195 I.e. BCS. no. 259, S 133 (from a French ‘copie figurée’ of the (?)eleventh century), which for more than a century has been accorded very little credit. Yet even W.H. Stevenson, who condemned it, acknowledged that the witness-list of eight attestations in addition to Offa, two of them ‘royals’ and four of them laymen, was

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Alcuin, who in the autumn was again asking what policy decisions were being made at the Frankish Court (quod sit consilium in palatio faciendi vel peragendi ), had simply been by-passed.196

Northumbria: Promise Unfulfilled Writing to the archbishop of York a decade later, Alcuin reminded him of the fate of Northumbrian kings who within his lifetime had flouted the Divine laws and challenged the clergy: Ælfwald, murdered in the autumn of 788, and Æthelred, murdered in 796. Earlier, in a letter to Æthelred himself after he had learnt of the Northmen’s attack on Lindisfarne in June 793, Alcuin asserted that it was in the time of his predecessor on the throne that sexual misconduct and the unjust behaviour of royal servants—violent judgements and the unlawful seizure of other persons’ property—first became rampant.197 Ælfwald was the victim of a conspiracy led by his patricius Sicga, but the beneficee was his nepos and son of the former King Alchred, Osred. Osred (II)’s reign, from which no coins are known, lasted a mere two years: a new conspiracy early in 790 brought Æthelred son of Æthelwald, ousted by Ælfwald eleven or twelve years previously, ‘from prison to throne, from misery to majesty’—the words are Alcuin’s in a letter to Joseph. Osred was betrayed (Sicga probably being among those who changed their allegiance), forcibly tonsured in York and subsequently driven into exile ‘from need’.198 The royal apparently correct for the purported date; and this is confirmed by Professor Brooks’s tables (available in manuscript) of the witnesses to Offa’s charters. H. Atsma and J. Vezin, ‘Le dossier suspect des possessions de Saint-Denis en Angleterre revisité VIIIe–IXe siècles’, Fälschungen im Mittelalter. Internationaler Kongress der MGH . . . 1986, 4, MGH Schriften 33/iv (Hannover, 1988), pp. 211–36, have made a powerful case regarding the text as based on older credit-worthy (‘authentic’) material, noting especially (pp. 215–16, 231) that Maginarius amd Nadelharius are well-documented at St.-Denis and that the details of the dating-clause are fully concordant. 196 The traditional chronology is hardly justified by the evidence of the letters cited in support of it. Thus, according to Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Charlemagne and England’ [1965/1975], pp. 163, 176 n. 45: ‘It is clear from’ epp. nos 8, 9, that the ports were still closed at the end of 790 and friendly relations re-established only in 791.’ In fact, in the first of these the dispute is not even mentioned, and Alcuin shows quite different preoccupations; while even if my interpretation of the letter to Adalhard is rejected, it offers no support for final settlement in 791. 197 Ep. no. 232 (p. 377); ep. no. 16 (p. 43), Chase, Two Letter-Books, II/4 (p. 54). For the dating of the letter, see below. 198 Ep. no. 8, Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/5 (in both English collections); HR 2, ed.

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line with which Alcuin was most closely associated, and whose cause and interests he seems at times to have identified with his own, was thus restored, bringing with it, perhaps, a brief promise of order and stability. It was, accordingly, to take up residence again in his native land that Alcuin left Francia in the spring or early summer of 790.199 The return to York and its cathedral community (as we must assume)200 had one enduring consequence: providing him with facilities for the copying and ‘registering’ of his letters on a regular basis. The very fact of such registration, more particularly of the correspondence of an individual who held no office, is surely remarkable.201 The background is entirely lacking: nothing is known about contemporary record-keeping at the cathedral; and the history of Northumbrian coinage is discouraging to the notion of a royal writingoffice that survived the violent changes of ruler. Could Alcuin, during his first stay at the Frankish Court, have been told about Salzburg’s property notitia and the collecting of letters there that later were organized in formularies?202 Among the letters of which a copy was made at York, but possibly written before Alcuin returned to England, is one to the newly-appointed Abbot Æthelbald of Wearmouth-Jarrow.203 It could well be the first of his elaborated epistolae ammonitoriae to have come down to us, other than (perhaps) the letter addressed to the community of St. Martin. It is certainly an early example of his Arnold, 52. The Annalist’s in loco vero quo Elfwaldus REX IUSTUS interfectus est points to an alternative contemporary view of King Ælfwald; but could the original reading have been iniustus or iniuste? When Sicga was killed in April 793 (it is not said by whom) and buried on Lindisfarne, he is referred to as dux: HR 2, ed. Arnold, 54. 199 Travelling presumably by the North Sea route with which he was familiar, compare the journey recorded in his carm. iv. It should be remembered that, in pre-steamship days, the pattern of prevailing winds there regularly made voyages southwards very difficult while favouring north-bound sailing. 200 Although the royal Court is an obvious alternative possibility. 201 Yet it attracts no comment (so far as I can see) in the recent Schriftkultur und Reichsverwaltung unter den Karolingern, ed. R. Schieffer (Abhandl. der NordrheinWestfälischen Akad. der Wissenschaft, 1996), although its index has seventeen references to Alcuin—a total exceeded only by Hincmar. For the circumstances, see now my ‘Why do we have Alcuin’s letters, anyway?’, York Quodlibet Lecure, 2001 (publication forthcoming). 202 Above, Pt. I, p. 49. 203 Ep. no. 67; Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/3 (pp. 22–4). In the English letter-collections, it precedes the letter to Colcu. Compare Alcuin’s letter to Æthelbald’s successor Friduin, ep. no. 282 (in the ‘personal’ collection) which suggests personal acquaintance if the abbot’s known fondness for wearing gold rings is rightly inferred (as by P. Meyvaert in Speculum 71 (1996), 879 n. 209) from confusio est vitae tuae digitos auro radiare.

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‘appositive style’, proliferating antitheses, verbal and clausal, with or without shared case-endings and making use of paronomasia in other syllables; and there seems to be no feature of its language that he could only have acquired during his stay in Francia.204 The abbot is reminded, like Paulinus, of the heavy burden he assumed when he accepted the honour. The normula (proper standard, rule) of the monastic life is almost everywhere being abandoned, the formula (example, pattern) of secular life takes hold; and—‘what is worse’— one-time builders are now wreckers, tearing down what they previously put up.205 Alcuin had grounds for optimism when he first wrote to colleagues and friends in Francia, and his thankfulness and delight at Æthelred’s restoration provide the opening sentences of his letter to Joseph: ‘the reformation of the kingdom (cuius regni novitate)’ will be keeping him there for some time.206 The rest of the letter is very largely personal: he wants to know whether the king is leading a military expedition or not, whether there is peace or conflict—good evidence that Alcuin had left Worms before the April/May conventus of the Franks was told that there was to be no expedition that year. He gives detailed instructions for the sending of substantial weights of silver (or their equivalent after exchange), secular and clerical garments, of medicaments and ‘colours for paintings’,207 and of a horse, more silver, wine 204 For the ‘appositive style’, see F.C. Robinson, ‘Beowulf ’ and the Appositive Style (Knoxville, TN; 1985), for Alcuin, esp. pp. 8–9. Bede’s definition of paranomasia: De schematibus et tropis [II], 1.viiii, ed. Kendall (CCSL 123A), pp. 147–8, where the first example is Ps 21.6 (iuxta Hebr.) In te confisi sunt et non sunt confusi. 205 Pondus of spiritual office: cf. ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, lines 1248 (Bp. Wilfrid II), 1480 (Archbp. Egberht); also, although in rather special circumstances, Bp. Higbald of Lindisfarne in 793 magno . . . curarum pondere pressus, carm. ix line 189 (MGH Poet. I, p. 234). Normula—formula: cf. monastice conversationis normam regulariter authenticis priscorum patrum formulis etc. in the prologue of Lul’s earliest letter, Epist. Select. 1, ed. Tangl, no. 98 (but in Reg.Ben., c. 73, it is the Books of the Bible that are rectissima norma vitae humanae); and norma had very powerful associations because that was the ‘meaning’ of the Hebrew Stephanus (the proto-martyr), see Isidore, Etym. VII. xi. 3 (apparently from Eucherius of Lyons, but ultimately from Jerome). CETEDOC offers no Patristic instance of normula; it occurs occasionally in the grammarians, and Aldhelm uses it several times in both prose and verse, without any diminutive significance: Ehwald, Aldhelmi Opera, indices s.v. (pp. 699, 741, 748). For the notvery-common dissipator in a pejorative sense, see Stephanus’s Vita Wilfridi ch. 33 (ed. Colgrave, p. 68), and previously, i.a., Augustine, Tract. in Ioh., 11, 13 (CCSL 36, p. 118) and, by implication, Jerome, Comm. in Isai., 3, 8.11 (CCSL 73, p. 116). 206 Ep. no. 8 (p. 33), Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/5. 207 For the interpretation of the references to five pounds plus five pounds of silver, see above. Pigmenta multa de sulfure bene has hitherto been understood as ‘pigments, paints’, and even connected with English achievements in book decoration

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and food to an embassy on its way to St. Peter’s, and to ‘brethren’ and dependents similarly. The resources of Alcuin’s Continental domains add to his dismay that he has only bitter ale to drink as he laments his distance from Joseph.208 A second letter went to Bishop Arn: the political situation is briefly touched on in similar language to that of the letter to Joseph, but for the most part it is an outpouring of emotion to an absent friend, concluding with requests for prayers both personal and communal.209 A third letter, placed by its modern editors chronologically between the other two but perhaps the latest in the group, is the one already quoted several times, written to Adalhard of Corbie. It is one of Alcuin’s characteristically ‘worrying’ letters. He misses Adalhard more than he can say, not merely because his ‘brotherhood in spirit’ means more to him than feelings of affection for blood relatives, but also because he relies on him for the encouragement without which he cannot start what God may help him to finish. The country, moreover, is in a bad way and King Æthelred is proving a serious disappointment: but he (Alcuin) is trying to improve matters. We have given advice (aliquid fecimus ammonitionis) to the king and others; and today we are working against injustice, as best we can, with some of the magnates.210

This is Alcuin’s first documented involvement in the politics of his native land, which on his own testimony he was to maintain until (!), although they are being sent to Northumbria. That is highly unlikely. ‘Sulphur’ in any form, except possibly copper sulphate, is not at this period a plausible element of any pigment (later, of course, it was combined with mercury to produce vermilion). It was, however, a very common feature of plant-based medicaments, and this is the normal meaning of pigmentum in late-Latin and medieval medical texts (including ones in the Lorsch-Bamberg codex) and of its derivatives in several early-Romance languages: see most conveniently A. Önnerfors, ‘Bemerkungen zum Waltharius-Epos’, Latomus 51 (1992), 632–51, at 636, to which the pigmentorum compositio of Bede, Vita Cuthb. c. 32 (ed. Colgrave, p. 258) and the Alcuin letter can be added. 208 For celia acerba and the correspondingly sour jest based on I Sm 9.7, see Bullough, Friends, Neighbours and Fellow-Drinkers, p. 5. 209 Ep. no. 10, Chase, Two Letter-Books, I/6 (pp. 29–30), the final section before the possibly ‘autograph’ addition beginning with a statement Novitas regni nostri me retinet adhuc isto anno. For the letter’s use of Jerome’s epistola iii, in a particular manuscript tradition, see above. 210 Ep. no. 9. Compare ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, line 1479 (on Ælberht): Non regi aut ducibus iustus parcebat iniquis; and the sentence near the beginning of Alcuin’s letter to the king and his leading counsellors in 793 (ep. no. 18), Recordamini quis vobis omnes perdonavit honores quos habetis, prosperitates contulit, sanitates largitus est, omnibus vos vestris fecit inimicis sublimiores.

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and beyond his return to Francia three years later. ‘Being mindful of your most sweet love’ (memor dulcissime dilectionis vestre—an opening that was to become characteristic of his epistolary style—he wrote to the Northumbrian king and optimates, ‘I do not hesitate, dear comrades, to counsel you often, either in your presence by word of mouth (if God grants it) or, if away from you, in writing as the Spirit directs’.211 It was not very effective. Indeed, worse was to come, even on the scanty evidence of the ‘Northumbrian Annals’. In 791 the dux Eardwulf was the subject of a bungled execution, on the king’s orders, outside Ripon monastery; the next year, King Ælfwald’s surviving sons were treacherously lured from sanctuary in York cathedral and then drowned in a mere ‘by King Æthelred’. Later in 792 Osred was persuaded by some of the magnates to return secretly from exile in Ireland, only to be betrayed, taken prisoner by the king and subsequently killed at his behest.212 A letter of Alcuin’s to Eardwulf in 796 recalled his miraculous avoidance of death, for which credit was due to God alone.213 In those he wrote at the time, necessarily to correspondents in Francia, the harsh realities of Northumbrian politics were wholly or largely glossed over. There is no reference to them in a letter to Richbod, when he had already added the bishopric of Trier to his abbacy of Lorsch and which Dümmler tentatively dated to the middle period of Alcuin’s three-year stay.214 Its

211 Ep. no. 16 (p. 42), Chase, Two Letter-Books, II/4, written after the Northmen’s attack on Lindisfarne. The opening Memor (‘I being mindful’) etc. occurs no less than fourteen times in Alcuin’s extant correspondence, including the prefatory letter of his De virtutibus et vitiis; it is never used by Boniface or by others whose letters are copied with his, and only once in the entire correspondence of Pope Gregory I (Registrum VII, 15 ed. Norberg, 1, 465: Memor bonitatis vestrae atque caritatis). 212 Eardwulf etc.: HR 2, ed. Arnold, 52–3. The failed execution is the subject of the second entry in the annal for anno dccxc but it is introduced by the words Cuius [sc. Ethelredi ] anno secundo, which should be 791: and this is clearly the correct year for the consecration of Ba(l)dwulf of Whithorn (by Archbishop Eanbald and his own predecessor, now bishop of Hexham; but not at York) eodem anno, since the day ‘17 July’, recorded in ASC ‘D’ (and ‘E’), is the ninth Sunday after Pentecost in 791. The succeeding annal, for anno dccxci, begins with the account of the fate of Ælfwald’s sons and continues with the death of Archbishop Jaenberht of Canterbury and his successor’s election, which ASC records under 790 for 792. Osred: HR 2, ed. Arnold, 54, ipso denique anno, following the account of Alcuin’s contribution to the current debate on ‘the adoration of images’, under the annalistic date anno dccxcii. 213 Ep. no. 108: scito certissime quod nullus alius tuam vitam conservare potest nisi ille qui te de morte gratuita pietate liberavit praesenti etc. 214 Ep. no. 13, as ‘ca. 791–792’. For its retrospective evidence and issues of interpretation, see also above, pp. 371–2.

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concern is the painful contrast between the love of and for God (described by Alcuin himself as tam longo repetita principio!) and the neglect or disdain that a former discipulus has been showing him, supposedly because of excessive devotion to Virgil’s Aeneid—an engagement that may well be reflected in the now-incomplete copy made about the turn of the century, probably in the Lorsch area.215 The writer’s distress is expressed without recourse to the language of passionate friendship, although towards the end he declares that he has written ‘rubbing the page with somewhat too fierce a pumice-stone to provoke you into writing back’, which could be understood as indicating an ‘autograph’ letter.216 Since, however, Alcuin complains that for a full year he has had neither an oral nor a written greeting from Richbod (whose appointment to Trier was almost certainly not before 792) and because of the letter’s manuscript tradition, it is much more likely that it was written after his return to the Continent, either in the autumn/winter of 793–4 or not impossibly in 795.217 Alcuin’s explicitly admonitory letter to a high-born, anonymous but possibly identifiable, Frankish layman and his wife may none the less allude obliquely to Northumbria’s current troubles; and in 793, ‘think who freed you from manifold suffering’ he reminded Æthelred and his leading counsellors, ‘how often you have escaped imminent death through His mercy, how often you have been snatched from the hands of your enemies’.218 215

I.e. Paris, BNF lat. 7906, fols 59–69 (CLA Suppl. no. 1744), on which see Bischoff, Lorsch2, pp. 36, 112. Although Chatelain (Paléographie des classiques, 1, 19 and pl. lxvi = fol. 59v) claimed that its ‘variantes curieuses . . . s’accordent assez souvent’ with the Ancient manuscripts F and P, this is only partially supported by the apparatus to Mynors’ OCT edition of 1969/1972. Surprisingly, however, the reported testimonies of Paris 7906 ( p) in that apparatus are far from reliable: in the first four hundred lines of Lib. IV I have noted at least six errors or significant omissions. 216 But as the opening phrase of the sentence with the words . . . paululum ferociori pumice cartam terens, ut vel iratus aliquid rescriberes (p. 39) is Hoc dolens dictavi, this may be intended rather as a metaphoric ‘sharpening up my text’. (According to H. Göbel, Studien zu den altenglischen Schriftwesenrätseln (Epistemata: Würzburger Wissenschaftliche Schriften; Würzburg, 1980), p. 132, none of the OE riddles with writingpractices as their subject refers to pumice or its use.) For the overall tone of this and the other letters to Richbod, cf. McGuire, Friendship, p. 119. No Carolingianperiod manuscript of Virgil has Trier connections, on the evidence of Mynors’s (incomplete) list in his OCT Vergili Opera, pp. ix–x. 217 It is in both ‘Tours collections’, K and T, and from the latter in S1 (twice); in K it is preceded by ep. no. 51, which I would date 794/5, and ep. no. 31 (of ?793/95) and followed by a second letter to Richbod (hence K1’s simple lemma Item alia), ep. no. 49, which is almost certainly of Oct./Nov. 795. 218 Ep. no. 69 to ?Gerold (above, p. 370 n. 122); ep. no. 18 (pp. 49–50), Chase, Two Letter-Books II/1.

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Royal Counsellor In 790 Alcuin had been denied the opportunity of journeying to Mercia, whose ruler compared favourably—for a few years—with the present and recent Northumbrian kings. He may have found some compensatory satisfaction in returning a vagrant but penitent monk to his abbot in (probably) western Mercia, with an earnest plea for understanding and forgiveness; as so often, the circumstances in which the monk had found his way to York and attracted Alcuin’s attention are totally concealed from us.219 Two requests for Alcuin’s views, both apparently in 792, are none the less striking evidence of the reputation he had gained for himself on both sides of the Channel and North Sea. The first is known from the text of his reply a copy of which, for whatever reason, was not included in the main York letter-collection. Following the death of Archbishop Jaenberht of Canterbury on 12 August 792, King Offa of Mercia as ‘over-king’ of Kent secured the election of Æthelheard, abbot of Louth (Lindsey). (It is likely that his name is concealed behind the corrupt form Edihardus abbas in the subscriptions to the 786 synodal acta.)220 The question was then raised as to the proper manner of his consecration, because in 787 legates of King Offa had persuaded Pope Hadrian to recognise the see of Lichfield (in Mercia) as a metropolitan archbishopric; and guidance was sought from Alcuin. Only a few years later he was to be severely critical of Offa’s successful initiative—the product ‘not, it may be said, of rational reflection but from a certain desire for power’221—but at this time he accepted it without comment, unless his insistence on the overriding authority of the church’s decrees is veiled criticism; and he advised that in the light of letters from Pope Honorius I preserved by Bede, which (Alcuin suggested) the Mercian king could consult in his own copy of the Ecclesiastical History, it would be correct for the new archbishop to be consecrated by his counterpart at Lichfield. By the date of the ceremony (21 July 793) Alcuin was back in Francia.222 219 Ep. no. 70, which may be the earliest extant letter to a Mercian addressee. For the location of the monastery, named in a head-note as Hoddahelm, see above, Pt. I. 220 Brooks, Church of Canterbury, pp. 120–1; MGH Epp. IV, p. 29 (line 11). Louth is an example of the pre-Viking English monasteries otherwise totally unrecorded. 221 Ep. no. 128. 222 Ep. ad Offam, ed. Lehmann: licet sancti canones firmissime decrevissent numquam ob regum dissensiones aecclesiastica statuta violare debuisset. Had York, whose only recently

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The second request and Alcuin’s response are known only from the previously-quoted passage in the ‘Northumbrian (?York) Annals’ and other annals and chronicles dependent on it.223 In spite of its anomalous character, and the use of language not normally found in annalistic texts, there is no good reason for doubting its authenticity; but it is certainly arguable that it was an early insertion in the original annal for the year 792, and conceivably one inspired by Alcuin himself.224 Ann Freeman indeed, in the course of her comprehensive re-examination of the composition, correction and consequences of the Opus Caroli regis ‘Against Images’, has latterly interpreted the passage in its most literal sense. She supposes that the liber synodalis sent to Britain in the ?summer of 792 was the volume of Latin acta of the 787 Nicene Council that had provoked the circle of scholars around King Charles to reject its supposed propositions and prepare a counter-blast under the editorial guidance of ‘the Goth’ Theodulf: in consequence, the full text was not thereafter available at the Frankish Court until Alcuin travelled back with it in the second half of 793.225 On the evidence of the Annals, it was accompanied re-acquired archiepiscopal powers would have been diminished by Lichfield’s enhanced status, ever protested? The only hint that it might have done is the instruction in Alcuin’s 790 letter to Joseph to ‘help me and Berdic on their(?) mission to St. Peter’s’ by ‘giving him my young horse’; but even if Berdic was indeed from York, there could be many other reasons for a Rome-bound legation four years after the legatine synods in England. 223 Above, Pt. I. 224 The immediately preceding annal with the year-date ‘791’ in the received text (‘pseudo-Symeon’) seems to be properly datable to 792 (above); the subsequent entering of new material from an outside source in the margins of or in a blank space after already-complete local annals is the most probable explanation of the antedating of events on the Continent in the years 795 and 796, see Bullough, Carolingian Renewal, p. 223 (n. 74). Nothing in the passage needs to be credited to Byrhtferth’s editorial activity. Bede had previously put the annal-writer’s heu, pro dolor! into the mouth of Pope Gregory I (HE II 1: ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 132); Alcuin himself uses Pro dolor, heu as the first feet of a line in his carm. ix to Lindisfarne in 793 (below), and Heu pro dolor when lamenting the successes of the (Adoptionist) ‘heretics’ in a letter to Paulinus of Aquileia, ep. no. 139; for heu see also Alcuin’s De grammatica, PL 101, col. 901B. The annal’s mirabiliter, unlike other adverbs in -iter (Lapidge, ‘Byrhtferth’ [repr.], pp. 322–3), is standard Classical and Ecclesiastical Latin. 225 See the ‘Einleitung’ to her MGH Concilia edition of the Opus Caroli (Hannover, 1998), c. 1, at pp. 5 and 7–8 (‘. . . kehrte Alkuin aus England zurück, in seinem Gepäck die Akten des Konzils’; and ‘Wohl gegen Ende des Sommers war die Revision des Opus Caroli regis abgeschlossen . . .’). She was less specific in her earlier ‘Caroline orthodoxy and the fate of the Libri Carolini ’, Viator 16 (1985), 65–108, at 80, 89–90; but, if anything, more specific in ‘Additions and corrections to the Libri Carolini; links with Alcuin and the Adoptionist controversy’, in: “Scire litteras”.

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by a letter written ‘in the name of the Northumbrian bishops and leading laymen ( principum)’ by Alcuin, similarly refuting the council’s declarations on the basis of Scripture.226 It is likely that Alcuin also brought a copy of the creed circulating for centuries as the Expositio fidei catholicae sancti Hieronimi although it was in fact that of Pelagius(!), with its distinctive (originally anti-Bonosus) definition Dei Filium non . . . adoptivum; it thus became part of the repertoire of creeds at the Frankish Court, making its first appearance there as a major and significant insertion at the beginning of the Opus Caroli regis’s Third Book.227 Unlike the creed, the letter has not survived. In form it must have been very similar to the letter to the Spanish bishops composed by Alcuin in 794 or his ?second letter to Felix of Urgel, written in 797.228 In the absence of any other writings by Alcuin on ‘images’, however, it is impossible to say on what texts he relied: none of the Forschungen zum mittelalterlichen Geistesleben, ed. S. Krämer and M. Bernhard (Bayerische Akad. der Wiss., Ph.-Hist. Kl., Abhandl. n. F., 99; Munich, 1988), pp. 159–69, at pp. 164–5. For reservations about this reconstruction, see below. 226 The annal’s [et] persona is now invariably translated as in the text: I am sure rightly, although I can find no precise parallel to this (prepositional) usage of the noun. 227 Hahn, Bibliothek3, no. 209 (CPPM, 2, no. 865); Opus Caroli III, 1, ed. Freeman, pp. 336–40, as the replacement of deleted group of creeds on Vat. lat. 7207 fols 117v–119v (see Freeman’s notes ad loc. and ‘Einleitung’, p. 44), without a title but with a (?)unique ending after esse arbitrii, declaring that in hoc opere beati Hieronimi verbis expressam taxavimus. Alcuin includes two or three of its formulae in the profession of faith of the 794 Frankfurt synod (below). It is the last of the five creeds in the Court-workshop ‘Dagulf Psalter’, Vienna Nat. bibl. 1861, fols 7–10, with title and the original ending Haec fides est papa . . . hereticum conprobavit, and an identical text is in the Court-origin collection in the Leidrad of Lyons book, Rome, Casa dei Padri Maristi s.n., fols 108–110; among the distinctive readings shared also with the Opus Caroli version are: after coepisse nec Filium the clause Non enim possumus . . . Filium coaeternum; the shortened Nec est prorsus aliquis in Trinitate gradus (in place of Non est enim aliquis in hac summa et ineffabili trinitate gradus); and after the final hominem the word semper (cf. Hahn). Both the Psalter and the Leidrad-copy preserve a small number of ‘Insular abbreviations’, and at different points. The Expositio Hieronimi is the third of four creeds in the early-ninth-century Munimenta fidei of Benedict of Aniane (ed. J. Leclercq in Studia Anselmiana 20 (1948), 21–74, at 65) and, with an extended title, in Karlsruhe Aug. XVIII (s. ix1/4, Reichenau but apparently from a Tours-origin exemplar). Note, however, that the creed of Pelagius is quoted at some length in Archbishop Lull of Mainz’s profession of faith to the Pope in 780: Levison, England and the Continent, pp. 238–40. 228 I.e. ep. no. 23 (uniquely in Vienna 795), wrongly dated by Dümmler to ‘ca. 793’). Dümmler dated his ep. no. 5 to ‘ca. 789’: but since it is in both Tours collections (K and T ), it is most unlikely to be earlier than 794/5; and its expressions of personal respect and encouragement suggest that it was written after Felix’s double recantation of his support for Adoptionism (at Regensburg in 792 and Rome in 793).

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late corrections to the text of Opus Caroli that Ann Freeman has suggested may reflect his influence is strictly ‘scriptural’.229 Two decades ago I argued that a specific contribution to the Opus’s final version might be discerned in the syllogistic arguments in Bk. IV c. 23, where ‘ostentatious use’ is made of Aristotle’s De interpretatione (Peri Hermeneias) as transmitted in Boethius’s first commentary on it, and similarly of Apuleius’s Peri Hermeneias. I have subsequently and unhesitatingly abandoned that claim. In the first place, the vocabulary and style of this section do not differ from those characteristic of other parts of the Opus where Alcuin’s involvement is not to be supposed. Secondly, Alcuin does not—it appears—use Apuleius’s work in his De dialectica (of 796/7?) although there are several places where, if he had known it, one would expect him to do so; and although he probably does make use there of the Boethian commentary, it is in ways rather different from its exploitation in the received text of the Opus Caroli.230 It is not likely that in England in 792/3 Alcuin was already drawing on the two texts (copies of which were demonstrably available at the Carolingian Court a few years later), only to ignore one of them and use the other quite differently after his return to Francia. Apart from his responsibility for making available at the Court before 790 one or more older texts and possibly some of his own ‘teaching material’ subsequently used in the composition of the Opus, Alcuin’s one likely contribution is the synodal theory expounded in the brief final chapter (IV 28), although even that must be regarded as linguistically Theodulf ’s.231 The denial of the universality of Nicaea II (contrary to the claims of the Greeks), and the proposition that a gathering of the bishops of several provinces ‘which professed without reservation the whole body of the doctrine taught by the Fathers’ in the Six Councils could claim to share in their universality as well as their orthodoxy, were as bold as they were appealing. They put 229 Letters: MGH Conc. II/i, pp. 143–57 (discussed below), ep. no. 23. Freeman, ‘Additions and corrections’, pp. 164–6. 230 See John Marenbon, ‘Alcuin, the Council of Frankfort and the Beginnings of Medieval Philosophy’, Frankfurter Konzil, pp. 603–15. Alcuin also (it seems) uses the Boethian commentary in his De grammatica, in the definitions of vox, littera, nomen and verbum. (For a different view, postulating a text of Isidore glossed with extracts from the Commentaries (!), see C.H. Kneepkens, ‘Some notes on Alcuin’s De perihermeniis with an edition of the text’, Alcuin of York, ed. L.A.J.R. Houwen and A.A. MacDonald, Germania Latina III (Groningen, 1998), pp. 81–112: the objections are considerable.) My now-abandoned view was re-stated in ‘Alcuin and the Kingdom of Heaven’, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 185–6. 231 Opus Caroli, ed. Freeman, pp. 557–8, with ‘Einleitung’, pp. 44–8.

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in the hands of the Frankish king a formidable instrument of authority over Christian peoples and the faith they professed; and it is noteworthy that Alcuin did not need, or did not choose, to articulate such views a second time, even at the peak of his contest with the Adoptionist Felix. The king’s sister Gisla was Alcuin’s chosen addressee for one of the last—perhaps the very last—letter from England, written when he was anxiously contemplating the return voyage across the North Sea.232 It is another and very accomplished example of his ‘appositive’ style, pointing the contrasts between what has been foregone or is to be avoided and what is to be sought or has been gained. Alcuin had previously, by his own account, ‘given advice’ orally to the Northumbrian king; and there are grounds for supposing that he had written ‘admonitory’ letters that do not survive. That to Gisla, whose learning is fulsomely praised, is none the less the first in the extant correspondence in which Alcuin uses the word ammoneo when writing to a member of a ruling dynasty. But because the recipient has already forsaken the world’s glories and its royal pomps for Heavenly honours as bride of the King of Kings, its phraseology and tone are significantly different from those of later letters to both English and Frankish monarchs. Iustitia is theological ‘righteousness’, not secular ‘justice’.233 Sinning, which will be minor, will be washed away (abluere) with tears of penitence; and although Alcuin quotes the same verse of the First Letter to Timothy as when enjoining confession on the St. Martin’s community, that has no place in his advice to Gisla. The letter finally foreshadows its author’s later exaltation of Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, with some unorthodox imagery: following Christ, Gisla will be led into the house of the Father and the chamber (cubile) of his mother so that she may eat and drink at His table.234

232 Ep. no. 15; above, p. 369 and n. 121. Note that the words in which Alcuin expresses his concern, with a request for protection through prayer dum fluctivagi maris incertum iter temptare conpellar, ut divina clementia me ad portum salutis perducere dignetur, are in some respects closer to Paulinus of Nola’s and Venantius Fortunatus’s metaphoric verses (Fort. Vita s. Mart. iv,1: post mare fluctivagum reptens ad litora portum; Paul. carm. xvii, 175–6 (ed. Hartel, p. 89): donec optatos liceat salutis/tangere portus) than is the corresponding metaphor with which he prepares for the conclusion of his ‘York poem’. For Alcuin’s North Sea voyages, compare above, p. 396 and n. 199. 233 For Alcuin’s notion of ‘justification’, McGrath, Iustitia Dei, pp. 91, 216 (n. 9), refers to the inauthentic De divinis officiis and cites Dic tu prior iniustitias, ut iustificeris, apparently without appreciating that this is Is 43.26 in a VL version. 234 Furthermore, linked to the Virgin Mother and following the Lamb, per omnia

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Communication with the Frankish Court and royal family was not necessarily limited to letter-poems and letters addressed to an individual. That the longest of Alcuin’s Bible-poems, 200 or 204 lines in elegiac distichs inc. Dum primus pulchro fuerat homo pulsus ab horto, was composed ca. 801 to accompany a gift to the new Emperor has been generally accepted since Bonifatius Fischer made it a keystone of his proposed sequence of (lost) early Tours Bibles and their Theodulfian rivals.235 Both the date and the supposed original setting are challengeable. The poem’s transmission is independent of Tours or Tours-connected Bibles, although that does not establish dissemination from (say) the Aachen Court rather than from St. Martin’s. It follows another, much shorter, verse-preface of Alcuin’s (inc. In hoc quinque libri ) in a north-east French Bible of the second third of the ninth century, Vienna Nat. bibl. 1190.236 An incomplete copy (lines 1–182 only) and the same shorter poem are a mid-century insertion in a St.-Amand copy of Aldhelm’s and Servius’s metrical writings; a complete copy was in a Salzburg (and St.-Amand?) collection of Alcuin’s verse and other writings, copied between 836 and 859 but lost since Frobenius Forster’s day.237 It is one of two Alcuin poems (although incomplete) in a verse miscellany written in caelestis regni penetralia transeas! A related but different image, less clearly focussed on Mary, is used in a later letter to a Mercian princess. I have not noticed any other early-medieval allusion to Mary’s heavenly chamber. 235 See especially B. Fischer, ‘Alkuin-Bibeln’ [1971], Lateinische Bibelhandschriften, pp. 203–403, at pp. 218–46. Recent writers who follow Fischer include F. Stella, La Poesia Carolingia Latina a Tema Biblica, Biblioteca di Medioevo Latino, 9 (Spoleto. 1993), pp. 43–4 and D. Ganz, ‘Mass production of early medieval manuscripts: the Carolingian Bibles from Tours’, The Early Medieval Bible, ed. R. Gameson (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 53–62, at p. 56. The poem (S.-K. no. 204) is Alcuin’s carm. lxix, MGH Poet. I, pp. 288–92, a variant edition in Biblia Sacra Vulgata, 1: Genesis (Rome, 1926), ed. H. Quentin, pp. 44–51; but Fischer, Lateinische Bibelhandschriften, at pp. 231–7, reverts to Dümmler’s text. 236 Vienna 1190, fols 16 et seq. (with the notorious scribal error Etrado for Ezra deo), where carm. lxviii (MGH Poet. I, p. 287) precedes it on fol. 16. The suggested origin and date are the late Professor Bischoff’s revised opinion (pers. comm.); for the non-Tours character of its text, see Fischer, Lateinische Bibelhandschriften [1965], p. 150, cf. [1971], pp. 230 n. 80, 392. 237 Brussels, Bib. roy. 4433–38, fols 73–76v, on which see Bischoff, Katalog, 1, no. 709; ‘Regensburg, St. Paul, perd.’, reported Forster, Alcuini Opera, 1, p. liv, a (?)partial transcript in Regensburg Staatl. Bibl. Rat. ep. 422. Ehwald, in his great edition of Aldhelm (MGH AA XV) dated all the manuscripts of that author’s (prose) De metris too late, according to Bischoff [1971], MaSt 3, 223 n. 54, Engl. transl. (with revisions) p. 103 n. 54. The relationship between the text of Servii centimetrum al. De centum metris (ed. Keil, G.L. 4, 456–) in the Brussels book, fols 50–54v and that in Berlin Diez B.66 pp. 223–31—both are incomplete—has not been explored. For the Forster transcript see Bischoff, Salzburger Formelbücher, pp. 7–9, 27–9.

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the fifteenth century but apparently a direct copy of a mid-ninthcentury book that was possibly in ‘Continental Insular’ script.238 A recent claim that its verse form is a direct response to Theodulf ’s use of that same metre in his Bible-poem, on the model of Eugenius of Toledo’s comparable but shorter one, ignores Alcuin’s use of elegiac distichs for one or more of his longer poems several years earlier; and he may, indeed, have had first-hand knowledge of Eugenius’s verses.239 In the ‘hymn of praise’ that leads up to a petitory prayer for the Frankish ruler, towards the end of the poem, the imperium is Christ’s authority over creation and not a secular one, while Charles is rex.240 A better indication of the poem’s time of composition is offered by the striking parallels with epithets for Moses in the letter written from England to ?Count Gerold and his wife; and there are supporting, if weaker, lexical arguments for an early date, such as the repeated use of the adjectival alm- and the reiterated cecinit.241 Others have noted that the Bible-poem’s distinctive opening ‘When the first man was driven from the beautiful garden . . . [and was hence], together with all his descendants, bereft of salvation (salutis inops)’ echoes the beginning of the poem on the destruction of Lindisfarne (lines 1–3) in 793; less noticed is the elegant marking of the end of its first section with the words salutis opes. The use of inops in the London BL Harley 3865, fols 11v–14; the Lindisfarne lament is at fol. 47v. If the exemplar were indeed ‘Continental Insular’, at the date in question it would almost certainly have been a product of either Fulda or Mainz. According to Roger Collins (Charlemagne’s Heir p. 366), Harl. 3865 ‘probably derives its contents from a collection of texts put together in northern Italy in the late-tenth century, quite possibly in an Ottonian court circle’: I do not know the basis for this statement. 239 Stella, Poesia Carolingia, p. 44, comparing Theodulf carm. xli/1, MGH Poet. I, pp. 532–8, and Eugenius, ed. Vollmer, carm. viii, MGH AA XIV, p. 238 f. Only the second half of Eugenius’s poem is in distichs. Alcuin carm. lxix line 159 = carm. lxviii line 13 (Poet. I, pp. 291, 287), Sanctus apostolicos Lucas descripserat (conscrip-, lxviii) actus certainly seems to be dependent on Eugenius’s hinc et apostolicos percurrens invenis actus/ quos sanctus merito conscripsit nomine Lucas (lines 23–4); and Theodulf ’s Hinc et apostolicos quos Lucas protulit actus/ it stilus (lines 133–4. Poet. I, p. 536) is hardly the intermediary here. Vollmer noted other, less convincing, parallels to Eugenius in Alcuin’s carm. lxviii and lxix. 240 Rex is, however, used by Alcuin even after the coronation of 800, although usually in conjunction with ‘imperial’ epithets. See, for example, the verses with which the dedicatory preface of De fide sanctae Trinitatis, ep. no. 257, concludes: O rex augusto clarissime dignus honore/ . . . decus imperii. 241 Legifer (line 35 being used again as Alcuin’s carm. lxvi, line 6), dux: cf. ep. no. 69 and the discussion of this letter above. For almus, -a in Alcuin’s verse (and its rarity in Theodulf ’s), see above, ch. 2; alma of the Dei genitrix Maria in line 116, which is common enough later, is a very early example. It is arguable, of course, that the relatively frequent occurrence of cecinit (and alm-) is simply a function of the poem’s length. 238

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transferred sense and in the clausula quoted (also pietatis inops) are apparently peculiar to Alcuin and even to these two poems.242 Their notably different themes surely make it more likely that it is the Biblepoem which is the model—or that the two are near-contemporary compositions—and is also, therefore, the source of the several verses repeated in shorter Bible-poems from Alcuin’s years at Tours.243 A context is perhaps provided by the lines towards the end of the poem: Quisque legat huius sacrato in corpore libri, Lector in ecclesia, verba superna Dei, Distinguens sensus titulos cola commata voce Dicat, ut accentus ore sonare sciat

often cited with other evidence for Alcuin’s concern about correct scribal punctuation. Layout per cola et commata is not, however, a feature of the Bibles produced at Tours: these use a hierarchy of scripts and a simplified punctuation in the text.244 It is, on the other hand, characteristic of the great Wearmouth-Jarrow Bibles of a century previously, still splendidly represented by the ‘Codex Amiatinus’ and by fragments of a twin whose home in the late-Anglo-Saxon period was apparently Worcester.245 Nor is this the only link between the poem and those Bibles. The penultimate couplet, which there is no need to dissociate from the rest of the poem, is—except for the orthographical Ezra for Esdra— a straight copy of the couplet which identifies the subject of the ‘author-portrait’ in the Amiatinus Bible’s prefatory leaves (fol. 5v). Seventy-two as the total number of books in the Bible is already 242 MGH Poet. I, p. 229. Four out of the five examples of inops in the ‘York poem’ have the meaning ‘poor man, needy person, beggar’; the fifth (line 658) is insula fontis inops, an unusual usage but taken from Bede’s Vita s. Cuth. (poet.) and ultimately from Fortunatus’s Vita s. Martini i. 150. Pietatis inops is carm. lxix line 42, salutis opes idem line 32: here opes are ‘treasures’ (metaph.), cf. ep. no. 251, vv. ad fin., sancta salutis ope. 243 Carm. lxvi, lxvii, lxviii: MGH Poet. I, pp. 285–7. 244 Parkes, Pause and Effect, pp. 31–6; and my comments, prompted by Alcuin’s ep. no. 172 (p. 285), in JournMedLat 5 (1995), 185–6. 245 E.A. Lowe, English Uncial (Oxford, 1960), pp. 9–13 and pls. VIII–X; B. Fischer [1962], Lateinische Bibelhandschriften, pp. 9–34; M.B. Parkes, Scribes, Scripts and Readers (London, 1991), pp. 93–5; idem, Pause and Effect, pl. 10 (pp. 178–9). For the layout and text of the fragments, now all in BL, see Marsden, Text of the Old Testament, pp. 90–8, 123–9. P. Meyvaert, ‘Bede, Cassiodorus and the Codex Amiatinus’, Speculum 71 (1996), 827–83, at 878–80, is the fullest account of the eleventh- and twelfth-century evidence for Worcester’s ownership of an Amiatinus-type ‘great Bible’, ostensibly gifted by the Mercian King Offa (ob. 796); but see also Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, pp. 182–3.

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found in the diagrams and texts there, by a misunderstanding: the mystical explanation, the seventy-two disciples of Lc 10.1, is Alcuin’s own and entirely in line with his thinking elsewhere. The poem’s four lines devoted to the Tabernacle and its furnishings suggest familiarity with the two-page illustration which is also included in the prefatory material.246 The order of the Old Testament books named is, however, neither that of the ‘Codex Amiatinus’ nor of early Tours Bibles:247 Job comes immediately after the Octateuch, suggesting dependence on Jerome’s Epistola ad Paulinum248 (it is never found there in any early Bible manuscript); and although in the next group Chronicles follows Kings, as in Amiatinus, the Major Prophets, with Lamentations, and the Minor Prophets precede the Psalms and the Wisdom Books as (with the insertion of Job) they do in the Tours Bibles; again, the poem’s implied order of the concluding books, with Tobias immediately before Maccabees, corresponds to neither. Parallels and contrasts (or contradictions) suggest that the poem was composed not for a presentation Bible created in the Tours scriptorium ca. 800–801, but in the previous decade to accompany an English pandect that incorporated some features of but was not identical with ‘Amiatinus’. The destination of such a noble book would presumably have been the Frankish royal chapel and its lectores in ecclesia, where, like the Mass-lectionary (OT) associated with Alcuin, it would have been potentially a ‘standard text’, the norm for the Verba Dei, proclaimed in the first instance at the Court itself.249 If there is any substance in this hypothesis, the book’s impact was, dedicationpoem apart, evidently limited: was it lost at an early date? The poem, exceeded in length only by ‘the York poem’, the verse Vita Willibrordi and the Lindisfarne lament, is skilfully-crafted; it is also very different in tone from most ‘Court’ poems of the 780s, and even

K. Corsano, ‘The first quire of the Codex Amiatinus’, Scriptorium 41 (1987), 3–34, esp. 19–22 and 26; Meyvaert, ‘Bede, Cassiodorus and the Codex Amiatinus’, p. 878. An excellent line-drawing of the Tabernacle illustration is the frontispiece to Bede: On the Tabernacle, transl. A.G. Holder (Liverpool, 1994). Bede’s commentary Bk. III c. 6 (ed. Hurst, CCSL 119A, p. 112, transl. Holder, pp. 128–9) is the fullest exploration of the symbolism of the number ‘72’ but does not link it with the scope of the Bible. 247 Marsden, Text of the Old Testament, pp. 450–1, is a convenient tabulation. 248 Biblia Sacra 1, 3–37. 249 Meyvaert, ‘Bede, Cassiodorus and the Codex Amiatinus’, p. 880, takes a different view: with, however, an unpersuasive explanation of the prayer for Charlemagne, and ignoring the poem’s transmission-history. But Bonifatius Fischer has doubted whether any ‘Court Bible’ was a Normalexemplar. 246

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from Alcuin’s own display-pieces of the end of that decade. In the context of 792–4, it becomes an early statement of the link between Divine authority and that exercised in the world by King Charles; it offers a roll-call of Old Testament duces and kings to serve as models— lawgivers, intrepidus fidei bellator, turbas . . . armis/ inducens patriam quam Deus ipse dedit; in sharp contrast with Alcuin’s pessimism in 793 about his own patria, it is implicitly optimistic about Francia under its present ruler. It also proclaims more directly than the 789 Admonitio generalis or the letter De litteris colendis that without a proper understanding of Scripture, no-one can know or reach out to God; and therein lies the vera sapientia to which all other learning should be directed.

Return to Francia. The Sack of Lindisfarne In March 793 Alcuin was still in York, witnessing strange meteorological phenomena that could subsequently be interpreted as portents. For on June 7 or 8,250 when he was already on the other side of the Channel, Lindisfarne’s cathedral-monastery was devastated by pagan Northmen who had unexpectedly crossed the North Sea, flouting the protective presence of Cuthbert and other saints. Letters recording his reactions to the news are preserved partly in the two Tours collections (with modified copies made at Salzburg a few years later) and partly in those put together in England; their addressees are, however, exclusively English—the Northumbrian king, other persons and communities in Northumbria, and the new (Mercian) archbishop of southern-English Canterbury, as well as Bishop Higbald of Lindisfarne and his devastated congregation.251 There is a very doubt250 Although June 8 is almost always the date in modern literature, it does not figure in any early text! Symeon’s Historia Dunelmensis ecclesiae (Symeonis Opera Omnia, ed. Arnold, 1, 51–2) has vii. iduum Juniarum in King Æthelred’s fifth year, which is June 7th 794; no day is indicated in the ‘Northumbrian Annals’ incorporated in the Historia Regum (ibid. 2, 55), which specifies the king’s fourth year; but the likelihood that one was in the original version is suggested by the inclusion of the words vi. idus Ianr. in the otherwise vernacular account in Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ‘E’ (ed. Plummer, Two Saxon Chronicles, 1, 57); and the Annals’ account is a heavily interpolated one. 251 Epp. nos 17–19 are in both the Tours and the English collections, and also— from the former—at Salzburg: for the changes introduced into the Salzburg copies, see above, Pt. I and ASE 27, 129 and n. 85. Ep. no. 20 (Chase, Two Letter-Books, II/3) is in the English collections and, uniquely, although not in the Tours collections as transmitted, is in the Salzburg collection S1 also, with a major omission.

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ful reference to the recent misfortunes of his native land, in the words Salomon . . . templum . . . construxit, non Chaldaea flamma periturum, in a highly-charged letter from Alcuin to Paulinus of Aquileia; but in spite of the clear verbal links with a passage in the letter to Higbald and with two lines in the poem that he addressed to the Lindisfarne brethren (below), their context is a quite different one, and it is likely on other grounds that the letter to Paulinus was written in the summer of 795. The pagan assault on Northumbria, which is sometimes said to have ‘reverberated round Europe’, is completely ignored by contemporary Continental Annals and other sources.252 The absence of any indication in the letters of where Alcuin was writing from is entirely typical of his correspondence before the last years of the century. I do not find it easy to believe that he had already rejoined the Frankish Court—at Regensburg (Bavaria) until the autumn!—although Ann Freeman’s reconstruction of the history of the Opus Caroli requires him to have done so in the course of the summer. This would indeed be excluded by Alcuin’s assurance, in the concluding section of one of his letters to Higbald, that when the king ‘returns home from defeating his enemies by God’s mercy, I plan with God’s help to come to him’ and raise the matter of the pueri taken captive at Lindisfarne; but it is likely that that letter, or this part of the letter, should be dated not to summer/autumn 793 but a full year later.253 The assumption that the entire letterEpp. nos 16 (to King Æthelred) and 21 (the ?latest or earliest to the bishop and congregation of Lindisfarne: below) are only in the English collections. For the signa or dira prodigia, see ep. no. 16 (p. 43) and HR 2, ed. Arnold, p. 54; also Historia Dunelmensis ecclesiae in HR 1, ed. Arnold, p. 51. The Lent storms with periods of calm and the return journey to Francia may in fact be connected, Alcuin taking advantage (as my colleague Dr. Robert Prescott has suggested to me) of a short period of predominant ‘northerlies’ or ‘north-easterlies’ in the North Sea. 252 Ep. no. 86: written in (mid-) summer, Alcuin not having seen or heard from Paulinus for some considerable time, which rules out 794; cf. ep. no. 20 (p. 57) and carm. ix, lines 49–50. For the 795 dating, see below, ch. 4. 253 Ep. no. 20, Chase, Two Letter-Books, II/3 (p. 52): Cum domnus noster rex hostibus per Dei misericordiam subditis domum revertetur, nos Deo iuvante ad illum [so mss.] venire venire disponimus. Domum could, I suppose, be understood as Regensburg, from which Alcuin was writing while the king was still at the front with his army. But the passage would make better sense if it were written in the late summer of 794, after the council of Frankfurt, when the king was engaged in yet another campaign against the Saxons and had not yet settled with his court at Aachen. There is, however, a transmission crux. The shorter text in the manuscript S1, in a context indicating that it was from a copy sent from Tours (although it is not included in either of the ‘Tours collections’), ends with a typical Alcuin farewell-clause Divine pietatis protectio vos . . . constituat, karissimi fratres. The passage Cum domnus noster rex . . . perducere

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sequence was written in the immediate aftermath of the attack, reflected in Dümmler’s datings and their adoption by almost all modern commentators, is certainly mistaken. Even if it was felt (by whom?) that the monastery’s sufferings should be reported to Alcuin as a matter of urgency, and a messenger experienced minimum delay traversing the North Sea or the Channel, the interval is likely to have been a matter of weeks rather than of days, particularly if he was travelling by stages to the Frankish Court. The letter to Æthelheard of Canterbury could only have been begun after reports of the archbishop’s consecration, with its handing over of wand (or rod, virga) and crozier (baculus) and installation in the sella dignitatis [s]uae, on 21 July had reached Alcuin, orally (it appears) rather than in writing;254 and almost two-thirds of an unusually long letter-text are devoted to a discourse on the episcopal office and its reponsibilities, before the recent scourging ( flagellum) of ‘a part of our island’, unspecified, is abruptly introduced—because the news had just been brought to him?255 Textual features of the letters to Northumbria suggest strongly, without conclusively proving, that they were written after that to Æthelheard and accordingly not before the late summer. Unless the letter to Higbald and the Lindisfarne brethren, ep. no. 21, in which the writer’s thanks for the community’s prayers are followed by expressions of delight that it prospers and will prosper through the intercession of its patron saint, and its misfortunes are curabimus and a second farewell-clause of a less common but still characteristic type (Valete in Christo dilectissimi et confirmamini semper proficientes) are peculiar to the ‘English collections’: have two originally separate letters been conflated in transmission? or was the first part of the copied letter engrossed but never sent (for lack of a portitor?) and an addition made later when it could finally be dispatched to Higbald, together—probably—with letters to York? For Freeman’s reconstruction of Alcuin’s movements, see above, p. 402 n. 226. 254 Its opening words are Audiens vestrae salutationis verba dulcissima etc. Seven other Alcuin letters begin Audiens . . . (and a further seven with other parts of audire), including ep. no. 44 which records a certainly oral message brought by the York priest and future archbishop Eanbald; none of Boniface’s and only one of Pope Gregory’s have that beginning. Æthelheard’s consecration on 21 July 793 (a Sunday; Pentecost 8 on the standard numbering) is established by John of Worcester’s Chronicle, ed. Darlington and McGurk, 2, 224 (–225 n.). The cathedra episcopalis is referred to in the consecration-prayer for a bishop in the Vatican Gelasian (I. xcix; Mohlberg no. 771) and Hadrianum (ed. Deshusses, no. 23) sacramentaries and in the fuller ordo in ‘Frankish Gelasians’ (Sacr. Gell., no. 2550). But Alcuin’s two other attributes are not specified in any of these: indeed, if there is any English liturgical evidence for the episcopal baculus before the late-tenth-century pontificals (‘Egbert’, in Two Anglo-Saxon Pontificals, ed. Banting, p. 11) I—and dictionary compilers—have failed to notice it. 255 In its several early manuscript copies it fills an average of eight pages. For flagellum, also in ep. no. 18 (p. 52), see above, ch. 2, pp. 299–300.

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referred to merely in passing as a castigatio . . . dignum, should on those grounds be placed first in the sequence, written when Alcuin was still unaware of the scale of the disaster,256 we should perhaps look elsewhere for his initial response: namely, to the unusually long and emotional poem, inc. Postquam primus homo, addressed ‘to you, my brothers, for whom I care’. (Lindisfarne is never actually named, although presumably only for metrical reasons.)257 It is arguably more pessimistic in outlook than the letters, a comprehensive evocation of Nature’s mutability (Nil manet aeternum celso sub cardine caeli ) being followed by nearly fifty lines on the fate of past civilizations and states and the material destruction associated with them, and then a shorter account of human aging:258 the historical examples are taken mostly from Orosius, the verses reflect Alcuin’s reading of both Christian and pagan poets (the latter in fact mostly Vergil).259 But this is immediately 256 In Reg. Ben. c. 2 and intermittently in Carolingian councils and capitularies, castigatio, castigare are used of a painful but not extreme punishment, i.e. a beating: see the places in MLWB 2, 340–2 (s.vv.). But in ep. no. 19, to Wearmouth-Jarrow, Alcuin says (p. 55) aliorum castigatio vestra sit ammonitio (which in the copy in the Salzburg-area D becomes nostra est ammonitio [cf. Dümmler, wrongly]) et paucorum tribulatio multorum sit salvatio. 257 Carm. ix, MGH Poet. I, pp. 229–35, from a fifteenth-century manuscript and Duchesne; an improved text, with a translation, in Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, pp. 126–39. But not all Godman’s emendations (and translations) are necessarily to be accepted: for lines 104–5 see next note; and in line 132 . . . lucrificare Deum does not mean ‘to bring riches to God’(!) but ‘to gain God [is better than gaining gold]’, cf. I Cor 9.22, where the Vulg. lucri facerem is lucrificarem in a widelydisseminated VL version. The poem’s last ten lines, inc. Non est quippe, were copied, with other carmina, at Salzburg in 802/3; it is impossible to say whether it had received a full text. 258 Pace Godman, Longa dies in line 104 is ‘length of days, a lifetime’ (as in Juvenal and elsewhere), and the emendation of line 105’s . . . quae numerare solet to qui numerare solent is probably unnecessary: in spite of the cross-reference to ep. no. 60 (p. 104) Godman has missed the evident allusion to Isidore, Etym. XIII.ii.1, with implications for the meaning of solivagos (apparently here understood as analogous with fluctivagus). Alcuin, it should be remembered, was already in his fifties when he wrote this; and the clouding (caliginare facit) of his own eyes is commented on in ep. no. 170 (p. 281). 259 Orosius cannot, however, be the source of Hunorum gladios ter ternis senserat annis/ Gallia tota (lines 81–2); nor is Bede’s Chronica maiora. Godman ad loc. points to Orientius, Commonitorium (CPL3 no. 1465), II. 181 ff., but this famous passage is quite unspecific. Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum II 4(5)–5(6), is more to the point but does not specify ‘nine years’. Line 23, Saepius excelsos feriunt et fulgura montes, is the strongest evidence anywhere that Alcuin knew something of Horace’s poetry (cf. carm. II. x 9 and 11–12: Saepius ventis . . ./. . ./ . . . feriuntque summos fulgura montis); but in view of the overwhelmingly negative evidence for direct knowledge at this period, it is far more likely that the words are ‘proverbial’, like the ‘York poem’s’ Tu ne forte feras in silvam ligna, viator and similarly in epp. nos 28 and 126, cf. Hor. Serm. I. x 34.

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counterpointed with the power of prayer directed to a God ‘who both wounds and heals’, exemplified by the successful petitions of bishops Aidan, Cuthbert, ‘the glory of your church’, and his successor Eadberht. Only at line 190—nearly four-fifths of the way through the poem—is the attack of ‘the pagan band coming from the ends of the earth’ introduced; and the concluding verses devote far more attention to its victims’ triumphant entry into Heaven than to the unparticularised failings of the community, which will yet flourish with God’s grace. Lindisfarne’s sufferings, in this poetic consolatio, can be read as an encouragement as well as a warning. Very striking is the way the attackers are characterized. Although the captions in Dümmler’s edition of the letters refer to them as Nortmanni, Alcuin himself never uses the term or an alternative ethnic one: to him they are pagani, a pagana gens. Is this a rhetorical device to emphasise the choice of pagans as an instrument of Divine punishment, in contrast with the failed Christian conduct of the Northumbrians at large? ‘I do not think’, he observes, ‘that the sin is only theirs who dwell in that place’. Or did he, unlike modern commentators, simply not know what part of the Scandinavian world the raiders came from?260 Conversely, I see no reason for rejecting Alcuin’s gloss on his remark that nothing like this has happened for nearly 350 years: ‘nor was it thought that such a voyage could be made’. His appeals to the past are interestingly varied. The reference to Hezekiah and the annihilation of the Assyrian host is shared, indeed, by the poem and three of the letters to Northumbria; but like the extension of that king’s life, its purpose is to show the power of prayer when a ruler is ‘just and pious’—Alcuin’s language, not that of his Scriptural sources.261 Writing to the king and his chief men he pairs veteres historias, Orosius presumably among them, with sanctas scripturas as testimonies to ‘kings losing kingdoms and peoples 260 Compare the marginal note ‘Lindisfarne ravaged by the Danes’ in Arnold’s edition of the Historia Regum 2, 55—where also, as again in the annal for 794 (idem p. 56), the text has simply pagani—with, e.g., Stenton’s ‘the raiders . . . undoubtedly came from Norway’ Anglo-Saxon England 3, p. 239. In his ep. no. 184 of 799, Alcuin refers similarly to the paganae naves which had recently raided islands along the Aquitanian coast. In contemporary Frankish annals from the 780s Nordmanni is a common alternative term for Dani (to whom Alcuin refers by that name in his ep. no. 6): not until 812 is there mention of a classis Nordmannorum which might be of Norwegians—because it is attacking Ireland. 261 Destruction of the Assyrians (Is 37.36): epp. nos 16 (p. 44), 19 (p. 55: without naming the king), 21 (p. 59); carm. ix, lines 161–2. Fifteen years added to the king’s life (Is 38.5, but also IV (II) Rg 20.6): epp. nos 16, 21; carm. ix, lines 163–4.

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their country’ because of their reckless sinning; a few lines previously, he has briefly characterized Northumbria’s Christian beginnings. The same ‘histories’, and perhaps (but not very probably) recent English experience, will have provided him with examples of great empires destroyed by internal dissension while one-time small territories that benefit from ‘peaceful concord’ expand until they are ruling over once-stronger kingdoms.262 Only the longer (and probably the latest) of the letters to Higbald (ep. no. 20), however, shares with the poem a recalling—very summarily—of the destruction of both Jerusalem and Rome and the ravages of Goths and Huns; and it is only in the letter to Archbishop Æthelheard that Alcuin directs his audience to ‘the book of Gildas wisest of the Britons’.263 The disquisition there on the episcopal office which (I have suggested) he was already composing when he learnt about the attack on Lindisfarne is his longest and most considered anywhere, although he naturally returned to the topic on many occasions, not only in letters but occasionally in his other writings.264 A wide range of Patristic authors is drawn on for Alcuin’s exposition or glossing of the Biblical texts that are its firm foundation; yet neither canon-law nor the 789 capitulary is put under tribute, except perhaps in the encouragement of preaching. The qualities credited in Christ’s ‘Sermon on the Mount’ to all who share in the kingdom, but particularly the disciples, are to be the everyday standards for the English episcopacy in general and for Æthelheard in particular; and ‘let neither the terror of high office nor anyone’s flattery divide you’ when you should be united as the army of God. (Alcuin will take a different view later about royal terror!) The image of bishops as a bright or 262 Ep. no. 18 (p. 52): . . . Sicuti maxima mundi imperia [imperitia mss.!] per dissensiones intestinas dilapsa decrescebant et e contrario minima quaeque civitatis cuiuslibet vel provinciae per pacificam concordiam regnum crescebat et proficiebat ut [et Dümmler] fortioribus sibi tandem imperabat regnis, language that very strongly suggests an (unidentified) literary source. Chase, Two Letter-Books, p. 44 nn., describes regnum as an internal accusative (accusative of respect?), ‘as a kingdom’. He also suggests that minima quaeque implies pars; but that surely weakens the intended contrast, and I would translate as ‘even the smallest of city-territories or provinces’ etc. 263 Discite Gyldum Brittonem sapientissimum occurs again in a letter to the Kentings in 797, ep. no. 129, and nowhere else in his correspondence; did Alcuin know that Canterbury had a copy of his work? it certainly had one in the time of Archbishop Theodore. 264 E.g., in his Expos. in epist. ad Titum I, 5 (PL 100, col. 1012C) where the criticism of bishops who appoint presbyteri not for their merits sed eorum vel officio deliniti vel sanguine iuncti is not from Jerome and seems to be his own.

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burning light is recurrent, the Biblical lux mundi even becoming lux totius Brittaniae, a conceit repeated three years later.265 When, after his brief references to the pagan attack and to Gildas, Alcuin reverts— with plenty of repetition—to bishops’ obligations to the society in which they live, described as the populus Dei,266 their direct descent from the Apostles is manifested in their power of binding and loosing and their possession of the keys of Heaven (as in Mt 16.19, 18.18). More unexpectedly, he then contrasts the potestas saecularis which wields the executioner’s sword with the potestas spiritalis whose tongue has the key of life, re-phrased in a later letter to the archbishop as a distinction between sacerdotalis atque regalis potentia, the latter of which holds the sword with which the guilty are punished.267 Although in rather different language, the inherent superiority of the spiritual over the secular is emphasised on both occasions. Pope Gelasius I’s famous pronouncement when writing to the Emperor Anastasius in 494 that ‘there are two [powers] by which this world is primarily ( principaliter) ruled, the sacred authority of the bishops and the royal power (auctoritas sacra pontificum et regalis potestas): of these two, the weight of the priests is much the more important . . .’, is not quoted verbatim in either of the letters to Canterbury; and contrary to what is widely believed, there is no sword-imagery in the Papal letter. Was it none the less Alcuin’s starting-point or inspiration? it was included in more than one of the canon-law collections available in northern Francia in the last years of the century; and the emphases in Alcuin’s letters are similar although much simplified, as also is their syntax. Or are his formulations here the distinctive expression of an elementary socio-political theory constructed from his reading of Isidore or earlier Fathers together with the De XII abusivis, which he would modify considerably whilst in Charles’s service?268 A more elaborate version is included 265 Ep. no. 104: O sanctissimi patres et pastores, o clarissima totius Brittanniae lumina . . . Light-imagery plays almost no part in episcopal ordination rituals: only (I think) in the phrase nec ponat lucem in tenebras nec tenebras in lucem. 266 On Alcuin’s use of this term in his Biblical exegesis, see esp. Interr. in Gen. no. 226 Ad Gn 25.23 (PL 100, col. 549A): In Esau figuratus sit maior populus Dei, hoc est, Israeliticus secundum carnem. It is common, although usually with wider connotations, in eighth-century Papal letters. 267 Ep. no. 255 (p. 413) of 802. 268 Gelasius: A. Thiel, Epistolae Romanorum Pontificum, 1 (Braunsberg, 1868), pp. 349–58 (no. 12), Jaffé-Wattenbach2, no. 632; Maassen, Geschichte, p. 280. W. Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government (London, 1955), p. 21 characterises the Pope’s language as ‘a thoroughly juristic terminology’; ‘the two swords’ allegory is a late-

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in another of his letters at this time: ‘It is for bishops [or priests, sacerdotes] to speak the word of God; it is for you, princes, humbly to obey and scrupulously perform; it is for the king to crush all wickednesses by his dutiful power ( pietatis suae potentia)’, he tells the Northumbrian king and nobles.269 At the end of a prose-text nearly 1400 words long, Alcuin adds twenty-four lines of verse, the first twenty of which ‘geminate’ the parts of the letter exhorting and praising the English episcopacy: they have attracted almost no attention.270 His master Ælberht had appended six lines of verse to one of his letters to Lul; Alcuin himself had previously ended at least one letter with a simple pair of verses or distich, and he was to do so several times again over the next ten years: but only on four other occasions, all from the last years of the century or after 800, and at the end of the letter-preface to one of his exegetical works was he to append a poem that is long enough to stand on its own.271 The tone and language of this first example are very striking. Although its verse-form necessarily divides it from hymns, it has hymnic echoes, beginning with the first line, even though Urbs aeterna are not the opening words of any pre-1100 hymn. In imagery of great boldness, Alcuin applies Genesis’s fontes vivi, paradisi et flumina sacra = Gn 2.6,10, to the bishops themselves, without any attempt at justifying it in his exegesis! military metaphors for spiritual leadership and triumph—bishops raising the banner of the Cross in the front line, and so on—are used to good effect.272 The poem reads and must have been intended to be read as unrestrained eleventh-century pro-Imperial invention (I.S. Robinson, Authority and Resistance in the Investiture Contest (Manchester, 1978), p. 136). It is hardly possible to accept WallaceHadrill’s dictum (Early Germanic Kingship, p. 103) that ‘Alcuin and his contemporaries were not at all bothered (!) by any Gelasian implication of division of temporal and spiritual power’; Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, pp. 9–12, while giving due importance to Alcuin’s reading of ‘pseudo-Cyprian’ had no doubt that Gelasius’s letter was his source. With Alcuin’s formulations, compare, e.g., Isidore, Sententiae, III 48, 49 and 51 (for some parts of which he is heavily dependent on Gregory’s Moralia), amd elsewhere: ed. Cazier, pp. 296–301, 303–4 etc.; although nowhere is there a reference to the judicial gladium. 269 Ep. no. 18 (p. 51). 270 Ep. no. 17, pp. 48–9, inc. Urbs aeterna Dei, terrae sal, lumina mundi. 271 Epist. select. 1, ed. Tangl, p. 262; ep. no. 9 (to Adalhard); epp. nos 171 (12 distichs, followed separately by a further two), 177, 243 and 311 (also to Æthelheard); ep. no. 251 (p. 407). 272 Indeed, Urbs beata Hierusalem, a probably seventh/eighth-century composition that Alcuin might have known, seems to be the only one that begins with Urbs. Alcuin’s exegesis of Gn 2.6 in his Interr. in Gen. 48 (PL 100, 521C) is purely literal.

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panegyric, whether because Alcuin was concerned to establish his bona fides with the English episcopacy or because he despaired of any other route to regeneration of the English kingdoms. A short letter to King Æthelred personally, whether sent as a private note at the same time as the major letter to him and his nobles (as Chase suggested) or independently some time later, is uncharacteristically blunt and a measure of that despair. Christ’s pronouncement that ‘Everyone who commits a sin is a slave to sin’ (Io 10.34 [Vg.]) becomes a definition of an unfit monarch, without any reference to the means of salvation that follow in the Gospel and its exegesis. ‘You should be governed not by anger but by reason’; ‘truth should be heard from your mouth, not lies’; ‘do not, do not seize the property of others lest you lose your own’.273 No later event, not even the Imperial coronation of 800 which has so often been claimed as the centre of Alcuin’s thinking in the late 790s, provoked or inspired in him a comparable literary outpouring. The elaborately-structured, often ornate and allusive, prose of the letters contrasts with their simpler verse ‘gemination’; yet the recourse to rhetoric, as we have seen, excludes neither a focussing on the immediate occasion of their composition nor adaptation to the individual recipient. Revealingly, Edelstein’s ‘structuralist’ analysis of Alcuin’s letters refers only four times, without specifying the recipient, to that to the Canterbury archbishop—one of them the doctores: ductores wordplay and another detached from its Pauline starting-point—and not at all to the two letters to the king and his nobles; while the frequent references to ep. no. 19, to the monks of Wearmouth-Jarrow, are precisely because it is the most conventional.274 Language and scriptural citations or allusions had to some extent been anticipated by the 786 synodal acta, in which Alcuin’s direct involvement is debatable, and by the 789 capitulary in which it is beyond doubt. Whether or not he travelled with a ‘commonplace book’ or excerpta and letter-formulae, it is hardly credible that the phraseology and polished style of the letters written in the aftermath of the Lindisfarne sacking had not been carefully honed in earlier exercises in the genre, of which no more than one or two have survived. 273 Ep. no. 30, Chase, Two Letter-Books, II/5. Noli, noli rapere aliena, ne et propria perdas (the reiterated negative is very unusual) is omitted from the Tours copy but present in the English collections. 274 See the Index entries in Edelstein, Eruditio und sapientia, p. 265.

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The Adviser at Frankfurt. Defender of Orthodoxy Alcuin’s first ‘biographer’ claimed, quite unhistorically, that his master Archbishop Ælberht, shortly before his death in 780, instructed him to visit Francia on his way back from Rome so that he might defeat ‘the most wicked heresy which is trying to make out that Christ was a man adopted [by God]’.275 In his time at the Court in the 780s, however, Alcuin had clearly convinced the king or his regular advisers that he had something of substance to offer in matters of Christian doctrine; and while his contribution to the Opus Caroli on images was modest, his part in the defence of Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy was to be paramount. This first became apparent at the great ‘synodal council of Frankfurt’ in June 794, which, despite the many lacunae, is the most comprehensively-documented of any assembly during Charlemagne’s reign: the sources even allow us occasional glimpses of the processes of decision-making and not merely of their end-products.276 The king and his court had arrived there and taken up residence in a newly-constructed ‘palace’ probably in early January, after a journey from Bavaria mostly by river, first to the canal near the Regnitz where they met Papal legates, and then to Würzburg for the Christmas assembly.277

275 Vita Alcuini, c. 8: ed. Arndt, MGH SS XV, p. 189. The author’s hominem Christum . . . adoptivum astruere, and not adoptivum filium [Dei], suggests that he did not understand what had been at issue. 276 The forty contributions to Frankfurter Konzil, ed. Berndt (1997), explore almost every aspect of the council and its context. Regrettably, editorial intervention is minimal; in consequence mis-statements, out-dated references and misunderstandings figure in many of the contributions, without cross-referencing to their correction elsewhere in the two volumes. The principal texts are MGH Conc. II/i, pp. 110–71, the annalistic references (including the contemporary Annales ‘Laureshamenses’) listed in BM2 324a; the annal for 794 in the ‘Revised Royal Annals’ ( post 801/2?), ed. Kurze, p. 95, is the only one to specify that the concilium episcoporum al. synodus took place quando [rex] et generalem populi sui conventum habuit. 277 Ann. reg. Franc. (shorter version), ARF, ed. Kurze, pp. 92, 94 = Ann. Mett. pr., ed. B. v. Simson, pp. 79–80; (expanded version), ARF, ed. Kurze, pp. 93, 95. For new discoveries at the site of the canal and the suggestion that it may actually have been used, with portages at either end, see W. Keller, Der Karlsgraben (Treuchtlingen, 1993), esp. pp. 8–61. The best account of the Frankfurt ‘palace’ (MGH Conc. II/i, p. 131 refers to the aula sacri palatii ) and its early history is still that in Die deutschen Königspfalzen, ed. T. Zotz, Bd. 1: Hessen (Göttingen, 1983), p. 144–82 (E. Orth); there are minor additions to the archaeological evidence in A. Hampel, Der Kaiserdom zu Frankfurt am Main. Ausgrabungen 1991–93 (Nussloch, 1994), summarised in Hampel, ‘Die Baugeschichte des Frankfurter Doms’, Frankfurter Konzil, pp. 587–602.

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Although Alcuin’s letters are again of no help, unless very indirectly, and his one retrospective allusion to the Frankfurt synod does not name the place, he must must certainly be assumed to have re-joined the court by the beginning of 794, if not several months earlier.278 What seems convincingly to have been demonstrated by scrutiny of the manuscript of the Opus Caroli Regis, now BAV Vat. lat. 7207, over many years is that before the work attained its final form, including the insertion of a creed probably brought by Alcuin,279 letters in the name of the Spanish bishops addressed to their Frankish counterparts and to the king had arrived at the Court—possibly while it was still at Regensburg—and had been read critically by scholars there: composed (it is thought) by Archbishop Elipand of Toledo after reports of Bishop Felix of Urgel’s first condemnation for heresy (792) had reached him, they mounted a robust defence of Adoptionist doctrines.280 The obvious and serious objection to this construction of events is the account of the synod’s opening proceedings, incorporated in the Frankish bishops’ response to the Spaniards’ letter or libellus and in the Libellus sacrosyllabus of the Italian bishops: when at the king’s command the Spanish libellus, carefully punctuated by a (Court) notary, was read aloud to the assembled company, a seemingly angry Charles rose from his throne and demanded that the canker infecting his dominions be cut away; but he then agreed that 278 ‘Indirectly’ because there are no letters addressed to the Frankish king or to his ‘courtiers’ which are certainly of the latter part of 793 or early months of 794; for ep. no. 20, see above. The allusion (De adoptione . . . ex auctoritate sinodali . . .) is in ep. no. 137 (p. 211). 279 Above, n. 226. 280 MGH Concilia II/i, pp. 111–30, ed. J. Gil, Corpus Scriptorum Mozarabicorum, 1 (Madrid, 1973), 82–95 (with minor improvements to the texts and some corrected source-identifications), both from the unique manuscript-source, Toledo Bibl. cap. 14–23 (Toledo, 1070): there are no copies from the Frankish side. Modern accounts of Adoptionism (also ‘Adoptianism’) and of the Frankish response to it are W. Heil, ‘Der Adoptianismus, Alcuin und Spanien’, Karlswerk 2, ed. Bischoff, pp. 95–155; K. Schäferdiek, ‘Der adoptianische Streit im Rahmen der spanischen Kirchengeschichte. I’, ZfKg 80 (1969), 291–311, ‘. . . II’, ZfKg 81 (1970), 1–16; John C. Cavadini, The Last Christology of the West. Adoptionism in Spain and Gaul, 785–820, University of Pennsylvania Press, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia, 1993), an important if at times controversial re-consideration of Adoptionist doctrines. The earliest non-Spanish evidence for the heresy is in Pope Hadrian’s letter, Codex Carolinus no. 95 (ed. Gundlach, MGH Epist. III, pp. 636–43 at 637–8; for its dating to early 786 and its place (last!) in a sequence of three papal letters to Spain, see Bullough, ‘The dating of Codex Carolinus Nos. 95, 96, 97 . . .’, Deutsches Archiv, 18 (1962), 223–30 and the partial modification by Schäferdiek, ‘Der adoptianische Streit . . . I’, pp. 291–5 (both ignored by Cavadini, cit.).

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there should be several days’ delay for counter-measures to be prepared.281 It is, however, a central argument of much modern scholarship that both the Opus Caroli and the summoning of the Frankfurt council, with the condemnation of the Adoptionist heresy high on its agenda, were conscious political statements by the Frankish king and his advisers going far beyond and subsuming the immediate dogmatic issues.282 The chronology apparently demanded by the Opus Caroli 283 can be maintained on the assumption (not in itself implausible) that it was only at the synod that the letter’s contents were fully disclosed to the king; or because a public display of royal wrath and active presidency of a ‘universal council’ re-stating doctrinal truths received from the Fathers was the more necessary after the ground had been cut away from under him in the matter of the Byzantine view of images. That a first version of the Italian Libellus had been drafted beforehand is clear from internal evidence; and a similar inference can be made about the Frankish bishops’ synodal letter, with its ample patristic testimonia. Its composition had been entrusted to Alcuin, who was also largely responsible for a subsequent shorter letter, without the testimonies but incorporating a distinctive profession of faith (creed), in the king’s name.284 The case for this was well-argued by the late Professor Luitpold Wallach: it has indeed been questioned, but on inadequate grounds. Wallach’s textual—lexical and stylistic—parallels 281 MGH Conc. II/i, p. 131 (Libellus), 143 (ep. episc. Franc.). Given Alcuin’s predilection for disease-metaphors, not least in relation to Adoptionism, could it be he who had supplied the king with the wording of his outburst, reported in the first of these (the work essentially of Paulinus of Aquileia) as oratio recta? 282 Representative examples are P. Classen, Karl der Grosse, das Papsttum und Byzanz, rev. ed., ed. H. Fuhrmann and C. Märtl (Sigmaringen, 1985), pp. 34–41, esp. pp. 38–9; T.F.X. Noble, ‘Tradition and Learning in Search of Ideology: the Libri Carolini’, in R.E. Sullivan (ed.) ‘The Gentle Voices of Teachers’: Aspects of Learning in the Carolingian Age (Columbus, OH, 1995), pp. 227–60; R. Collins, Charlemagne (Basingstoke and London, 1998), pp. 127–36. See also Freeman, Opus Caroli regis, Einleitung, pp. 9–10. 283 Cavadini’s implied chronology (Last Christology, pp. 73–4) would put the arrival of the letters from Spain even earlier, since he supposes that Hadrian had seen that to the Frankish bishops and responded to it ‘a year or two before the Council’. This, however, is strictly unnecessary; but the inclusion of his response (ed. Werminghoff, MGH Conc., II/i, pp. 122–30) in the Court ‘Adoptionist dossier’ argues for his having written it early enough for a copy to have gone to the Court in advance of the council’s deliberations, and it may even have influenced the views it expressed: see Cavadini, Last Christology, p. 77, who also points out (ibid., p. 185 n. 13) that there is no mention of Felix. 284 MGH Conc. II/i, pp. 158–64; for the profession of faith, see below.

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with the later dogmatic writings and with letters to both Elipand and Felix can easily be extended.285 A reference to noster vero Gregorius . . . clarissimus toto orbe doctor is characteristic of Alcuin (although also papal language). Even more so are the cadences and sentence-structure of, in quick succession: Tenete vos intra terminos sanctorum patrum et nolite novas versari questiunculas; the phrase (inherited from Bede) sanctorum patrum vestigia sequi; and the word-play of the ‘appositive’ doctores in fide et ductores ad vitam.286 Alcuin’s hand is equally apparent in distinctive forms of Biblical and liturgical citation. Evidence from the Psalter is suggestive if not compelling: of the letters’ seven explicit quotations (as distinct from mere echoes) that are not part of verbatim extracts from the Fathers, a majority are ones where the Roman and the Gallican versions are identical; two are in the Roman version, although the precise form of one of these is found also in several late-eighthcentury Gallican psalters; and the ‘peculiar’ form of Ps 44.8 ( prae participibus) has a documented Insular tradition.287 The quotation of Matthew 25.34 is in the liturgical, not the Vulgate form, Venite benedicti patris mei, percipite regnum quod vobis paratum est ab origine mundi, characteristic of Alcuin’s letters and of the final quotation in his ‘Commentary on Hebrews’; and the adaptation of John 12.35, Ambulate dum lucem habetis ut non etc. to read Currite (with other changes) is parallelled in letters, including that to the Northumbrian king some months previously. A series of quotations of four collects in the Gregorian Sacramentary in support of unigenitus points, although not unequivocally, in the same direction.288 Finally, there is the overlap between the letter’s excerpts from the Fathers and those deployed in Alcuin’s later polemical treatises. Alcuin took his stand against the ‘novel assertions’ of Elipand and his followers on the authority of tradition, on received truth pro285 Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, pp. 147–65; Bullough, ‘Alcuin before Frankfort’, pp. 582–3. Note that adunatio (Bullough, p. 583) is also used (twice) of the union of the two natures in Christ in the Roman conciliar profession of faith in 680, which Alcuin may have known (below). 286 Noster Gregorius: above, ch. 1, p. 185 n. 168. Doctores—ductores: Bullough, ‘Alcuin before Frankfort’, p. 583. 287 Ps. 71, 11, . . . omnes reges terrae . . . (MGH Conc. 2, 152) is Ro., as is Ps. 134, 6, omnia quaecumque voluit Dominus fecit in caelo et terra (idem, 157). For prae participibus in Adomnan’s De locis sanctis, against the normal prae consortibus, see my table in Die Iren und Europa, ed. H. Löwe (Stuttgart, 1982), 1, p. 98. 288 Bullough, ‘Alcuin before Frankfort’, p. 583; epp. nos 18 (p. 51), 52 (p. 96) of ?794/6; Sacr. Grég. ed. Deshusses, 1, nos 315 (p. 168), 323 (p. 170), 497 (p. 220), 690 (p. 271), with Bullough, p. 583 n. 50.

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claimed by ‘the total unanimity of the catholic church’ and ‘supported by the most solid testimonies of the holy fathers’.289 He began the substantive text of the reply to the bishops with a complaint that they had made it very difficult to check their citations, raising the suspicion that they might have tampered with their sources; he, on the other hand, consistently named his ‘authorities’ and often the work from which he was quoting. It is not unlikely that Alcuin had begun to compile a collection of scriptural, Patristic and other testimonia relevant to Adoptionism while he was still in England and/or during his first months back in Francia, and therefore without immediate reference to the letters from the Spanish bishops;290 he was to extend it considerably over the next four or five years, as argument and counter-argument passed through several different stages. Many, perhaps a majority, of his source-texts could well have been available at York: the coincidence with the names in the ‘York poem’s’ author-list is considerable, although it could hardly be otherwise; and if the overlap with the texts excerpted for the De laude Dei is minimal, it does (for example) include two verses of an Ambrosian hymn common to both.291 If, on the other hand, the testimonia were assembled in any significant degree from books available at the Frankish Court in the first half of the year 794—and since Alcuin was frequently rebutting citations in the Spanish bishops’ letter, it is hardly credible that they were not—that must greatly extend our picture of the Patristic element in its pre-Aachen ‘library’.292 Elipand had argued that Scripture and Patristic exegesis since the fourth century clearly demonstrated that while Christ in his divine nature is truly and eternally the Son of God, non adoptione, in his 289

Alcuin, Adversus Felicem, III. 14: PL cols 101, 170A; Epist. Karol., MGH Conc. II/i, p. 160. 290 Ep. no. 23 is, of course, no longer proof of this. 291 MGH Conc. II/i, 150: vv. 19–20 of the hymn Intende qui regis Israel, ed. Fontaine, Ambroise: Hymnes, p. 275. The De laude includes vv. 17–24. 292 Compare B. Bischoff’s seminal ‘Die Hofbibliothek Karls des Grossen’ [1965], MaSt, 3 (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 149–69, here esp. pp. 154, 156, 160, Engl. transl., pp. 59, 63, 66, with my own ‘Charlemagne’s Court Library re-visited’ (EME 12, forthcoming). The books available at Frankfurt may also have included ones owned or brought by other courtiers. Professor Mordek has suggested that acta c. 8, on the renewed dispute between Vienne and Arles, presupposes use of the Collectio Coloniensis in Cologne, Diöz.- u. Dombibl., 212, which has on its first flyleaf (otherwise blank) In D[e]i nomine Hildibaldus, i.e. the (arch)bishop of Cologne and head of the royal chapel: H. Mordek, ‘Aachen, Frankfurt, ReiBeobachtungen zu Genese und Tradition des ’, Frankfurter Konzil, ed. Berndt, pp. 125–48, at pp. 131–2.

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human nature he is truly and naturally the son of a human being and only adoptively the Son of God. Alcuin’s detailed objections to that way of thinking begin badly: he misquotes one of the Spaniards’ initial statements of faith (assuming that the Frankfurt text is correctly transmitted), which he claims is a falsified quotation from a sermon of Augustine’s; and he attributes to Hilary a statement correctly credited to Ambrose (In libro de Trinitate) in the bishops’ letter, while ignoring a genuine Hilary quotation; all of which suggests a degree of haste.293 Subsequently, however, in defence of his own ‘orthodox’ interpretation of God’s words at Jesus’s baptism (Mt 17.5), Hic est filius meus dilectus in quo mihi bene conplacui, he quotes from De Trinitate Bk. 6 a passage that overlaps with one in his letter to Felix of Urgel, both of which are parts only of a much longer quotation included in his first treatise against Felix. Jerome provides the commentary on a quotation from the Letter to Titus which is not obviously helpful to Alcuin’s argument, even though from the section on sana doctrina (Tit 2.13–14); when later he included it in his own Commentary on the Letter which generally follows Jerome, he was to underline the Spanish heretics’ rejection of Scripture and authority as he saw it by changing the original ut nova heresis calumniatur to ut Nestoriana haeresis calumniatur!294 Two short anti-Nestorian statements correctly credited to Cyril of Alexandria, even if quoted at second hand from Liberatus of Carthage’s Breviarium and not directly from Cyril’s letters in their Latin version, suggest a widening of Alcuin’s search for testimonies: his objection Quid est adoptio nisi caritatis copulatio qua pater adoptione sibi copulat filium . . .? might not, however, have seemed so cogent to other Fathers who used (caritatis) copulatio in 293 MGH Conc. II/i, p. 112; idem, 144. The ‘Augustine’ source has not been identified; and although several of the Spanish bishops’ quotations from Augustine are not first-hand but modified ones from Vincent of Lérins’s Excerpta e S. Augustino (ed. R. Demeulenaere; CCSL 64 (1985), pp. 199–231), this is not one of them: see below, p. 426 and n. 301. The correct title of Ambrose’s work (CPL3 no. 352; ed. O. Faller, CSEL 79 (1964), pp. 225–81) is De incarnationis Dominicae sacramento; and Faller’s apparatus (p. 225) has no witness to the title used by the Spaniards. Elipand’s omission of Ambrose’s words filium esse natura sed eum dicimus (which gives a very different meaning to the sentence and has no manuscript support: see Faller’s edition, p. 267) is guaranteed by Alcuin’s response, and should not have been ‘corrected’ by Gil. In the Spanish bishops’ subsequent quotation, the variant transcribit (for transcripsit) is similarly not reported for any manuscript. 294 Hieron. Comm. in epist. ad Titum, II, 11–14, PL 26, col. 622, cited MGH Conc. II, pp. 146–7; Alcuin, comm., PL 100, cols 1022B–C.

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other senses.295 He includes a long, exclusively Christological, passage from ‘the Roman deacon Paschasius’s De Spiritu sancto’, a false attribution apparently first evidenced here of a work properly Faustus of Riez’s, writing against those who had denied the Godhead of the Holy Spirit.296 Support for the unity of Christ’s two natures in His person, and non adoptione neque appellatione, is found in short passages from the Dogmata [al. expositio] catholicae fidei (of Gennadius or pseudoGennadius): in Alcuin’s treatise ‘against Felix’ the chapter from which they are taken is quoted in extenso with, however, a false ascription to Isidore’s Etymologies.297 Alcuin’s use of Augustine, from four or five different works, the De Trinitate not among them, is complicated by the character of the Spanish bishops’ quotations (or supposed quotations) from the Father: some but by no means all of them, including two short passages from the De Trinitate and longer ones from the Enchiridion, from which Alcuin independently extracted counter-propositions, are taken in fact from Vincent of Lérins’s Excerpta (which Alcuin would certainly not have known), although several of their most troublesome assertions are not found in the received text of that work.298 There is no attempt to construct a systematic argument in the epistola. Paulinus’s Libellus goes much further in that direction: with ‘a few nods in the direction of Hadrian’, it relies almost entirely on the Scriptures (New Testament) and creeds, except for the extraordinary ‘geometrical’ analogy that introduces a rejection of the Apollinarist denial of the presence of a human mind or soul in Christ.299 For 295 MGH Conc. II/i, p. 154; Liberatus, Breviarium, ed. E. Schwartz, ACO, II.5 (1936), 98–141 (CPL3 865), at 108. The tradition of the work depends on the mid-ninthcentury Corbie manuscript, Paris BNF lat. 12098 pt. ii, the exemplar of which is evidently distinct from that of pt. i and could have been in the Court library. 296 MGH Conc. II/i, pp. 150–51. Neither Paschasius nor Faustus is in the York list, and I know of no certain quotation from the work elsewhere; there is no pre800 (or indeed pre-900) manuscript. 297 For a possible explanation (proceeding from Alcuin’s postulated breves or ‘fiches’), see Bullough, ‘Alcuin before Frankfort’, p. 584. 298 Use of the Excerpta was first demonstrated by J. Madoz, ‘Los “Excerpta Vincentii Lirinensis” en la controversia adopcionista’, Revista Española de Teologia 3 (1943), 475–83; a complete record is in the apparatus to Demeulenaere’s CCSL edition (above, n. 293) and in the Index scriptorum, ibid. pp. 467–8. Alcuin’s own citations of the Enchiridion are MGH Conc. II/i, pp. 149, 151. 299 Regrettably brief accounts of the Libellus are J.C. Cavadini, ‘Elipand and his critics at the Council of Frankfort’, Frankfurter Konzil, pp. 787–807, at pp. 802–3, and T. Hainthaler, ‘Von Toledo nach Frankfurt. Dogmengeschichtliche Untersuchungen

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the most part, Alcuin counterpoints text with text. In places he succeeds in rebutting Elipand’s assertions on the basis of his demonstrable misuse of texts; at others his own citations seem now neither apposite nor effective. He certainly never grasped the importance for his opponent’s Christology of the passage in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians (2.6–7) which, in its Latin Vulgate version, hymns a Christ who ‘did not think to snatch at (non rapinam arbitratus est) equality with God’ but ‘emptied (exinanivit) himself of his Godness and took the form of a slave’, often simply represented by the ‘shorthand phrase’ deitate exinanita.300 Ironically, the one instance of those verses verbatim in Alcuin’s epistola is in the course of a passage quoted from Augustine’s Enchiridion in order to counter Elipand’s use of it in his letter to the Frankish bishops; and the text there is in fact Vincent of Lérins’s slightly shortened (but apparently also interpolated) version in which v. 7 is omitted!301 But Alcuin’s insistence that in the end Elipand’s interpretation will create a two-person Christ is not unwarranted. Paul’s words have, however, left their mark on the Frankfurt synod’s ‘profession of faith’ reported in the penultimate section of the royal letter, a text that deserves more consideration than it has hitherto received.302 Prof. Wallach found parallels for several of its clauses in zur adoptianistischen Kontroverse’, idem pp. 809–60, at pp. 854–7. In spite of its title, G. Fedalto, ‘Il significato politico di Paolino, patriarca di Aquilieia, e la sua posizione nella controversia adozionista’, ibid. pp. 103–23, has nothing to offer. The anti-Apollinarist arguments are MGH Conc. II/i, pp. 140–141; for a good short summary of the heretical doctrine, see DCC3, p. 86. 300 The meaning of the original Greek of Phil 2.6–7 (now generally accepted as the opening verses of an early Christian hymn that continues to v. 11) has been much debated, and many modern commentators reject the Vulgate translation; for their crucial importance for Elipand, see especially Cavadini, The Last Christology, pp. 31–6, 41–3; idem. ‘Elipand and his critics’, pp. 790–96. Deitate exinanita occurs earliest in the Symbolus fidei Elipandianae in Beatus of Liébana (and Eterius’s) Adversus Elipandum, I xl, ed. B. Löfstedt, CCCM 54 (Turnhout, 1984), p. 28 (ll. 1065–6). 301 MGH Conc. ii/i, p. 151 = Augustine, Enchiridion ad Laurentium, XI 35, ed. E. Evans, CCSL 46 (Turnhout, 1969), p. 69; MGH Conc. II/i, pp. 115–6 = Vincent, Excerpta, IX, lines 1–19, followed by idem, X, lines 38–50 (with omissions), ed. Demeulenaere, pp. 226–7, 230–1. It is, however, surely unlikely that Elipand would have omitted that key verse in any citation; and we should probably suppose that the text in the unique (Spanish) manuscript is defective at this point. The interpolated words are almost certainly Elipand’s, not Augustine’s or Vincent’s: Cavadini’s cautiously-expressed doubts (‘Elipand and his critics’, p. 791 n. 11) are hardly persuasive. 302 MGH Conc., II, pp. 163–4; for the copy in Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibl., 191, see below. In the thousand pages of Frankfurter Konzil, ed. Berndt, only one-and-a-half are devoted to the creed, in T. Hainthaler’s ‘Von Toledo nach Frankfurt’, at pp. 858–9. For Dom Bernard Capelle’s comments, see below. See further, Bullough, ‘Alcuin, Arn and the Creed in the Mass’, Arn-Symposium (Vienna, December, 2000) (publication forthcoming).

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Alcuin’s later writings, and these can be modestly added to. He also correctly noted that the opening words of the Frankfurt text are from a version of the ‘Niceno-Constantinopolitan’ creed, and that at least three other creeds are drawn on thereafter for its formulations.303 What is striking, however, is the novelty or at least independence of the wording even of the opening sections (to cum patre et filio coadorandum et conglorificandum.) Thus, between ante omnia secula and lumen de lumine, the words et ante omnia tempora are introduced. In the extended formula non factum, naturalem, non adoptivum, per quem omnia condita sunt, caelestia et terrestria, unius essentiae et unius substantiae cum patre the ps.Jerome (actually Pelagius) Libellus fidei could have been the source only of the crucial non . . . adoptivum and perhaps of the final clause. Unius essentiae et unius substantiae and the subsequent unius esse substantiae unius potentiae et unius substantiae are closer in fact to the language of the credal statement at the end of Alcuin’s De fide sanctae Trinitatis; while naturalem and caelestia et terrestria seem to be unique.304 Neither the received versions of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed, including the one used by Alcuin in his De laude Dei,305 nor the Libellus fidei admitted the ‘double procession’ of the Holy Spirit (‘from the Father and the Son’) although it was, of course, already a feature of Toledo creeds and was proclaimed, more surprisingly, at the English council of Hatfield in ?679. It was energetically asserted in the Italian bishops’ Libellus in 794.306 The Frankfurt profession of faith has, after vivificatorem omnium, the clause a patre et filio procedentem; and the doc303 Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, pp. 152–4. Note that the reference to ‘a unique variant’ of NC in the letter and in Alcuin’s writings is incorrect: natum ex patre ante omnia saecula is a well-documented variant (see e.g. Burn, Facsimiles of the Creeds, p. 17); what is unique, although paralleled in Alcuin’s Adversum Elipandum (PL 101, col. 290A) is the added ante omnia tempora. Deum verum between Spiritum sanctum and vivificatorem seems not to occur otherwise in texts of NC until somewhat later. 304 Compare unius substantiae, unius essentiae, unius potestatis: De fide, PL 101, col. 57A. The reading of the Libellus fidei in Opus Caroli regis, III.1 (ed. Freeman, p. 336) is unius cum Patre substantiae. For c. et t., compare the creed in the 789 capitulary. 305 Above, ch. 1. 306 Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, pp. 358–65 is an excellent summary of the doctrine and its credal expressions; but for the Toledan formulation and its sources, see also J. Madoz, Le Symbole du XI e de Tolède, Spic. sacr. Lovaniense, Études et Documents 19 (Louvain, 1938), pp. 49–55. For the context of the Hatfield proclamation (Bede, HE IV. 17, in the form Spiritum Sanctum procedentem ex Patre et Filio inenarrabiliter), see H. Chadwick, ‘Theodore of Tarsus and Monotheletism’, Logos. Festschrift für Luise Abramowski (Berlin and New York, 1993), pp. 534–44; idem, ‘Theodore, the English church and the monothelete controversy’, Archbishop Theodore, ed. M. Lapidge, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 11 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 88–95, at pp. 93–5.

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trine was subsequently enunciated twice more, with only minor changes of wording.307 Dom Bernard Capelle claimed, with more than a little exaggeration, that after the Frankfurt professions’s coadorandum et conglorificandum— the precise wording of the ‘Stowe missal’s’ version (and of certain others) of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed—standard credal formulae ‘se trouvent noyées dans les flots d’un commentaire interminable’!308 Thus, while in forma Dei aequalis patri, in forma servi minor patre has its counterparts in the in forma divinitatis aequalis patri, in forma servi minor patre of the symbol of the sixth council of Toledo and in the final part of the much longer formulation in the eleventh council’s symbol (675),309 neither of these, nor the Letter to the Philippians, has anything corresponding to in forma Dei creator, in forma servi redemptor which follow in the Frankfurt text. The latter’s two preceding clauses, Una persona Deus et homo, unus mediator Dei et hominum, suggest that Augustine’s De Trinitate, indirectly or directly, has been drawn on here.310 The sources of other glosses or expansions remain to be identified. It is none the less apparent that, in order to strengthen the claims of orthodoxy against Spanish ‘novelties’, Alcuin, perhaps with input from other participants, had composed during the synod a confession of faith notably different in form and language both from the creed included very recently in the Opus Caroli regis and from the creeds of previous councils, universal and local. Was it pro307 After a formula of uncertain origin, with the words procedentem ex patre et filio; and after one from the creed ‘Quicumque’ (Aeternus . . . Spiritus sanctus), with ex patre filioque procedens. 308 B. Capelle, ‘L’introduction du Symbole à la messe’ [1951], Travaux Liturgiques, 3: Histoire; Varia, L’Assomption (Louvain, 1967), pp. 60–81, at p. 69. For the variant forms of (co)adorandum etc., see ibid. p. 73, and more fully Capelle, ‘L’origine antiadoptianiste de notre texte du Symbole de la messe’ [1929], Travaux Liturgiques, 3, pp. 47–59, at p. 56. The version of the so-called ‘Nicene creed’ adopted liturgically after the deiectio Felicis heretici (?799, not 798; the council in the latter year was at Rome and not, pace Capelle, at Aachen), i.e. Paulinus of Aquileia, and used until the twentieth century has here the previously undocumented simul adoratur et conglorificatur; and, before this, qui ex patre filioque procedit. 309 Cf. Wallach, p. 153. For the relevant passages, see J. de J. Pérez, La Cristologia en los Simbolos Toledanos IV, VI y XI (Rome, 1939), pp. 22, 47; also Madoz, Symbole du XIe Symbole, pp. 91–4. Minor patre is not Pauline. 310 De Trin. 1, 7 (ed. Mountain, pp. 44–6), esp. lines 6–8, ut mediator Dei et hominum esset homo Christus Iesus (I Tm 2.5), ita dicuntur ut maiorem filio patrem significent . . ., lines 22–3 and lines 36–7, in forma enim servi quam accepit minor est patre; in forma autem Dei in qua erat etiam antequam hanc accepisset aequalis est patri. The precise wording in forma Dei . . . minor patre recurs in Alcuin’s De fide sanctae Trinitatis, III. vii (PL 101, col. 42), in a context in which there are other borrowings (re-ordered) from De Trin. I, 7.

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fessed orally by the synod in one of its concluding sessions? The only evidence pointing that way is the distinctive heading of the copy entered in the early-ninth century on previously blank leaves at the beginning of the Court-connected canon-law book (Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibl. 191, fols Iv–IIv): Expositio catholicae fidei a sanctis patribus et venerabilibus sanctae Dei ecclesiae pastoribus . . . concordi professione et pacifica omnium unanimitate perscripta, quatenus huius sanctissimi symboli signum memoriale permaneret in Domino.311 But the copy extends to the letter’s concluding paragraph, Haec est fides catholica et ideo nostra. . . . heredes pariter perficiat in eternum; and although it includes at least one reading that is clearly the correct one, i.e. Maria virgine incarnatam (against the printed creatam), there are no good reasons for supposing that it belongs to a tradition independent of what I have called the ‘Court Adoptionistdossier’ in the Baturich of Regensburg book, Munich clm. 14468 (fols 30v–88), and the Hincmar of Rheims book, Rheims, Bib. munc. 385 (fols 61–95). The possibility that the Einsiedeln extract may for a time have been more widely available is suggested by the incomplete copy (defective at the beginning; not used for the edition) preceding a sermon-collection in an early-ninth-century Freising cathedral book (clm. 28135).312 These texts apart, there is nothing suggesting that Alcuin’s Frankfurt Expositio fidei had any subsequent impact anywhere. (The Rheims text is incomplete and without marginal annotation.) Professsor Wallach’s claim that it was ‘the symbolum used in the liturgy of the mass’ at Aachen until 798 can be discounted. It is manifestly not a ‘liturgical’ creed; and Wallach seems to have been misled by references in two of Alcuin’s letters and in his antiAdoptionist treatises to the profession of belief ut in symbolo [catholico] decantare solemus. The latter is, as the quotations show, the NicenoConstantinopolitan creed, which for several centuries past had been recited in the pre-Easter baptismal ceremonies (acolytus . . . dicit symbolum decantando . . . is the rubric in the ‘Vatican Gelasian’) and, on one interpretation of the ‘Stowe Missal’, was already sung in the mass in Ireland when Alcuin was young.313 311 MGH Conc. II/i, p. 163 app.; for the manuscript, see CLA VII no. 874 and Bischoff, Katalog, 1, no. 1116. 312 Compare W. Hartmann, ‘Das Konzil von Frankfurt 794. Nachwirkung und Nachleben’, Frankfurter Konzil, ed. Berndt, 1, pp. 331–355, esp. pp. 340–1. 313 Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, p. 154; ep. ad Beatum, ed. Levison, p. 320; ep. no. 23 (p. 61); Adv. Felicem I. 9 (PL 101, cols 134D–135A, where the correct manuscript reading is homo NATUS est), etc. ‘Vatican Gelasian’: I. xxxv, ed. Wilson, p. 55, ed. Mohlberg, no. 317.

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The final chapter of the council’s acta, one of several that reflects the king’s personal intervention,314 singles out Alcuin in a way that seems entirely without parallel. ‘[The lord king] recommended also that the holy synod should think it fitting to receive Alcuin into its fellowship and/or prayers, since he was a man learned in the teachings of the Church. The whole synod agreed, in accordance with the lord king’s suggestion, and received him into their fellowship and prayers’.315 Consortium is unfortunately an ambiguous term. The phrase it introduces here may simply mean that Alcuin, a foreign-born deacon, was to be admitted to the prayer-fellowships of Frankish cathedral-churches and monasteries. But the occasional examples of consortium episcoporum and similar ‘group’ or ‘community’ usages in Carolingian texts may indicate an intention on the king’s part that at future synods Alcuin should sit with the episcopal doctores et ductores.316 Alcuin’s own passing references to the synod and its decisions, however, say nothing about the honour accorded him (if it was), and he made no identifiable attempt to exploit it: even when he wrote a circular letter to the bishops in Britain in 796, the title he gave himself was humilis levita . . . sanctae Eboracensis [a]ecclesiae filius.317 At the one synod he did attend, at Aachen in 799, he was the principal protagonist in a debate with ‘the arch-heretic’ Felix. Alcuin would certainly have welcomed the royal recommendation that the synod should pray for him. His letters regularly end with 314 Mordek, ‘Aachen, Frankfurt, Reims’, pp. 128, 134–5. Mordek’s suggestion (ibid. pp. 132–4) that Alcuin may have been involved in the formulation of the acta as such is surely to be rejected: except where they are referring back to chapters in the 789 Admonitio generalis, they conspicuously lack the stylistic ‘tricks’ that demonstrate Alcuin’s involvement in that capitulary. An obvious alternative candidate is Hildebald, bishop of Cologne and latterly also principal chaplain, the subject of the previous chapter, where it is decreed that he will, with Papal approval, reside at the court propter utilitates ecclesiasticas. 315 Commonuit etiam [domnus rex] ut Aliquinum ipsa sancta synodus in suo consortio sive in orationibus recipere dignaretur, eo quod esset vir in ecclesiasticis doctrinis eruditus. Omnis namque synodus secundum ammonitionem domni regis consensit et eum in eorum consortio sive in orationibus receperunt: MGH Conc. II/i, p. 171 (c. lvi). For sive in Late Latin, see Norberg, Beiträge, p. 97; for the name-form, see Bullough, ‘Alcuin before Frankfort’, p. 571 n. 1. 316 Bullough, ‘Alcuin before Frankfort’, pp. 571–3; there is a more recent edition of the Vita Eusebii (BHL. 2748) in M.G. China, Santo Eusebio di Vercelli (Vercelli, 1974), pp. 147–67, which I have not seen. For other examples of consortium, including commune c., sanctorum sacerdotum c., electionis c. including lay persons, but never c. episcoporum, see the indices to MGH Conc. II and III, s.v.; and apparently the only instance of consortium in the entire corpus of the Ordines de celebrando concilio is in a quotation of a sacramentary prayer, ed. H. Schneider (MGH; Hannover, 1996), at p. 429. 317 Ep. no. 104; below, ch. 4.

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a request, often imperatively worded, for the prayers of his correspondents and of their communities, both as a supernatural extension of links forged and maintained by the written word and as intercession with God to save him from the consequences of his frailty and sinfulness. Before he left York for Francia, WearmouthJarrow had entered his name in its prayer-register (album) of living persons. The geographical range of his subsequent requests is impressive.318 The extent to which the ‘persistent prayers’ of others drew God’s attention to Alcuin’s needs and ensured that on the Last Day he, with them, would hear Jesus Christ proclaiming ‘Take possession of the Kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world’ is beyond knowability.

318 See the map in Gerchow, Gedenküberlieferung, p. 56, although it needs correction at several points. For the Wearmouth-Jarrow album, see above, ch. 2, at n. 196.

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CHAPTER FOUR

UNSETTLED AT AACHEN

The Court was still at Frankfurt past mid-summer: it was there that Queen Fastrada died in August, although her body was taken to Mainz for burial. By that time the king and his army were once again en route for Saxony. Alcuin, it is usually assumed, journeyed directly to the new Aachen palace. But in what is almost certainly the earlier of two long letters to the York community, with an unusually elaborate address-clause, followed(?) by a shorter one to Archbishop Eanbald, all written when the king was still away with his army, he reports that their important messages, written and oral, had been brought by the priest Eanbald who ‘found me euntem per loca sancta’.1 These latter, the loca sanctorum martyrum vel confessorum Christi, which according to the other letter his ‘restless journeyings’ took him to, are surely the several religious houses in Francia that Alcuin ‘ruled’ before 796; and an iter instabilitatis fits ill with the time when he and the royal court were established at Aachen. The supporting reason that he gives for his remaining in Francia—in a section of the letter omitted (deliberately?) from the copy or copies kept at Tours—namely, that ‘many strive to stain the faith, and even to rend into several parts the woven tunic of Christ which the soldiers by the Cross did not dare to divide’, is likewise most appropriate to 1 To the York congregation: ep. no. 43, Chase, Two Letter-Books II/6, and ep. no. 42 (add. codd. H2 fols 7–8v, A1 fols 89–90); to Archbishop Eanbald, ep. no. 44. I have argued in Pt. I that the younger Eanbald’s own letter relating to his own return journey, ep. no. 46, was addressed to a southern-English bishop. Dümmler’s apparatus for ep. no. 43 is not always reliable and obscures the complexity of its manuscript-tradition. The text in both Tours collections and in the copy sent to Salzburg (transmitted by S1 and D) omits Alcuin’s apologetic response to the petitio that had been brought to him (MGH Epp I, p. 88 l.33–p. 89 l.18): which is therefore only in the English collections, presumably preserving here the ‘recipient’s copy’ text. The same letter’s initial ab Eanbaldo presbitero is, however, omitted from both the Salzburg and the English texts! With Alcuin’s iter instabilitatis in ep. no. 42 compare, e.g., Reg.Ben., cc. 4 and 58; the contextam Christi tunicam etc. is an allusion to Io 19.23–4 (and not as Dümmler). Where had Eanbald expected to find Alcuin when he set out from York? Frankfurt? Worms? Aachen? The letters provide no indication.

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the months immediately after the Frankfurt council. Alcuin also remarks that the sending of his replies had been delayed by Eanbald’s (or his own?) ‘serious illness’.2 Almost certainly, they should be dated to the late summer/early autumn of 794 (rather than the next year as Dümmler supposed), together with a letter to Higbald of Lindisfarne which ends with a promise to speak to the king about the Lindisfarne pueri still held captive.3 On what seems to have been the main purpose of Eanbald’s mission to Alcuin, an invitation to return to his native land, his initial reason for declining was that the king was still away and unable to give his consent. Alcuin’s language in the main letter4 is very guarded, and even more so elsewhere, but it is not excluded that (as Gaskoin first suggested) he had been given indications that he could be put forward as the successor to Eanbald, who was already planning to resign the see: i.e. he was to be to Eanbald (I) what Eanbald had been to Archbishop Ælberht. Less plausibly, Alcuin was trying to convey a willingness to be considered when Eanbald did resign. Reiterating in the letter to Eanbald his inability to come to York immediately, Alcuin ‘very much wishes’ (opto et obsecro) ‘that I shall find you still in the high office—if that is possible—which I saw you in when I left’: to follow this with the hope that if Eanbald has decided to go he will at least ensure a properly canonical election of ‘the best man (optimum)’, seems both an oblique and a bold instance of self-recommendation!5 Finally, if an even more obscurely-worded letter to the fratres (by implication, of York) belongs here also rather than to 795 or even later, relations between them and their archbishop were at this time far from good; apparently they were also 2 Mox remisissem Eanbaldum dilectioni vestrae, si eum infirmitas gravissima non praeoccuparet (so mss., although Dümmler prints occuparet). Allott, Alcuin of York, p. 4, relying on Dümmler’s text, translates ‘. . . if he were not so seriously ill’, which may indeed be what Alcuin is saying: but if praeoccupare = ‘frustrate, prevent’ (as in MGH Capit. I, p. 116 (c. 29) of 803) it is at least possible that the illness was Alcuin’s, especially as in ep. no. 44 his own febrium acervitas is among the excuses for his not travelling to York. 3 The Higbald letter is ep. no. 20. Ep. no. 41, dated ‘c. 794–95’ by Dümmler, clearly belongs to a much later date (?799). 4 I.e. ep. no. 43. 5 Gaskoin, Alcuin, p. 89, developed by C. Cubitt, ‘Wilfrid’s “usurping bishops”: episcopal elections in Anglo-Saxon England, c. 600–c. 800’, Northern History 25 (1989), 18–38, at 32–3; both, of course, accepting Dümmler’s 795 dating for the letters. For the irrelevance of ep. no. 46, see above. In ep. 48 (later? presumably 795), Alcuin is concerned about fair election without himself as candidate.

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divided among themselves and perhaps under external pressures.6 The unique letter to the nobilissima femina Liutgarda, at this stage the king’s concubine rather than wife, in which Alcuin asks to be told how the king is getting on in Saxony and in which royal residence he intends to winter, was on the evidence of this last question alone surely written in the autumn of 794.7 Before Christmas of that year the king and his wider court-circle were, in fact, reunited at Aachen: the new palace must still have been something of a building-site, although evidently it had one or more structures suitable for formal and informal feasting!8 The next eight or nine months were to be the longest period during which Alcuin and his monarch were simultaneously in residence there. Before the end of July 795 Charles and a part of the court, although not Alcuin, were on the move again, provoked by Saxon infidelitas: they only returned from the middle-Elbe region some time in the autumn. A second and slightly shorter period together at the Aachen palace followed, but one marked by a succession of dramatic and momentous events, for which a major part of the evidence comes from letters written by Alcuin, whether in his own name or the 6 Ep. no. 47: hoc maxime obsecro ut concordes sitis cum piissimo patre nostro, et timorem Domini ante oculos habeatis; et quod ei placitum speratis concorditer loquimini, viriliter perficiatis, firmiter retineatis. Nec aliquis vestrae unanimitatis viscera disrumpere valeat. I have not noticed a precise parallel to viriliter . . . retineatis in other letters, but the rhetorical device is a common one: compare, for instance, the passage from ep. no. 82 (to a Mercian cleric) of about the same time, quoted below p. 443 and n. 35. For the striking (and unique?) vestrae unanimitatis viscera, compare of course Col 3.12: induite . . . viscera misericordiae, and Phil 1.8: cupiam omnes vos in visceribus Christi Iesu (memorably quoted by Cromwell). 7 Ep. no. 50: preserved only in the main English collection of letters, as the middle of a group of three to members of the royal family, and presumably forming part originally of Alcuin’s ‘personal collection’, although not subsequently copied in the H manuscripts. But if it does relate to the 794 and not the 795 expedition, then the king’s relationship with her necessarily began while Fastrada was still alive; compare Konecny, Frauen des karolingischen Königshauses, pp. 69, 195 (nn. 39, 40). Alcuin’s subsequent close—unusually close?—links with Liutgarda are indicated by epp. nos 90, 96, 102 and 190; and perhaps also by his carm. xxvi (below). 8 The chronology of its several parts and their precise form in Alcuin’s lifetime is very uncertain, in spite of the confident language used in some modern accounts. Wood used in the construction of the cathedral (ex-chapel) cupola and of the (?domestic) ‘Granusturm’ has, however, provided pre-800 dendrochronological dates: E. Hollstein, Mitteleuropäische Eichenchronologie, Trierer Grabungen und Forschungen 11 (Mainz, 1980), pp. 44–5; M. Untermann, ‘“opere mirabili constructa”. Die Aachener ‘Residenz’ Karls des Grossen’, in: 799—Kunst und Kultur der Karolingerzeit, Beiträge zum Katalog der Ausstellung Paderborn 1999, ed. C. Stiegemann and M. Wemhoff (Mainz, 1999), pp. 152–64.

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king’s, in a period in which the royal ‘writing-offices’ produced neither privileges nor capitularies.9 One more expedition against Saxon rebels set out from the Palace as early as June in 796; by the time the king returned in the autumn of that year, Alcuin was—reluctantly—on the point of leaving the court for St. Martin’s at Tours, or perhaps indeed had already left. Alcuin’s time at the Frankish Court, often loosely and misleadingly labelled ‘the Aachen Court’, dominates most modern biographies and accounts of the early phases of ‘the Carolingian Renaissance’: in the Ferrières Vita by contrast it takes up, on the most generous estimate, a bare fortieth of the whole.10 The familiar version wilfully ignores the awkward fact that Alcuin was himself continuously (or more or less continuously) at the Aachen palace, and potentially or actually one of the king’s inner circle of scholars and counsellors, for two-and-a-quarter years at most—and the king himself absent for several months! It is that brief period that inspired and was duly reflected in verse-accounts of the Palace community which, in spite of the seminal studies of Dietrich Schaller and of the acceptance of their implications by other scholars,11 are still cited as descriptions of Charlemagne’s Court over almost two decades, with or without the support of passages in Alcuin’s letters. Furthermore, in the itinerant pre-Aachen-Palace days Alcuin (if my post-dating of his move to Francia is accepted) had been present at the Court for four-anda-half years or less; and only at Worms, Ingelheim and, for the first time, Aachen in 787–9 and possibly on the way to and at Frankfurt were the king and he in one another’s company (at least potentially)

9

Excluding from consideration the ?capitulary-fragment attached to the texts of the Epistola de litteris colendis, there are no capitularies between the Capitulare missorum, Boretius no. 25 (with a single, late, manuscript witness!) and the Capitulare Saxonicum of 28 October 797, Boretius no. 27; and the interval is even greater if Becher, Eid und Herrschaft, pp. 79–82, is right in arguing, contra Ganshof ’s 793, for a 789 dating for no. 25. There are no genuine diplomas now extant between DK 1 no. 179 of ?mid-795 (Gil[t]bertus advicem Radoni recognovit) and idem no. 180 of 17 Febr. 797 (Ercanbaldus advicem Radoni recognovi ). For Alcuin’s letters, see below. 10 In the printed edition, roughly one-third of a page out of fourteen, plus at most two passing references! 11 Schaller’s ‘Vortrags- u. Zirkulardichtung am Hof Karls des Grossen’, originally published in 1970, and reprinted with corrections and additions in his Studien zur lateinischen Dichtung, pp. 87–109, 412–14 is still fundamental. Mary Garrison, ‘The emergence of Carolingian Latin literature and the court of Charlemagne (780–814)’, Carolingian Culture: emulation and innovation, ed. R. McKitterick (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 111–40, at pp. 123–6, is an excellent summary.

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for a longer period than in 794–5.12 His re-discovery and first exploitation of long-neglected pagan and Christian writings and his earliestsurviving exercises in both ‘Divine’ and ‘secular letters’ certainly belong to those years; but a significant part of the intellectual and educational achievement that is commonly credited to his time at Court belongs rather (as I shall argue) to his years at St. Martin’s, Tours.13 When Alcuin declared his belief that by following Charles’s zeal for learning ‘a new Athens may perhaps be created in Francia’, he had been away from Aachen for nearly three years, during which he had shown himself to be anything but sympathetic to new developments in the circle of scholars around the king.14 It is at least arguable, therefore, that Alcuin’s ‘well-known’ or ‘well-documented’ devotion to the Aachen Court and its ‘academy’ is very largely a construct of modern scholars, although his laments about his nowlimited resources and his sense of isolation from old friends after the move to the Loire-valley abbey are not to be denied. Certainly, in his comparatively-brief final period at the Frankish Court, Alcuin was seemingly established as a highly-regarded teacher of ‘adolescents’, scolam tenens; and he was responsible for the composition of letters in the king’s name to foreign dignitaries and even to other courtiers—to Mercian bishops to ask them to intervene with King Offa, to Offa himself to ask him to recall an undisciplined priest, to Angilbert and to the new Pope Leo.15 Yet he was apparently still prepared to consider a return to York: and not, at that stage, to die and be buried. His surviving correspondence with both non-English and English addressees—which, if I am right in attributing to this period a majority of those to Mercian destinations, runs to almost forty letters in approximately twenty-four months—gives no indication of whether this was ever raised with King Charles: fidelitas was always a delicate issue, royal friendship was (as Alcuin said) not to 12

For 787–9, compare BM 2 290c–301a with remarks, above. See below. 14 Ep. no. 170 (p. 279). For a surely correct translation, see Godman, Poets and Emperors, p. 39; earlier translators and commentators have regularly glossed over Alcuin’s si and ignored his forsan. 15 For scolam tenens, see below. The letters are epp. nos 85, 87, 92 and 93 (discussed below), all in the ‘expanded Tours collection’, and those to Angilbert and the Pope also in the Salzburg collection, scribe ‘theta’; there are no other extant royal letters from these years. Note the total or almost total absence of Biblical quotations, even in the letter addressed to the Pope. For the titles used in the address-clauses, see Wolfram, Intitulatio, 1, p. 242. 13

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be treated lightly and could quickly be replaced by ira et malevolentia.16 The Frankish king, indeed, his absences and presences, rate very few mentions in Alcuin’s letters to others before the preparations for a Rome-bound embassy at the end of 795. The promise to Bishop Higbald to speak to him in due course about the Lindisfarne boys in pagan captivity does seem, however, to belong here rather than to an earlier year.17 The other major exceptions are the previouslyquoted letter to Liutgarda; and the unusual opening of a letter to another ‘royal’ woman, Charles’s sister Gisla, abbess of Chelles: ‘By God’s grace, we have had a successful festival during these holy days [?Easter (or Pentecost), 794 or 795], and our lord king was happy and the whole court (omne palatium) in a state of joy’. Alcuin’s own happiness had been increased by the recent gift of (apparently) a psalter and a sacramentary: every palaeographer and liturgical scholar will regret their non-survival.18

A Court Remembered in Verse The nature of the evidence denies us a satisfactory answer to the simple and obvious questions: for how long did ‘courtiers’, other than writing-office notaries, stay at the Palace? how much time did they actually spend in one another’s company? It is certain only that in the brief period of Alcuin’s residence there, it provided a distinctive setting for the intermittent life in common of a talented and uniquelyprivileged group of men (and the occasional woman), for a collective and individual display of poetic skills and for the lauding of the royal patronage that was its pre-condition and inspiration. Surviving carmina from this time or a few months later, respectively by the Northumbrian Alcuin, by the Frankish Angilbert (abbot of St.-Riquier) 16 The probable dating of the letters depends, of course, on my view of the origins of the collections in which they are preserved; for the same reason I believe that references by other scholars to ‘letters of the 780s’ to Offa etc., and the conclusions sometimes drawn, are mistaken. 17 Above, ch. 3. 18 Ep. no. 84. The verb in Alcuin’s De gratissimo munere psalmodiae et missarum celebrationis quod mihi magna caritate direxistis (Eccl. Lat. dirigere = ‘send’) makes it unlikely that he was merely thanking her for intercessions (which could hardly include masses, anyway); supply librorum, therefore? Dümmler’s dating was ‘793–96’; the first date is obviously impossible, and the last date is excluded by Alcuin’s veniente Angelbercto (compare below).

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and by the ‘Goth’ Theodulf (not yet a bishop) are as vivid as they are vigorous, rich in personalia, their authors exuberantly paying off old and new scores.19 Alcuin’s is most satisfactorily interpreted as the latest, and not the second, in a principal series of three: for, if these are to be given a context in (in the modern jargon) ‘real time’, a poem that begins Venerunt apices vestrae pietatis ab aula . . . Portantes vestrae nobis pia dona salutis and complains that there is no-one ‘giving out fine verses’ in the boys’ quarters20 was almost certainly written after its author had ceased to be normally resident at the Palace. Consequently it cannot, as has been supposed, have preceded a poem by Theodulf composed apparently in the spring of 796 and certainly later than the autumn or early winter of 795, when the first Avar treasures arrived.21 Moreover, ‘between August 794 and the end of 795’22 is one date at which an absent Angilbert would almost certainly not have been composing a poem directed to the resident Palace-community; a supposed mission to Rome at the end of 794 is a long-standing error which is extraordinarily difficult to eradicate, and he was certainly at Aachen in the later months of 795! Internal and external evidence combine to establish Angilbert’s departure from the Court for Rome in early 796 (below) as the probable starting-point. The sequence of poems and events subsequently 19 Angilbert, carm. ii, MGH Poet. 1, 360–63, Godman, Poetry, pp. 112–18, with a facing English translation; Theodulf, carm. xxv, MGH Poet. I, pp. 483–89, Godman, Poetry, pp. 150–62, with a facing English translation; Alcuin, carm. xxvi, MGH Poet. I, pp. 245–6, Godman, Poetry, pp. 118–20, with a facing English translation. A fourth, thematically-related, poem is Theodulf, carm. xxvii, MGH Poet. I, pp. 490–3, inc. Quid cycni faciunt, resonant dum talia corvi. It has, however, some notable differences from the other three; and Schaller has produced strong arguments for dating it later in the decade: ‘Der junge am Hof Karls des Grossen’ [1971], Schaller, Studien zur lateinischen Dichtung, pp. 110–28, 415–19 (important amplifications and corrections, but necessarily wrong on the dating of ep. no. 142, since it is in the K letter-collections). 20 The first line is closely paralleled by later letter-openings, as ep. no. 186 (to Arn), also ep. no. 176 (to Adalhard); the examples quoted by Schaller, Studien zur lateinischen Dichtung, p. 99 n. 32, beginning with ep. no. 95 (to Paulinus), are markedly less close. For lines 18–24, on the lack of a teacher of poetry, see below, pp. 439–40 and n. 27. 21 Schaller, ‘Vortrags- u. Zirkulardichtung’, Studien zur lateinischen Dichtung, pp. 99–101, followed by Godman, Poetry, pp. 10–11, 118–19, idem, Poets and Emperors, pp. 68–70, and others. To justify his dating, Schaller has to suppose Alcuin’s ‘temporary absence from the Court’ in the early spring of 796: Studien, p. 102, cf. p. 99. The extant letters give no support to this hypothesis, and on the whole contradict it. 22 Schaller, ‘Vortrags- u. Zirkulardichtung’, Studien, pp. 102–4, 108–9; Godman, Poetry, pp. 10, 112; idem. Poets and Emperors, p. 64.

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would then be: 1. Angilbert’s reminiscent poem in which, in spite of the close relations between the two men, Alcuin is not named, but prominence is given to the king’s son Charles, both under his own name and with the pseudonym Iulus—the name of Aeneas’s son in the Aeneid—hitherto wrongly identified as Pippin;23 2. Theodulf ’s poem, written for dispatch to the Aachen Court when both he and Angilbert were temporarily absent but Alcuin’s presence could still be assumed (Et pater Albinus sedeat pia verba daturus /Sumpturusque cibos ore manuque libens) and intended to be circulated and read aloud;24 3. Alcuin’s departure from the Palace for St. Martin’s, Tours in the summer/autumn of 796, and thereafter (4.) the composition and dispatch of his letter-poem to king and court, probably before the end of the year but certainly while Angilbert was assumed to be still absent in Italy or on his way back. Alcuin’s verses were not, therefore, ‘mercilessly pilloried’ by Theodulf in his: rather, Alcuin was making a coolly contemptuous response to his rival’s sharp characterizations, with an account of the Court at work, not banqueting and performing.25 Here, the ‘rank-and-file’ 23 With consequences for the dating of Angilbert carm. ii, cf. Schaller, Studien, p. 104. Carlus is so named in the first (vv. 32–36) of several groups of verses in which the pipe ( fistula) and its poetry are invoked to celebrate named members of the royal family. In the later section beginning Cartula, curre the letter-poem is invited (vv. 75–81), after prostrating herself at ‘my David’s feet’, ‘to bring greetings to my dear ones’, Atque puellarum cameras percurre canendo/Et pete castra [mei] primo clarissima IULI/ Et dic multimodas iuveni per carmina laudes (adopting Schaller’s emendation against Dümmler’s and Godman’s primo [carta] ). The Aeneid offers innumerable line-endings . . . Iuli, including Ascanium surgentem et spes heredis Iuli/respice cui regnum . . . at v. 274–5 (also per [al. et] spes surgentis Iuli at vi. 364, x. 524), with which compare Angilbert’s carm. ii, vv. 34–35, Tu quoque magnorum sobolis condigna parentum/. . . regni spes . . . Nor need castra be understood as metaphorical (as Schaller and Godman): the contrast with the immediately-preceding puellarum camerae, presumably in the precincts of the palace proper, suggests that these were extra-mural ‘barracks’ occupied by the royal heir and his fellow-iuvenes. The junior Charles’s presence at the Court in 794/5, interrupted by his leading one of two turmae against the Saxons, is documented by the Annales regni Francorum (both versions), ed. Kurze, pp. 94–6; while the contemporary Annales Laureshamenses in Vienna lat. 515 show that he was with his father in Saxony and at Aachen in 796. The latter (confirmed by the wellinformed and partly independent Annales Maximiniani, MGH SS.-in fol., XIII, p. 22) establish also that Pippin was in Italy or Pannonia until he journeyed to the Court in the autumn of 796. For the evidence of Alcuin’s carm. xii, see below. 24 Lines 191–4. For the structure and implications of that particular section, see especially Schaller, ‘Vortrags- und Zirkulardichtung’, Studien z. lateinischen Dichtung, pp. 94–7. It is a reasonable assumption that by the time Theodulf composed this poem Alcuin’s verse-epitaph for Pope Hadrian had been completed and dispatched from the Court. 25 Godman, Poets and Emperors, pp. 68–70 is a comprehensive analysis of ‘Theodulf ’s

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clergy in the chapel, priests, deacons and sub-deacons, are commended for the way they perform their duties, as are the medical doctors who give their services free! two categories on which Theodulf had nothing to say. (Are they, perhaps, among the plebs who having been admitted selectively are ‘shown the door’ when the meal is over?).26 The ordo of those who learn ‘grammar’ and presumably the other artes—young adolescents rather than boys—is (now) master-less, and Alcuin pointedly wonders why Einhard, in spite of being only a recent arrival but who knows the Aeneid well, has not been appointed; even Drances (an older layman, an anti-hero in Aeneid xi.336–9) would have done! a comment that is hardly compatible with the view that the older Alcuin was hostile to secular verse in an appropriate context.27 Each of the other main groups (ordines) has its particular master: Zaccheus-Ercanbald, in charge of the writers; an un-named presbyter egregius, who seems to be the bishop and senior chaplain Hildebald, controlling the chapel-priests; the sub-deacons under Jesse, a future bishop of Amiens; and so on. Alcuin is silent about his personal relations with these men, and they are not among his known correspondents.28 The final verses of the poem as extant are concerned with individuals to whom (he hints) he has been closer. First is the sole woman, mea filia, whom he encourages in star-gazing and learning to praise malicious imitation’; ‘mercilessly pilloried’ was his judgement in the earlier Poetry, p. 11. But in Poetry, p. 10, he also judges the tone of Alcuin’s poem to be ‘confident and comfortable’. Could both poets have had Statius, Silvae II.7 in mind? the verbal links are not close, but there are suggestive echoes in the two poems. 26 Alcuin, carm. xxvi, lines 7–17 (ministri in l.7 must signify clergy generally); Theodulf, carm. xxv, lines 63–66, 201–3 MGH Poet., I, pp. 485, 488. For Alcuin’s relations with doctors, compare above; I have been unable to consult H. Scheffers, ‘Medizin am Hof Karls des Grossen: ein Beitrag zum Stellenwert der Medizin und zum Problem der karolingischen “Hofschule”’, Würzburger Medizinhistorische Mitteilungen, 11 (1993), 175–203. 27 As Mary Garrison has remarked: ‘Emergence of Carolingian Latin literature’, p. 124 n. 52. (But for the limits of Alcuin’s approval, see the comments of G. Wieland, cited above, ch. 2, pp. 278–9 n. 82). Garrison comments further (p. 153) that ‘such open criticism of Charlemagne’s policy is unparallelled’ in contemporary poetry, and strengthens the case against Alcuin’s absence being a merely temporary one (above, n. 20). 28 Unless ep. no. 246 of 801/2 was addressed to Hildebald, as proposed by Sickel, ‘Alcuinstudien’, p. 489, with the further suggestion that it might be representative of a group of similarly-worded letters. No other text allows an identification of Idithun, whose teaching interestingly combines practical chant (voce sonora is perhaps to be translated as ‘with concordant voice’) and theoretical musica.

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God. She has been identified with Charles’s cousin Gundrada, later characterised as virgo familiarior regis, nobilium nobilissima; but more probably she is the king’s most recent bed-mate, Liutgarda, whom earlier that year Alcuin had characterised as Deo fidelis et regi in a letter to Archbishop Peter of Milan, telling him that he was her intermediary in the sending of precious objects as alms-gifts.29 Then comes the absent Homer, i.e. Angilbert, followed by several other courtiers referred to by their bye-names, including those he hopes will ensure that there is still porridge for him when he next visits the Court: their identification is usually made possible by the other poems in this group; and one of them, the chamberlain Meginfrid (‘Thyrsis’), who was widely regarded as particularly influential with the king, is in the select group of Alcuin’s lay, non-royal, correspondents.30 Theodulf himself is simply ignored in Alcuin’s poem, unless he was meant to be included in a missing final section. In the triangular relationship of the three men, Theodulf says that he isn’t going to write about Angilbert since he isn’t there; Alcuin says he will in the future—for the same reason. The promise was almost certainly kept, although not necessarily immediately, in O, mea cella, perhaps the most lyrical and moving of Alcuin’s poems; and in the formulaic verses Dulcis Homere vale, valeat tua vita per aevum.31

Theodulf, on my chronology, having got in first with his praise (MGH Poet. I, p. 485): . . . pulchra virago/quae micat ingenio cum pietatis ope/. . . ./quae bene discendi studiis studiosa laborat/ingenuasque artes mentis in arce locat—although surely even in the lateeighth century virago would have been read as two-edged! The letter is ep. no. 190: the gifts, put in the hands of a trustworthy messenger, are described as a silver dish and storacen, presumably here ‘decorated silk’. Alcuin had been in correspondence with Liutgarda previously, perhaps as early as November 794 (above, p. 434 and n. 7), and had sought her support in intervening with the king on behalf of the monastery of S. Salvatore, Rieti in the ?autumn of 795 (below, p. 452 and n. 65). In conjunction with her unexplained (personal?) link with the archbishop of Milan, does this suggest previous Italian connections (even at the Pavian court)? although Einhard (Vita Karoli, c. 18) describes her as Alamanna. 30 Alcuin, carm. xxvi, line 47; compare Angilbert, carm. ii, lines 63–66, claiming that he ‘loves poetry’ and displays an ardua fides, which in the context must be his (secular) fidelity, and Theodulf, carm. xxv, lines 117–24, indicating the authority that comes with intimacy with the king. Ep. no. 111 to Meginfrid is one of the earliest letters written from Tours. 31 Theodulf, carm. xxv, lines 145–6; Alcuin, carm. xxvi, lines 45–6, which should be translated ‘Flaccus will compose a poem . . . whenever you return to the Court’ (and not as Godman, Poetry, p. 121). 29

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A major part of the non-poetic evidence for Alcuin’s time at Aachen is inevitably his letters addressed to England: they are strikingly unbalanced in their choice of correspondents. After his short and sharp epistiuncula of late 793 or early 794, no letter now extant is addressed to the Northumbrian King Æthelred, from whom Alcuin had once hoped so much. Writing in 796/7 to the one-time dux (in Bernicia?) and patricius Osbald who had been king for 27 days in mid-796, Alcuin recalls a warning letter written by him two years previously which had been ignored. Was Osbald at that time already in trouble with Æthelred and/or challenging his authority, with the backing of others who briefly supported him? were other letters that have not survived addressed to Northumbrian optimates? We cannot say.32 In contrast, the Tours and English letter-collections preserve from these years a surprising number of letters to Mercian addressees, predominantly men and women with Court connections or themselves ‘royals’, and refer to several others that have not survived as well as to ones received by Alcuin: letters from the Frankish king to his ‘royal brother’ and the embassies or portitores who conveyed them may have helped to create opportunities for such exchanges.33 Personal concerns, not ‘matters of state’, are their main preoccupation. Although Alcuin evidently placed great store on his standing in the Mercian kingdom and his relations with its rulers, these were often uneasy and threatened ones. His one letter to the king before the dramatic events of mid-796, beginning (uniquely) with Fideliter . . ., was to accompany the return of a pupil as Offa had requested. Linked with the hope that he himself might yet visit the Mercian court (on his way to York?), Alcuin gives ‘strict instructions’ that his disciple be given his own pupils to teach and not allowed to fall into bad ways; but this in turn allows him to praise Offa’s concern for learning and to encourage him in other kingly virtues.34 32

Ep. no. 109; other references, above, Ch. 1, p. 140 and n. 37. Above, p. 436 and n. 15. Note that there are no extant letters from Offa or from anyone at his court; but for a possible grant to St.-Denis—which did not involve Alcuin—see above. A Mercian abbot may be the author of the letter to Lul, Epist. Select. 1, ed. Tangl, no. 129. 34 Ep. no. 64; the full opening clause reads Fideliter voluntati tuae semper placere cupiens. Decus Brittaniae is particularly flattering: the young King Pippin is decus Italiae in ep. no. 29, and the late Pope Hadrian is Romae decus in his epitaph (below). Tuba praedicationis, which follows, is normally an epithet of bishops; and compare the 33

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Writing to the priest Beornwine, he expresses relief that his correspondent had not been a party to damaging remarks about him and that they could continue to be ‘at peace’ with another: the supposed falsehoods seem to be related to accusations of being ‘unfaithful’ (unexplained and not easily explicable) to Offa ‘and the English people’. Alcuin none the less hopes that at the right time and place Beornwine, who is perhaps a court ‘chaplain’, will ‘urge the will of God on the king gently, on bishops respectfully, on leading laymen confidently and on all truthfully’.35 To the ‘pious woman’ Hundruda, whom he had once met (te iam prçsentem) presumably on a visit to the Mercian court, he laments that Queen Cynethrith, to whom greetings should be conveyed, and the king had (apparently: Alcuin’s language is very unclear) behaved badly with regard to a (his?) monastery in Mercia; in spite of which he insists, in grovelling terms, on his continuing loyalty.36 The first part of the letter beseeches his correspondent to maintain the highest standards of the religious life ‘at the royal court’ (al. ‘palace’)—perhaps the earliest occurrence of the term in any of Alcuin’s letters37—and be an example to others there. It concludes with a request to convey greetings also to Ecgfrith, Offa’s son and designated heir. Writing to Ecgfrith, here addressed as nobilissimus iuvenis like Charles’s son Pippin earlier but also as one ‘born to rule’ (natus in solio regni ), Alcuin’s ‘exhortatory letter’ emphasises the examples provided by his parents, his father for authority, his mother for piety, and the conduct associated with those basic virtues. The son, however, is also to be ‘the prop of their old age’ and still obedient to them: did he have knowledge of tensions between a king-to-be and a father who

praise for Offa’s efforts ut lumen sapientiae luceat in regno vestro, quod multis modo extinguitur in locis with his near-contemporary urging of the York brethren to teach a younger generation ut scienti[a]e lumen, quod ab origine fidei in nostra refulsit ecclesia, numquam extinguatur (ep. no. 43 [p. 89]). 35 Ep. no. 82: Dei suade voluntatem omnibus personis, regi suaviter, episcopis honorifice, principibus fiducialiter, omnibus veraciter. For Beornwine’s possible status at the Mercian court, see Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, p. 117. 36 Ep. no. 62. The crucial passage reads in the unique manuscript copy: Faciant de me sicut illis placeat: nam fides mea apud illos non violabitur, credens tanto meliores habere illos, quanto meliores sunt meritis et dignitate. 37 Unless preceded by that in the letter to Gisla. The Mercian charter of 781, BCS. 240, Sawyer 121, purportedly granted by Offa sedens in regali palatio in Tamouuorthige (Tamworth, Staffs.) is spurious, although the use of an earlier (genuine) charter is possible; King Cenwulf ’s charter of 799, BCS. 293, Sawyer 155, was issued in vicu regio æt Tomewor ige.

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had been on the throne for nearly forty years?38 A remarkable letter to the king’s daughter Æthelburg(a) under her by-name Eugenia may also belong to these years, although a later (post-796) dating is possible.39 Even if part of the inspiration for it was Jerome’s celebrated letter to Julia Eustochium ‘on maintaining her virginity’—the few verbal links are tenuous and the two letters are very different in scale—its tone and language make clear that Alcuin seriously doubted whether, in the atmosphere of her earthly court, Æthelburga would succeed in preserving her virginity. ‘Try (coneris)’ to keep a promise to do so; in the palaces of the Eternal King, ‘the conqueror of nature will be allied with the creator of all creatures’; and ‘a few days’ effort (!) will be compensated for by eternal rewards’. But ‘don’t replace lust by avarice’!40 One further letter in this group is addressed to an unnamed abbot who was being persecuted and whom Alcuin promised his active intervention with the king. The late Professor WallaceHadrill’s optimistic ‘[Offa] would not have ignored Alcuin’s opinions, any more than Charlemagne did’ is not the only or indeed the most plausible reading of his post-792 correspondence with Mercia.41 Even with the suggested ante-dating by a year of several of the letters attributed by Dümmler to 795, correspondence with the York church was evidently resumed some time in the latter year. Alcuin wrote a short, blunt and only mildly-rhetorical letter to the cathedral clergy urging them to conduct an honest and un-simonaic elec38

Ep. no. 61, the letter to Pippin no. 29 (of ?790–93); Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship, pp. 119–20, especially for its stress on ‘the significance of belonging to a gens regia’. 39 Ep. no. 36: on which, and its addressee’s erroneous identification with a homonymous abbess of Fladbury, see Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, pp. 115–6 and esp. n. 77. 40 Jerome: epist. no. xxii, ed. Hilberg, 1 (CSEL 54), pp. 143–211; in early manuscripts often, in fact, only in the form of extracts, see ibid. p. 143. The phraseology of the final section (41) of Jerome’s letter seems to be echoed in Alcuin’s qui in caelis . . . agnum sequuntur, quasi ramis virentibus in arcem caelestis Hierusalem and laudis carmen decantabit in praesentia sui sponsi; and avarice and its consequences are the subject of an earlier section (31; Hilberg, pp. 191–2), the final part of an extract in two Carolingian manuscripts. The language of ubi naturae victor omnium conditori creaturarum consociabitur is neither Biblical nor credal, and indeed I have failed to find any other instance of naturae victor (over His human nature? over the ‘natural world’?) for Christ. Omnium conditor creaturarum, however, has obvious hymnic references: compare Ambrose’s Aeterne rerum conditor and Deus creator omnium (Ambroise: Hymnes, ed. Fontaine, pp. 149, 237 (nos 1 and 4)) and later hymns, beginning with Hrabanus. Note also the use of consocior with the dative. 41 Ep. no. 63; Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship, p. 120 (where the ‘supporting’ n. 104 seriously misrepresents the text of ep. no. 82).

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tion: it was still his expressed hope that he would return before it took place; but clearly he had by this time ruled himself out, and not only because of a deeply-troubled conscience which he reveals in letters to the Pope and others.42 The election and consecration eventually took place only after Archbishop Eanbald’s death on 10 August 796, with unseemly haste, if the ‘Northumbrian Annals’ can be trusted. Although the person chosen by the York brethren (or perhaps only a faction among them) was Alcuin’s one-time pupil Eanbald, his apparent initial feelings of pleasure were soon to change to ones of disapproval.

Court and Popes The junior Eanbald’s accession had been preceded by other dramatic and disturbing events in both the Northumbrian and the Frankish kingdoms that left their mark on the Aachen Court in the months before Alcuin’s departure from it in the summer of 796. Of these the ‘Royal’ Annals, at this period contemporary, and the likewise contemporary non-Court (but mis-named) ‘Annals of Lorsch’ provide only a very partial and puzzlingly selective documentation; and the details of their respective narratives cannot always be reconciled. Conversely, Alcuin’s letters and poems are the only evidence for his involvement and are the principal sources of our knowledge of Charles’s responses to events on which the Annals are silent; their chronological sequence and absolute dating, however, are rarely unambiguous and are not clarified by the scanty references in other near-contemporary and later texts. The annalistic record for 795 is predominantly concerned with the campaigns against the Saxons which brought Frankish armies for the first time (so far as we know) to Bardowick, a frontier post with Slavdom. Incidentally, however, the ‘Royal Annals’ and their ‘revised’ version report the arrival there of legates from an Avar leader or regional governor (tudun) with an offer of submission and acceptance of the Christian faith. The contemporary ‘Lorsch annals’ are silent on this but conversely report the arrival at Aachen later in the year of the tudun himself, who after being baptised ‘returned 42 Ep. no. 48; for ep. no. 47, see above. Letters to Hadrian: ep. no. 27; and to Leo III: ep. no. 94, both discussed below, pp. 461–2.

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home with great honour and gifts’.43 Alcuin, who as usual had remained at Aachen while the king campaigned in Saxony, seems to have heard about the first legation quite quickly. The evidence is in one of a group of letters addressed to Paulinus, patriarch of north-Italian Aquileia, when correspondence between them had been resumed after many months in which no letters were exchanged, and shares with them a proliferation of metaphors and tropes of varied appropriateness and origin. ‘Avar legates have been sent to our lord the king, with promises that they will submit peacefully and accept the Christian faith. If this is true (et si hoc verum est), . . . who of the servants of God should dissociate himself from so good and praiseworthy a task that the Devil’s savagery be destroyed and Christ’s service grow? But how many eyes are looking to you to see what you mean to do’: because, Alcuin continues, ‘the area falls to you on the basis of contiguity’ and you are the right person in other respects also (vicinitas locorum tibi competit et sapientiae decus subpetit et auctoritatis excellentia tibi appetit!).44 Language and context favour a ‘late 795’ date rather than Dümmler’s (widely-followed) 796; writing to Bishop Arn of Salzburg at the end of May (or beginning of June) 796 Alcuin acknowledges, in a significant change of mood (or attitude), that he is henceforth the royally-approved leader of missionary activity in Avar territory.45 None the less, in the months between 43 Annales Laureshamenses, MGH SS. I, p. 33, and facsimile, ed. Unterkircher; and the two versions of the ‘Royal Annals’, ed. Kurze, pp. 96, 97, although only the ‘revised’ version names Bardowick. (For its subsequent history, see Die deutschen Königspfalzen. Repertorium . . ., ed. C. Ehlers et al., Bd. 4, Niedersachsen 1, ed. U. Reinhardt et al., Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte (Göttingen, 1999), pp. xx–xxx.) For the difficulties of extracting a coherent account of relations between Franks and Avars in 795/6 from the annalistic and occasional other sources, compare below. 44 Ep. no. 99, with the first reference to the Avars in Alcuin’s correspondence since early 790 (the Huni of ep. no. 20 are not Avars but the ‘historic’ Huns). It is one of only four letters in the K collection not included in T, although a copy was (uniquely) sent to Salzburg and is the last re-copied by scribe ‘theta’ in Vienna 808. For the resumption of correspondence, see on epp. nos 86 and 60, below, pp. 449–50 and n. 55; as previously noted, none of Paulinus’s extant letters is addressed to Alcuin. Alcuin himself is surely responsible for the clumsy et in angusto pectoris antro caritatis olla fervescit! 45 Ep. no. 107, written after, but evidently not long after, 25 May 796. Jaffé inferred (see Dümmler’s edition, p. 153 n. 5) from the words of the letter in quibus sicut ortavi audivi, sicut speravi agnovi that Alcuin had addressed a now-lost letter to Arn simultaneously with ep. no. 99 to Paulinus; and he was followed by Heinz Löwe, ‘Alchvines Bedeutung für die Südostmission’, Die karolingische Reichsgründung und der Sudosten. Studien zum Werden des Deutschtums und seiner Auseinandersetzung mit Rom (Stuttgart, 1937), pp. 116–29 (still overall the best treatment anywhere of that topic,

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the writing of the letters to Paulinus and to Arn it was an expedition directed, although not personally led, by Duke Eric of Friuli that reached the Avar hring in the east-European plain for the first time and returned with part of its accumulated treasures.46 A necessary corollary is that Eric’s visit to Aachen and conversation with Alcuin there, recalled in a short letter to him, had been in the late summer/early autumn of 795, when also one of several near-contemporaneous letters to Paulinus was entrusted to him;47 and that the letter itself, assuring him that its writer was praying that he would emerge safe-and-sound and victorious from encounters with God’s enemies and encouraging him to heed Paulinus’s advice, was written after his return to his north-east Italian ‘duchy’ but almost certainly before the results of the expedition were known.48

but because of the date and circumstances of publication largely ignored in the past half-century), at p. 116. Accepting that ep. no. 99’s words si hoc verum est demand a dating in 795, however, there are no grounds for supposing that the ‘lost’ letter to Arn belongs to that earlier phase of correspondence. If the linked letter-poems to Paulinus and to Arn, carmm. xvii (+ xix?) and xviii (MGH Poet. I, pp. 239–40; S.-K. nos 16381, 6592, 16380: the first two in the Salzburg book Vienna 808) are of 795/6—which is possible but not certainly demonstrable (linked perhaps with Alcuin’s departure from Aachen?), it is noteworthy that neither makes any reference to ‘missionary activity’. 46 That is: accepting the account of the expedition in the ‘Royal Annals’ (= Annales Mettenses; but ruthlessly abbreviated in the ‘Revised Annals’), s.a. 796, ARF ed. Kurze, p. 98, cf. p. 99; but following the chronology demanded by the ‘Lorsch Annals’, s.a. 795, MGH SS. I, p. 33 and facsimile. This has, indeed, been generally accepted by scholars since the late-nineteenth century: the key references are conveniently assembled by Bruce, ‘Two neglected paladins’, pp. 217–19; W. Pohl, Die Awaren. Ein Steppenvolk in Mitteleuropa 567–822 (Munich, 1988), pp. 318–20 is a good recent summary. It is, however, often muddled in popular accounts, and unfortunately also by R. Collins, Charlemagne, pp. 95–7, in the course of a generally noteworthy attempt to relate Frankish successes to the internal situation in Avaria. Alcuin’s comment on that ‘kingdom’ is quoted below. 47 Ep. no. 99 (p. 144): binas vestrae paternitati paulo ante direxi cartulas, unam per sanctum episcopum Histriensem, alium per virum venerabilem Aericum ducem. Would these letters have been almost identical in content, because of the risk of non-arrival (as was common in early-modern centuries)? In 776/780, Pope Hadrian had reported to the Frankish king the violent expulsion of an (?)earlier episcopus Histriensis, Maurice: MGH Epist. III, Cod. Car. no. 63, p. 590; there is no satisfactory evidence for the location of the Istrian see-church at this period. 48 Ep. no. 98. Every modern commentator, so far as I can see, has followed Jaffé’s annotation of the letter’s . . . quatenus tuae fortitudinis dexteram . . . victricem ubique faciat that manifestum est haec verba ad Ericum iam victorem scripta esse; Bruce, ‘Two neglected paladins’, p. 220, goes further, claiming that in the letter ‘Alcuin stresses . . . exclusively’ ‘the religious significance of th[e] victory and the submission following it’—which is manifestly false. But faciat is a present subjunctive, as is custodiat at the end of the following clause, and quatenus is the Late Lat./Eccl. Lat. ‘[in order] that’

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Simultaneously with these events although apparently originally independent of them, and following a visit to the royal court of two high-placed figures in the Papal curia,49 preparations were in hand for a Frankish embassy to Pope Hadrian. Its leader was to be Angilbert, a man who belonged to the king’s most intimate circle—fidelis familiaris, auricolarius and counsellor in all things, lover of his daughter Berta—and in spite of his criticisable private life was no less trusted by his teacher Alcuin and others:50 writing to Pope Hadrian (a letter that was never sent) and subsequently to Pope Leo, Alcuin declared that Angilbert would be passing on confidences and making representations orally that he had been unwilling to commit to parchment. The legation’s primary purpose was probably, although this must remain speculative, to improve relations between the two courts, which had been cool since Charles and his advisers had learnt that the Byzantine position on images they had vigorously denounced was also that of the Pope.51 A range of gifts was prepared for sending to Hadrian.52 Pre-eminent among them was the magnificent (from the late-fourth century according to Souter, Glossary, s.v., and certainly common in Ennodius, Cassiodorus etc.), i.e. ‘that He may make your brave right arm ( fortitudinis dexteram) the victor . . .’: compare quatenus nostrae navigium vitae sanctitatis vestrae orationibus gubernare digneris in a letter to Paulinus, ep. no. 60 (p. 104), perhaps only a short time later, and in many other letters of Alcuin’s. 49 Campulus and Anastasius, ep. no. 93 (p. 137). Campulus was a relative of Hadrian’s and sacellarius; he had been on at least one previous legation to the Frankish Court: MGH Epist. III, Cod. Carol., no. 67, p. 595 of 781. The identification of Anastasius is less certain but he was probably the bibliothecarius first recorded in 787, whose office was at this time gaining in importance (Noble, Republic of St. Peter, p. 221). Nothing is known of the purpose of their embassy. 50 Ep. no. 93; Neff, Gedichte Paulus Diaconus, no. xxxix; and the letters of Alcuin cited below. For the secondary literature on Angilbert, see above. 51 Angilbert as leader: Alcuin’s ep. no. 27 (below); ARF, ed. Kurze, p. 98 = Ann. Mett. pr., ed. von Simson, p. 81 (Angilbertum dilectum abbatem suum), ‘Revd. annals’, ed. Kurze, p. 99 (Angilbertus abbas monasterii sancti Richarii ); epp. nos 92, 93 (letters in the king’s name composed by Alcuin); and Alcuin’s own letters, epp. nos 75, 94, 95, 125. Ep. no. 27, and possibly also epp. nos 75 and 94, relate to the planned embassy to Hadrian; otherwise, they refer to the re-arranged embassy to Pope Leo. For the significance of auricolarius, see below, n. 73. Purpose: Classen, Karl der Grosse, das Papsttum u. Byzanz, pp. 40–1, 42–5; and compare now, for the conflict of views in 794, Opus Caroli, ed. Freeman, ‘Einleitung’, pp. 8–10. An earlier supposition that the embassy was also or primarily intended to obtain Papal approval for future Frankish missionary activity in Avaria was—in my view, rightly—rejected by Löwe, Karolingische Reichsgründung, pp. 72–3 and passim. There is no reference to the embassy in Liber pontificalis. 52 For gifts prepared and not sent because of Hadrian’s death, see Theodulf ’s carm. no. xxvi, MGH Poet. 1, 490 (his verse-commemoration of Hadrian) and the king’s letter to the new Pope, Leo, ep. no. 93 (p. 137).

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‘Dagulf Psalter’ (Vienna Nat. Bibl. 1861)—so-called from the principal scribe of its stylish minuscule—with its novel ‘Vulgate’ cantica and credal collection and its distinctive ivory book-covers: whether or not Alcuin had some influence on its texts (the arguments are equivocal), the courtier with overall responsibility for its creation was most probably the head of the chapel, Bishop Hildebald of Cologne.53 Subsequently, a generous share of the first tranche of the captured Avar treasure-hoard was destined for the Papal court.54 Letters from Alcuin to several different recipients in the Alpine, north-Italian and central-Italian regions of the Frankish king’s dominions (most of them in one or both versions of the ‘basic Tours collection’), although attributed by Dümmler to arbitrarily-scattered dates, make best sense if they were written either at this time or during the preparations for Angilbert’s re-arranged departure: they throw vivid light on Alcuin’s perceptions of himself, as well as on his circle of friends and acquaintances, in the mid-790s. One to Paulinus of Aquileia, however, which marks the resumption of correspondence between the two men after a break apparently extending back to the closure of the Frankfurt synod, should probably be dated a few months earlier, i.e. to the summer of 795.55 It is unusually long—four to seven manuscript pages in the several copies—and is written in Alcuin’s most high-flown ‘baroque’ epistolary style, perhaps 53 Koehler, Die karolingischen Miniaturen: Hofschule, pp. 42–6; K. Holter, Der goldene Psalter “Dagulf-Psalter”, Commentarium-Bd. (Codices selecti, LXIX*, facsimile in id., LXIX; Graz, 1980), with L. Nees’s essential review in Art Bulletin 67 (1985), 681–90. The unitary conception of the book’s creation, linking external and internal features and their ‘messages’, has been convincingly argued by Francis L. Newton, ‘The Dagulf Psalter: its dedicatory verses, its prefaces, its ivory covers, and its reflection of Charlemagne’ (forthcoming); the suggestion that the over-arching responsibility was Hildebald’s is, however, my own. For the cantica and creeds (not considered by Newton), see R. Beer’s introduction to Monumenta Palaeographica Vindobonensia, 1 (Leipzig, 1910), pp. 29–68, esp. pp. 32 ff. and Bullough, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 58–9, 192–3 with 229–30 (nn. 112, 113). 54 Refs. as n. 52. 55 Ep. no. 86 (pp. 128–31). Its opening words are Dum ferventis cancri igneus sol sidus ascendit, the inspiration or model for which is surely Boethius, Consolatio philosophiae, lib. I metr. vi: Cum Phoebi radiis grave/ Cancri sidus inaestuat; about this time Alcuin was drawing on the Cons., I pr. 6 (and later passages) for his De vera philosophia: Quid homo, rationale animal . . ., PL 101, cols 851A–B. Note that, while in T/T * the Paulinus letter follows a royal letter (ep. no. 85) and precedes Alcuin’s unique letter to Pope Hadrian (ep. no. 27, discussed below), in the K manuscripts it is the first of a group of six addressed to Paulinus, and the only other extant letter to him (no. 60: on the evidence of the lemma in K1, the address-clause using the otherwise unrecorded bye-name Timotheus) follows here after a part-text and a bad text of letters to other addressees.

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in deliberate emulation of his correspondent’s own rhetorical language.56 Until the recent arrival of that desperately-awaited letter, which may have been accompanied by a poem,57 Alcuin had heard nothing from his old friend for far too long. Alas! he must acknowledge his weaknesses and sins, his worldliness and wallowing in filth; and deploying a multiplicity of New Testament exemplars and types and linking a new and extended medical metaphor with ‘the eye of the heart’, Alcuin beseeches his spiritual mentor through his prayers to raise him up and heal him.58 The first of only two extant letters to another north-Italian addressee, Archbishop Peter of Milan—‘O that I had the eagle’s wings, so that with a following wind (Euro) I might speedily fly over the Alpine peaks to be in your presence’—is considerably shorter than that to Paulinus; but after the briefest of allusions to mutual caritas, it shares some of its sentiments and language, to the extent that the later Rheims copyist has added a marginal note accusatio Alcuini, and is probably close to it in date. Repeatedly referring to the archbishop as the father and himself as the son, Alcuin contrasts his own failings with Peter’s conspicuous qualities as a pastor and teacher of the following generations, even when—just like Paul!—this is necessarily through the medium of letters.59 The second letter is merely an epistiuncula, in which he says that he is acting as an intermediary for gifts from Liutgarda, and was in all probability written to be taken to north Italy by an unnamed portitor later that year or early in 796: other correspondence entrusted to the same carrier may be identifi56

As p. 129, lines 14–18 and p. 130, lines 31–6. If the extraordinary Plura mihi de sanctissimo tui cordis epithalamio rorifluo nectare exudantia protulisti exempla; ut verius etc. is regarded as consciously hermeneutic punning. 58 Adhaesit oculi cordis mei pulvis cogitationum iniquarum. . . . quatenus aeternae pietatis medicus collyrio (‘eye-salve’) suae misericoridiae inunguat oculum . . . ut verum perpetuae bonitatis lumen videre valeat etc. But it is unnecessary to seek a medical-text source, e.g. Celsus, for Alcuin’s language here and in carm. xcvii (about whose authorship Burghardt, Philologische Untersuchungen, pp. 127–8, is needlessly doubting: the poem was also in the lost Regensburg manuscript known to Frobenius), Sed tibi collirio visus infunde salutis/Ut valeas signi etc., in view of Apc 3.18: et collyrio inungue oculos tuos ut videas; cf. also (?ps.-)Alcuin, Comm. in Apoc., PL 100, col. 1114D, Qui ergo caecatos oculos pulvere habet, collyrium superimponat ut lumen recipiat. 59 Ep. no. 83; manuscript T * (BAV Vat. reg. lat. 272) fol. 69v. The significance of the parallel with Paul is rightly remarked by Edelstein, Eruditio und Sapientia, p. 43: but his further discussion of this letter on pp. 116–17 suggests that he has not understood that here, uncharacteristically, it is Alcuin who is the wayward son and disciple; and he has nothing to say about Alcuin’s self-abasing language (ep. no. 86 is totally ignored). 57

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able.60 The longer letter to the Milanese archbishop is the only evidence for his supposed learning and spirituality; and although it is apparent that other letters passed between the two men, as is almost always the case we have no idea what sort of response Alcuin elicited from his admired correspondent.61 Among the letters certainly written with the forthcoming embassy to Rome in view, a characteristic short one reminds Bishop Egino (of Konstanz; also rector of St. Gallen) that in personal conversation ( praesenti conloquutione [sic]: at Frankfurt? at Aachen?) he had promised to send some relics—perhaps to be placed in one of Alcuin’s monasteries or to be added to his other personal possessions; Egino now has the opportunity of entrusting them to ‘my son’ Angilbert: obsecro ut veraciter perficias quod hilariter promittebas.62 If Remedius was already bishop of the easternAlpine diocese of Chur—possibly the first non-Rhaetian, certainly the last bishop who simultaneously exercised secular authority in the region—one or more letters to him may belong here. Despite Alcuin’s describing Remedius as ‘our most dear and faithful friend’ when writing to Arn in 800, the letters are essentially unemotional requests for prayers, both by the bishop and by the monasteries in his diocese, linked in one case with thanks for gifts received; this notwithstanding, Alcuin’s name is not to be found in Pfäfers’s splendid Liber Viventium of a few years later.63 60 Ep. no. 190. Compare the indiculus to Paulinus, ep. no. 96, which also reports a gift from Liutgarda (from the Avar treasure?). For other letters possibly in the same batch, see below, n. 63. 61 In 799, in a letter to Arn, Alcuin asks to be commended to Pope Leo, to Paulinus of Aquleia and to Peter of Milan: ep. no. 186 (p. 313). Manuscripts attributable to Milan at this period are totally lacking: see Bischoff, ‘Handschriftenüberlieferung’, MaSt 3, 31–3, Engl. transl. pp. 47–8, and idem, Katalog, 1. It has been suggested more than once that Alcuin encouraged (or even ‘inspired’) Peter’s establishment of a community of monks at the urban church of Sant’Ambrogio in 789: there is no supporting evidence for this, and it is surely inherently unlikely. 62 Ep. no. 75, for which Dümmler’s date was 792(!)–796? Eccl. Lat. hilarus, -iter can mean ‘generous(ly)’ as well as ‘joyful(ly)’: see, e.g., Vg. Sap 6.17 and the Liber pontificalis’s characterization of Leo III (ed. Duchesne, 2, 1) as valde nimisque hilarus in elaemosinis. 63 The letters are epp. nos 76, 77 (from the T collection), 263 (with the request for the intercessions of the servants of God qui sunt in monasteriis per vestrae diocesis [vestri diocesi ] latitudinem), 310 (from the H collection). But no. 77, which requests the bishop to ensure that noster negotiator travelling to or from Italy is not obstructed by his toll-collectors and asks for prayers for the soul of Joseph, must belong to Alcuin’s Tours years. There is no independent evidence for the date of Remedius’s succession or (except indirectly: probably ca. 805/6) for that of his death. Some of the problems created by the bishops’s loss of secular authority are described in a

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The letter to Duke Eric may also have been intended for conveyance by Angilbert’s legation, but because of its postponement was probably conveyed by an anonymous portitor earlier: in another short letter that clearly belongs here Alcuin assures Paulinus of Aquileia, from whom he has recently heard once more, that Angilbert will bring more extensive greetings on his way to Rome.64 Two other letters almost certainly reflect the intended final stages of the journey to the Papal city, namely, approaching it along the Via Salaria. The first is addressed to Abbot Usuald and the congregation of S. Salvatore, Rieti, to whose prayers Alcuin had been commended in the previous decade and whose recent petitioning of the king he had, he claimed, supported jointly with ‘the most pious lady’ Liutgarda. The second tells the monastery at Farfa (in the Sabina) and its Abbot Mauroald, whom he has never met, that he was taking advantage of a visitor to the area to ask to be included in its prayer-fraternity.65 The most remarkable of the letters prepared by Alcuin for conveyance by the aborted legation is the one addressed to Pope Hadrian, which Dümmler dated more than a year earlier in the belief—an erroneous one—that Angilbert had been sent to Rome in the summer of 794 with the decisions of the Council of Frankfurt. Its tenor and purpose were clearly recognised by the Rheims copyist who

much-discussed letter of complaint of the early 820s, last ed. Bündner Urkundenbuch, 1 (Chur, 1952), nos 46 and 47, but conveniently available in MGH Epist. V, pp. 309–11: on this, see most recently K. Schmid, ‘Von Hunfrid zu Burkard: Bemerkungen zur rätischen Geschichte aus der Sicht von Gedenkbucheinträgen’, in: U. Brunold and L. Deplazes (ed.), Geschichte und Kultur Churrätiens: Festschrift für P. Iso Müller (Disentis, 1986), pp. 191–209, esp. p. 206, with references to the extensive earlier literature (particularly the writings of O.P. Clavedetscher). A facsimile of the Liber Viventium Fabariensis (St. Gallen Stiftsarchiv) was published in 1973 (ed. A. Bruckner, H.R. Sennhauser; Basel); but by that time, of course, Alcuin’s name might have been in a separate liber mortuum (al. anniversariorum). 64 Ep. no. 95, which also commends praesens vero harum portitor litterarum, who has been entrusted additionally with oral messages. Although probably of early 796, it is not impossibly of late 795; in any case, it is later (not earlier) than ep. no. 99. 65 Rieti: ep. no. 90. The mistaken identification of the monastery (which goes back to Mabillon) with S. Salvatore, Monte Amiata, whose abbot throughout the 790s was Anspert, was corrected by P.F. Kehr, Italia Pontificia, 4 (Berlin, 1909), p. 25, on the basis of Reg. Farf., ed. Giorgi and Balzani, 2, 133 (no. 160), but is still frequently repeated (most recently and surprisingly by Villa, ‘Horazüberlieferung’, p. 45 who—like Bischoff previously—makes unwarrantable inferences from the identification). The petitioning was presumably for a privilege of some sort; none survives, and Alcuin’s quantum valui suggests that he knew it had been unsuccessful. Farfa: ep. no. 91; the monastery is away from the road, to the west.

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wrote in the margin Nota. De confessione et accusatione Alchuini.66 Alcuin is here petitioning the Pope for forgiveness from unspecified but clearly major sins, which I have previously suggested are sexual: I remain uncertain whether his appeal is to be understood as an emotional outpouring when a sense of his sinfulness had become unbearable (which the earlier letter to Paulinus would certainly support) or whether he was acknowledging his need of formal reconciliation, which he felt no local bishop, i.e. the bishop of Liège or even the bishop and ‘arch-chaplain’ Hildebald, could provide. It was thus a personal, even a psychological, issue that provoked Alcuin’s earliest explicit assertion of the unique authority of the Roman bishop as vicar and heir (heres) of Peter; and he does so in terms that seem to owe as much to Pope Leo I’s sermons (tractatus) as to recent Papal letters, although at least one key phrase may echo a letter of Hadrian’s. The tie of baptism ( per sacri baptismatis adunationem—an apparently unique usage of a favourite word) had brought him into the sheepfold of Christ the shepherd, Who after His resurrection had triply commended His sheep to Peter ‘prince of the Apostles’, to whom also He had given ‘the power of binding and loosing’ in Heaven and on earth. (The New Testament bases are, of course, respectively John 21.15–17 and Matthew 16.19; but Alcuin does not here quote either Vulgate passage verbatim.)67 He is now, however, a straying and sick sheep who seeks to be healed; and the bishop of Rome has 66

Ep. no. 27; BAV Reg. lat. 272, fol. 73v. The letter’s version of the former is in fact much closer to Leo’s tract. 4.3: Sancti Leonis Magni Romani Pontificis Tractatus Septem et Nonaginta, ed. A. Chavasse, CCSL 138 (Turnhout, 1973), p. 19; and here also transivit . . . ius istius potestatis (Alc., potestatem delegavit) with reference to the Matthew passage. Alcuin continues: Huius te . . . ut vicarium sanctissime sedis agnosco, ita et mirificae potestatis heredem esse fateor. According to computer-concordances, heres (of Peter) occurs nowhere in the letters of Pope Gregory I or of his seventh- and early-eighth-century successors; and I have not found it in letters in the Codex Carolinus. But Leo’s tract. 3.4 has cuius dignitas etiam in indigno herede non deficit and ipsum vobis cuius vice fungimur: ed. Chavasse, pp. 13, 14; and compare also the next passage in Alcuin’s letter with tract. 3.4, ed. Chavasse, p. 13 (lines 76–9). Peter had occasionally been described as claviger or clavicularius (regni caelorum al. caelestis) in seventh-century Papal letters; one or other of these epithets is commonly used by Hadrian’s notaries, especially in the later letters (of 787–91), MGH Epp., III, Cod. Car. nos 81, 82 et saepe (claviger), 94 (clavicularius); and similarly in Pope Leo III’s letter to King Coenwulf of Mercia, MGH Epp. IV, p. 188 (no. 127) (clavigero regni caelorum). Alcuin avoids them, with the single exception of claviger regni caelestis in ep. no. 137 (p. 215), and he does not even link the Pope with the Gospel ‘keys’, although in ep. no. 17 (p. 47) he had characterised the (southern) English bishops as vos qui clavem regni caelestis cum apostolis ligandi solvendique potestatem accepisitis a Christo! 67

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the medicinal power. That he had not sought forgiveness as a penitent earlier, although probably aware of Hadrian’s reiteration of the bars to ordination,68 may well have been a major factor in his finally ruling himself out as Archbishop Eanbald (I)’s future successor. If so (and it will remain mere speculation) it helps to explain his insistence, in the most general terms, on the unforgiveableness of the ‘heresy of simony’ in the choice of a bishop. A 26-line letter-poem addressed in Charles’s name to Peter of Pisa and to Paul the Deacon, inc. Christe, pater mundi, saeculi radiantis origo was perhaps also intended for conveyance at this time, although it is not excluded that it had been in the baggage of an earlier legation: Peter, who is thanked for sending ‘a cheerful poem’, was back in north Italy (at King Pippin’s court? in the Verona region?); Paul was in the south; and Pope Hadrian was still alive when the poem was composed.69 Professor Godman, detecting a characteristic acerbity of language and allusion, supposed that Alcuin was its real author; Professor Schaller’s ‘second [or third?] thoughts’ were rather of Angilbert himself. The poem certainly reached its intended final destination, since its manuscript-tradition is exclusively Montecassinian.70 When, however, the Frankish embassy was on the point of setting out for Rome—hardly earlier than February/March—messengers from 68

Above, Pt. I. Neff, Gedichte Paulus, no. xxxiv (pp. 140–42), S.-K. no. 2201. For the whereabouts of Peter in the early/mid-790s, see Prof. C. Villa’s cautiously-expressed inferences from Berlin Diez B.66, ‘Horazüberlieferung’, DA 51, 44–9. 70 See Neff, p. 139. Godman, Poets and Emperors, p. 55, confidently asserted Alcuin’s authorship: he seems never to have published his planned fuller arguments (cf. n. 94). Neff insisted (Gedichte, pp. 139, 142) that the poem was the king’s own composition, although with a ‘scissors-and-paste’ use of Alcuin’s carm. iv at several points (lines 20–21 = carm. lines 15–16; line 26 = carm. line 39); his main argument was that, if Alcuin had been composing a poem in the king’s name, he would ‘niemals eine solche Verschlechterung seine eigenen Verse vorgenommen’ as the change from carm. iv line 47, Paulini gaudens conplectere colla magistri to Gedichte, no. xxxiv line 25, Colla mei Pauli gaudendo amplecte benigne! Others are unconvinced: the two poems were composed some fifteen years apart; and nearer in date to the second of them is Alcuin’s earliest extant letter to Bishop-Abbot Arn (ep. no. 10), the opening sentence of which concludes with quo collum caritatis vestrae desideriorum meorum digitulis amplecter. The poem’s line 10, Curre per Ausoniae, non segnis, epistola, campos, is evidently based on Statius, Silvae IV. 4 Curre per Euboicos non segnis, epistula, campos; Silvae II 7 is among the early additions to the manuscript Florence, Bibl. Medicea-Laurenziana pl. XXXIX. 32, at least one of the scribes of which had an Imperial Court connection (Bischoff, Katalog 1, p. 259 (no. 1224)). Alcuin may have known the Silvae at York (above, ch. 2, pp. 281–2. Schaller, in the earlier of two articles in 1970, proposed an ‘Alkuin-Schüler’: Studien zur lateinischen Dichtung, p. 85. But more recently, drawing attention to Angilbert, carm. ii, line 45 (MGH Poet. I, p. 361), he has suggested this court-poet as the most likely author: Studien (‘Nachträge’), p. 413. 69

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that city arrived at Aachen with news of Hadrian’s death on December 25 and the election the very next day of his successor Leo (III): one of the ninth-century copies of the Papal writing-office’s Liber Diurnus, the originally north-Italian Egmond manuscript, seems to preserve the precise text of the decretalis cartula by which the Frankish king was officially notified of the election.71 Charles’s reactions to the death of a bishop of Rome with whom he had had close relations for more than twenty years and his replacement by someone previously unknown to him were to involve Alcuin at several levels. He composed for the king a brief ‘letter of instruction’ addressed to Angilbert as leader of the embassy, a copy of which was subsequently taken to Tours and later re-copied for sending to Salzburg.72 It does not suggest a very favourable view of the new pope: the royal courtier is to look for occasions ‘to admonish him diligently concerning total probity (omni honestate) in his life and in particular concerning observance of the holy canons and pious governance of God’s holy church’, to exhort him ‘to destroy the heresy of simony, which in many places badly disfigures the body of the church’—not least, in the regions politically subject to the rex Francorum et Langobardorum but ecclesiastically subject to the bishop of Rome, as Pope Hadrian had complained—and to raise any other matters that he knows to have been a cause of contention.73 More significantly, Alcuin was entrusted with the composition of a letter to the new Pope, pointedly also with Charles’s name and title, as rex Francorum et Langobardorum et patricius Romanorum, placed first in the address-clause.74 At several points, his personal style and 71 Liber Diurnus form. 63 (82; 58), ed. Foerster, pp. 219–21, with the observations of Classen, Karl der Grosse, cit. (rev. ed. 1985), p. 42 n. 141; the heading in all three manuscripts is Decretum pontificis. Acknowledgement of its receipt forms the opening clause of the king’s letter to the Pope (next note). 72 Ep. no. 92, with the royal title Gratia Dei rex et defensor sanctae Dei ecclesiae, as (except for the addition of Francorum after rex) in the letter to Offa, ep. no. 87. It is tempting to think that the letter-text engrossed (fair-copied for sending) by a Court scribe ended at the words perducere dignetur, and that the unique farewell, Vade cum prosperitate, perficiens in veritate, reversurus cum gaudio, Homeriane puer, was an autograph addition by Alcuin. The Salzburg copy (S1, fols 207v–208; scribe ‘theta’) was in turn adapted as a ‘formula-letter’ in clm. 14743 (S1*), at fols 135–6. 73 I quote P.D. King’s translation. King does not offer a translation of et quicquid mente teneas <nos> saepius querelis agitasse inter nos [nos1 in S1 but not in T *, and surely to be expunged: an odd phrase but justifying the epithet auricolario ‘intimate counsellor’ (and certainly not ‘(arch)chaplain’, as MLWB s.v.) in the address-clause. Does inter nos mean ‘between the king and the bishop of Rome’ rather than with Leo personally? and are the querelae ‘claims’ or ‘disputes’? and over what? For simony in episcopal elections partibus Italiae Tusciae, see MGH Epp., III, cod. Carol. no. 94 (of 790/91), p. 634. 74 Ep. no. 93.

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characteristic rhetorical devices break through, in phrases such as quae vel nobis voluntaria vel vobis necessaria and ductore et datore. Conversely, his language here may owe rather more than has been generally recognised to earlier letters composed by leading figures in the court and its chapel—of which only a tiny number are extant—but also to letters from the Papal curia.75 Overall, the letter demonstrates Alcuin’s ability to find appropriate language, with a minimum of direct Biblical quotation, for an unfamiliar situation and for a novel assertion, although made perhaps with conscious ambiguity, of the Frankish king’s position in the Western church at the expense of the bishop of Rome. In cooler terms than Alcuin’s own ‘consolatory’ letters later and tempered by the familiar words of the apostle Paul (I Th 4.13–14), Charles declares his tearful sadness at the death of ‘a most loved father and most faithful friend’.76 But this is mingled with joy at the choice of a successor: someone has been chosen who can ‘intercede daily with the blessed Peter, prince of the apostles, for the stability of the whole church and for my well-being and that of my fideles, indeed for the prosperity of the whole kingdom given to us by God’.77 The letter reaches its climax in the much quoted but far from straightforward declaration that:

75 For the pre-Alcuin composers of royal letters, see Bullough, ‘Aula renovata’, Carolingian Renewal, pp. 130, 151–2 . . . Multiplices divinae pietati agentes gratias, in the present letter’s first sentence, is uncharacteristic of Alcuin; but compare Multiformes namque gratias regi saeculorum in Königsbrief, ed. Munding, p. 3, Ch. Lat. Ant. 12, ed. Bruckner, no. 543 (ignoring all the criticisms of and corrections to Munding’s edition), of ?786/7. 76 Compare Post patrem lacrimans Karolus haec carmina scribsi in Alcuin’s epitaph for Hadrian (below) and Einhard, Vita Karoli, 19: Nuntiato etiam sibi Hadriani Romani pontificis obitu, quem in amicis praecipuum habebat, sic flevit acsi fratrem aut carissimum filium amisisset. Halphen’s characteristically sceptical comment on the second of these (Éginhard, Vie de Charlemagne, p. 61) was ‘On ne sait ou Éginhard a pris ce qu’il conte à ce propos et qu’il serait imprudent d’accepter les yeux fermés’! Alcuin’s consolatory letters are epp. nos 105, 106, 197 and 198, discussed below. 77 Qui cotidie . . . pro totius ecclesiae stabilitate et qui pro salute mea meorumque fidelium, immo et pro totius prosperitate [stabilitate in T *] regni nobis a Deo dati interecederet et paterna pietate nos . . . adoptaret (p. 137); to be compared with Königsbrief, ed. Munding, p. 3, cotidianam Deo . . . fundemur praecem . . . simulque praecantes paternitatem vestram ut pro incolomitate nostra atque pro stabilitate regni . . . and Hadrian’s letter to the king in 787, MGH Epp. III, p. 611, Cod. Carol. no. 79, quod sine intermissione die noctuque semper memoria vestri facio, in orationibus meis obsecrans tam pro vestra in triumphis regali victoria et perpetua stabilitate quamque pro sanctae memoriae genitoribus vestris. With this last compare also populus christianus super inimicos sui sancti nominis ubique semper habeat victoriam in the letter to Leo (p. 138).

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It is our function—to the extent that Divine goodness aids us—externally to defend Christ’s holy church on every side by force against the incursion of pagans and the ravaging of infidels, internally catholicae fidei agnitione munire (see below, p. 458, for a translation). It is yours, most holy father, to aid our struggle with hands raised to God, like Moses, to the end that, with God as guide and giver, the Christian people should everywhere and always be victorious over the enemies of its holy name, and the name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified through the whole world.

What is surely conspicuous here is the limited function allowed to the Pope, for which it would be hard to find convincing precedents.78 Indeed, it is no more than Alcuin claims for himself in relation to Paulinus of Aquileia some two years later (nostrum est elevatis cum Moyse manibus in caelum humilitatis precibus te adiuvare), and very different from ‘the exaltation by Charlemagne of the Roman church’ regularly demanded by Pope Hadrian in his letters to the Frankish king and from the Petrine authority recently attributed to that same pope by Alcuin.79 How limiting it is depends to some extent on the interpretation of the final element in the contrasting assertion of the king’s responsibilities. 78 These words and the paragraph that follows were first drafted before the publication of the Jesuit Father Klaus Schatz’s ‘Königliche Kirchenregierung und römische Petrus-Überlieferung im Kreise Karls des Grossen’, Frankfurter Konzil, ed. Berndt, 1, 357–71. Schatz is, if anything, even more categoric (see esp. pp. 358–9); and, against all previous commentators, he extends his understanding of the letter in that sense to Opus Caroli I, 6 (below). I do not know, however, where Alcuin refers to the Frankish king as rex et sacerdos, although he describes him as rex and praedicator in the later epp. nos 41 and 178 and rector et doctor in the first of these (compare Schatz, pp. 359, 368). 79 Letter to Paulinus: ep. no. 139 (pp. 221–2). The quotation in the text is from W. Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages (London, 1955), p. 92; but the letter to Leo lists the topics to be discussed with Angilbert as the measures needed ad exaltationem sanctae Dei ecclesiae vel ad stabilitatem honoris vestri vel patriciatus nostri firmitatem. Schatz, ‘Königliche Kirchenregierung’, esp. at p. 359, seems not to have appreciated that the context of Alcuin’s references to the Pope as heres of Peter, etc. in his epp. nos 27 and 94 (to Leo) is a notably different one. WallaceHadrill’s comment (Frankish Church, p. 187) that Charles/Alcuin are making the populus Christianus, the many peoples over whom Charles ruled, the potential beneficiary of papal intercession, ‘and it is this rather than the not unexpected division of function between king and pope that is too easily overlooked’ is surely doubly misleading: populus christianus is a Frankish commonplace, current even before 768 and figuring in association with prayers for the deceased Pope Hadrian in the ‘Lorsch Annals’ for 796 (pp. 458–9 and n. 85); and equally a commonplace also of the contemporary Papal writing-office, although originally perhaps with rather different connotations (see, e.g., MGH Epp., III, cod. Car. no. 62, p. 589), together with its synonym under the New Dispensation, populus Dei. Et PRO PLEBE sacris pervigil in precibus is one of Hadrian’s virtues in his epitaph (below).

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Agnitio of ‘the catholic [al. true] faith’ is very unusual, and munire is unfortunately ambiguous (‘strengthening al. supporting [within]’ or ‘fortifying [against]’?): not surprisingly, perhaps, the phrase has been variously understood by modern commentators. A translation of the noun as ‘diffusion’, with its suggestion of mission-field activity, is inappropriate in the context, and not within its recognised semantic field.80 But Charles’s part in making the true faith known to the people or peoples whom he rules, which Alcuin has chosen to express in this way,81 is not merely a secondary, instrumental, one. Rather, his authority extends to establishing what the true faith is, as was implicit—perhaps even explicit—in the preparations for and proceedings of the Frankfurt synod,82 and as Alcuin will claim for the Frankish king in his later responses to the ‘Adoptionist heresy’. When, in the words of the so-called ‘Lorsch Annals’, ‘the royal lamenting was over’, Charles gave instructions for prayers to be offered ‘throughout the whole christian people ( per universum christianum populum) within his lands’ and distributed ‘an abundance of alms for him’.83 Of the innumerable oral communications and letters from the Court which this implies, no certain trace has been found, excepting a unique circular letter in Alcuin’s own name to ‘the bishops of Britain’.84 He noted as the occasion of its sending, and of his seeking their intercession for his soul, that ‘he had not failed to take advantage of the opportunity of the present [Frankish royal] embassy’, 80

As in Robert Folz’s excellent treatment of the letter in Le Couronnement Impérial de Charlemagne (Paris, 1964), pp. 136–8, followed by Wallace-Hadrill, Frankish Church, p. 186; and note that Folz’s ‘propos lourds de sens’ is not well-rendered by the English edition’s (London, 1974; p. 114) ‘weighty words upon’. 81 ‘Inwardly to fortify [the Church] with our confession of the catholic faith’ is the translation offered by Loyn and Percival, Reign of Charlemagne, p. 118 (followed by Noble, Republic of St. Peter, p. 271). This may indeed be what Alcuin/Charles is intending to convey; but it is not what the Latin says, which is most accurately rendered by P.D. King’s ‘to strengthen [the church] in knowledge of the catholic faith’: hence my reference above to ‘conscious ambiguity’. 82 ‘Explicit’ if one accepts Schatz’s interpretation of Opus Caroli I, 6 (see ‘Königliche Kirchenregierung’, pp. 360–3)—taken up with enthusiasm by Ann Freeman (Opus Caroli, ed. Freeman, p. 132, n. 2), who comments that the chapter seems not to have been included in the work as originally planned. 83 MGH SS I, p. 36. 84 Ep. no. 104: only in the larger English collection, amongst the ?Canterbury ‘formulary’ letter-group and therefore a ‘recipients’ text’. Dümmler dated it ‘796 post Apr. 18’; but content and tenor demand that it was written and sent before the Frankish Court had learnt about the Northumbrian king’s assassination (below). Allott’s excellent version (Alcuin of York, pp. 34–5) translates consacerdotes as ‘priests’: it must, however, mean ‘(fellow-)bishops’, cf. ASE 22, 108–9 and p. 104 n. 38.

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which he defined subsequently as the fratres et consacerdotes who were bearing gifts to back up the royal requests for prayers. These were specified as: for the king himself; for ‘the stability of his kingdom and likewise for the extension (dilatatione) of the Christian name’— the former phrase common enough in royal diplomas, the latter going back at least to Augustine, but both occurring here apparently for the first time in Alcuin’s writings; and lastly, ‘for the soul of the [or ‘our’?] most blessed father Pope Hadrian’. The writer’s serious doubts about how his letter would be received by the bishops of the patria on which he had recently turned his back, and perhaps unease about particular requests, are suggested by its unusually elaborate address-clause, ‘to the most holy and revered bishops of Britain, our most dear homeland, Alcuin a humble deacon, a son of the holy church of York . . .’; and by the authenticating-clause before his Farewell, Hec ut nostra credatis, nostro sigillo subter sigillavimus.85 The last of the commemorations ordered by the dead Pope’s ‘devoted son’ was ‘an epitaph written in gold letters on marble, to be made in Francia so that he might send it to Rome to adorn the sepulchre of the supreme pontiff Hadrian’; someone (possibly Alcuin himself ) sent a similar description, with the additional detail that it was in verse, to Northumbria where it was added to the local Annals.86 A large slab of a distinctive black marble quarried in the Dinant region was brought to Aachen; within a very accomplished vine-scroll border and in a capital script that departs from ‘Classical’ norms only in its occasional ligatures and embraced letters, thirty-eight lines of elegiac distichs, composed by Alcuin, were incised.87 Whether or not other Court poets were given an opportunity to provide alternative 85 Or was this simply an imitation of royal writing-office (‘chancery’) practice (cf. DK 1 passim)? perhaps because Alcuin’s letter, together with the others to Frankish destinations that have not survived, was engrossed by its notaries? 86 MGH SS I, p. 36; ‘Northumbrian Annals’ in ps.-Symeon, HR, ed. Arnold, 2, 56–7; for an explanation of the lattter’s ante-dating to ‘794’, see above, Pt. I. 87 MGH Poet., I, pp. 113–14, but from manuscripts, the earliest Paris, BNF lat. 2773 (s. ix¾; Rheims) fol. 23; a more correct text, from the surviving inscription at St. Peter’s, Rome, ed. Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, pp. 182–3. The two major studies of the inscription are Wallach, cit., pp. 178–97 (mainly concerned with authorship and textual models); S. Scholz, ‘Karl der Grosse und das Epitaphium Hadriani. Ein Beitrag zum Gebetsgedenken der Karolinger’, Frankfurter Konzil, ed. Berndt, 1, 373–94 (interpretation). For the stone, see J. Ramackers, ‘Die Werkstattheimat der Grabplatte Papst Hadrians I’, RömQuart 59 (1964), 36–78, at 47–9; for the letter-forms see ibid., 43–5 and D. Ganz, ‘“Roman Books” reconsidered: the Theology of Carolingian Display Script’, Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West, ed. J.M.H. Smith (Leiden, 2000), pp. 297–315, at pp. 302–3.

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texts for the epitaph is not known: Theodulf ’s, which is sometimes said to have been produced ‘in competition’, may always have been intended to serve a different function.88 The skilfulness of Alcuin’s verses and the elements of originality in his language have not always been appreciated. Surprisingly, they seem to owe nothing to earlier Papal epitaphs; even the opening epithet, an all-embracing pater ecclesiae, seem unparallelled elsewhere.89 What follows is a seemingly-novel juxtaposition and linking of two themes. Having announced the epitaph’s association with Hadrian’s ‘place of rest’, the record of the dead pope’s virtues and achievements that follows, although inevitably drawing on epigraphic commonplaces and earlier Christian poetry, is unusually wide-ranging and specific, with a reference to Hadrian’s repairs to the city’s defences.90 A distich follows (vv. 15–16) proclaiming that, for the man here commemorated, death will have been not the end but ‘the door straightaway (mox) to the better life’. Hadrian, that is, is among those who, in Bede’s account of Drythelm’s vision (paraphrased in Alcuin’s ‘York poem’), ‘because they have been perfect in every word and deed and thought’ ‘come to the Heavenly Kingdom as soon as they leave the body’; while those who have practiced good works without attaining that state of perfection will await the Final Judgement in a lovely but inferior place—requies to Alcuin, paradisus to other early-Carolingian writers.91 This makes 88

Below, Princeps ecclesiae (metrically impossible after hic) is among the papal epithets in Alcuin’s letter to Leo, ep. no. 94 (p. 138); line 33’s pater optime is anticipated in Alcuin’s letter to Hadrian, ep. no. 27. Apostolicus pater of the bishop of Rome (but also of other bishops) is at least as early as Columbanus. Line 4’s pastor apostolicus is used by Alcuin of other popes in his carmina (Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, p. 183); in Opus Caroli, however, it is exclusively a term for Peter: see ed. Freeman, p. 649 (Index), s.v. Does the absence of echoes of other Papal epitaphs mean that there was no sylloge of inscriptions among the books at the Aachen palace in 796? compare Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, pp. 194–6. 90 V. 13, Doctrinis opibus muris erexerat arces/. . . inclyta Roma: not really comparable with ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, lines 19–20, Hanc Romana manus muris et turribus altam/ fundavit, which Godman suggested might be an echo of I Mcc 4.60, et aedificaverunt . . . per circuitum muros altos et turres firmas. For Hadrian’s building activity and in particular his restoration of the city-walls, compare now T.F.X. Noble, ‘Paradoxes and possibilities in the sources for Roman society in the early Middle Ages’, Early Medieval Rome, ed. Smith, pp. 55–83, esp. p. 62. For a metaphorical murus in Theodulf ’s ‘epitaph’, see below. 91 Bede, HE V 12, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 494; ‘York poem’, ed. Godman, lines 994–98 (with an unfortunate translation of caeli aulam, corresponding to Bede’s regnum caeleste, as ‘courts of Paradise’(!)). For Alcuin’s use of requies, see ‘York poem’, line 995 and epp. nos 42 (p. 86), 44 (p. 90). Compare further Bede’s second Advent 89

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possible the inscription’s distinctive second half, which breaks with convention to invoke prayers not so much for the deceased as for Charles and his subjects. Hadrian in death, that is to say, is to be what the Frankish king hopes Leo will be in life, and with greater confidence: namely, a petitioner with God in His heavenly kingdom, the consequences of which will finally be revealed when the trumpet sounds for the Last Judgement. The impressive and grandiloquent epitaph can hardly have been ready for inclusion in the baggage of Angilbert’s legation. The opening line of Theodulf ’s very different epitaph, Aurea funereum complectit littera carmen, marmora pro tunicis etc. in a later line (21) and the metaphorical murus et arma of the deceased pope suggest that the incised text was already known to him; and four lines are addressed directly to Pope Leo.92 Perhaps, when the completed epitaph was taken to Rome for display above Hadrian’s tomb in the left crossing of St. Peter’s basilica, a copy of Theodulf ’s verses accompanied it.

At the Aachen Court. Last months However many letters from Alcuin had been dispatched to Italy ahead of Angilbert’s delayed embassy and which (if any) were sent when he was already on his way,93 one that the royal legate certainly took to Rome was the very personal and emotional letter to Leo, revising and supplementing the one composed but never sent to his papal predecessor.94 The noteworthy changes in phraseology homily, where those who have been admitted directly to the Divine Presence in the company of the Apostles, martyrs and confessors are described as ‘persons of a more rigorous and perfect life’: Homil. I 2, ed. Hurst, p. 12 (lines 202–208); and the confirmatory line 28 of the epitaph, cum sanctis anima gaudeat alma Dei. The import of these verses, and the Christian doctrine of resurrection, are both seriously misrepresented by Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne, p. 192. 92 MGH Poet., I, pp. 489–90, the verses invoking Leo’s intercessions at lines 29–32. Aurea is, however, a not-uncommon first foot in early Carolingian verse: the opening line of Paul the Deacon’s epitaph for Queen Hildegard (Neff, Gedichte, no. xxvi (p. 115) is Aurea quae fulvis rutilant elementa figuris (Theodulf ’s second line is Verba tonat fulvus et lacrimosa color); and the opening line of the second prefatory poem in the psalter intended for Hadrian (Vienna, Nat. bibl. 1861) but never sent is Aurea Daviticos en pingit littera cantus. Theodulf ’s own love of works of art and precious materials is, of course, well-documented: A. Freeman, ‘Theodulf of Orleans and the Libri Carolini ’, Speculum, 32 (1957), 695–9. 93 See above. 94 Ep. no. 94: in both Tours collections, but not copied to Salzburg.

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are hardly self-explanatory, and their implications for Alcuin’s concept of Papal authority are equally unclear: among the epithets for the Pope are ‘vicar of the Apostles’ (i.e. of Peter and Paul), ‘heir of the Fathers’ (and not of Peter), and the seemingly unique ‘nourisher of the one unspotted dove’.95 Alcuin expects that the prayers and letters of exhortation of the person so characterized will keep the sheepfold secure; and he assumes that the former will be supported by angelic presences sent down from above. The Petrine power of binding and loosing is not explicitly referred to, although the postresurrection commission to Peter is, and when it comes to Alcuin’s own ‘terrible bonds of [his] sins’, it is by ‘the ecclesiastical power of apostolic authority’ that he hopes to be released. On his personal devotion to the apostolic see and on the reasons for his petitioning for forgiveness, Angilbert (the letter concludes) will have more to convey ‘by word of mouth’. Alcuin was not to learn of the pope’s response to his letter and oral pleas until he had left Aachen for Tours, perhaps indeed not until some time in 797: even then it was only from Angilbert.96 The one letter written to his friend and confidant while he was in Italy and Alcuin himself still at Aachen97 displays an almost bewildering change of mood from those addressed to the two popes and to Paulinus. He is admittedly unsettled, ‘a man all at sea’, but he is not moaning, nor whining about ‘false friends’. There is only the briefest of references to his sins, and none at all to the world at large. His acquisitive self is very much to the fore: he is hopeful that Angilbert will be on the lookout for relics and objects that will beautify churches! and he underlines his eagerness with an Ovidian tag whose authorship he knows. (It is perhaps more probable that Alcuin had taken this from some grammarian than directly from a manu95 . . . unius inmaculatae columbae nutritor. Columba for ‘the Church’ is unusual, but dictionaries are misleading in suggesting that it only occurs (much) later: it originates in the ‘Song of Songs’ and its allegorical exegesis: Ct. 6.8(9), Una est columba mea perfecta mea, interpreted by Alcuin (PL 100, col. 658B) as Sancta videlicet et universalis per totum orbem Ecclesia. Its qualifying by inmaculata is, however, without parallel anywhere, although an equally unorthodox usage is Sexta die creatus est homo de INMACU-LATA TERRA in ep. no. 81. More orthodox is Alcuin’s expression of the hope that the York clergy will remain inmaculatos in conspectu Dei in ep. no. 48. 96 Ep. no. 125. Alcuin’s words are unambiguous: qui [sc. Angilbertus] revertens valde a vestrae auctoritatis almivola pietate hanc meam petitionem benignissime susceptam asseruit. The adj. almivolus is a very recent coining, not certainly recorded before Alcuin, and it failed to establish itself. 97 Ep. no. 97: in both Tours collections.

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script of Ovid’s poems; but the latter is not entirely excluded.)98 But this prompts him to a comment on his own playfulness, with a trope that is surely not of his own coining but has not so far been found elsewhere, Paululum propter refectionem animi rethorica lusi lepiditate, before he reverts to his ‘wrinkled brow’ and need for prayers.99 That fears for his own future in Heaven were still much on his mind is indeed clear from his circular letter to ‘the bishops of Britain’.100 It is apparent from later correspondence that his concern about the York church had also not diminished. But if this was matched by concern for the Northumbrian kingdom at large, it is not obviously reflected in letters that were ‘registered’ nor in the rare later allusions—conceivably, because he was conscious that it had been ineffective. The obvious implication of a letter of 796/7 to the exiled Osbald, king for less than a month in 796, in which Alcuin recalls writing to him ante biennium, is that no correspondence had been exchanged in the intervening period; a letter to King Eardwulf who followed him (below) refers to ‘ancient friendship’ but no previous correspondence;101 and while Alcuin’s fear of a simonaical election may be an implicit judgement on King Æthelred, other explanations are obviously possible. A letter from the Frankish king to the Mercian King Offa at the very end of his life, frequently cited for its references to visiting English traders and to objects of trade,102 must on stylistic grounds be credited either to Alcuin or to an attentive disciple at the Aachen court. If the latter, was it only written after Alcuin’s departure? if the former, what is its chronological relationship with other letters of Alcuin’s and in particular with his circular letter to the bishops of Britain and with the last of his own letters to Offa (below)? Unlike earlier letters in the king’s name, it is not included in the ‘Tours collections’, but is the last item—whether as an afterthought or as 98 The ?Court-connected author of the poem Fidolio fratri suo (Sancti Columbani Opera, ed. Walker, pp. 192–6, falsely ascribing it to Columbanus of Bobbio) may have known the Ars amatoria; and a few years later Modoin, whose bye-name was Naso, had probably read several of the poet’s works. 99 Dictionaries and lexica do not give any example of lepiditas earlier than the fifteenth century! Allott offers the neat translation: ‘This was just a bit of verbal fun for light relief ’. 100 And from some of the letters to Paulinus and others, if they belong to 796 here rather than the previous year. 101 Ep. no. 109, ep. no. 108: both only in the ‘personal’ collection. 102 Above, Ch. 1.

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a much later addition—in the main English collection. Offa is again addressed by Charles as ‘brother’, but the preceding royal title is rex Francorum et Langobardorum ac patricius Romanorum, not . . . et defensor sanctae Dei ecclesiae.103 The text of the letter shares with earlier ones an ability to adapt Alcuin’s epistolary forms and style to the occasion as well as to the nominal author. Typically, it does not include a single Biblical quotation, although it has one generalized citation of Augustine, on prayers for the dead; and phrases such as lucra sectantes non religioni servientes have a characteristically Alcuinian ring. It departs (probably) from standard writing-office practice when it assures Offa of the royal protectio et patrocinium enjoyed by legitimate traders; it insists, however, that they are liable to the regular tolls.104 Less clear than we would wish, not least because of the letter-writer’s ambiguous tense-usage, is a remarkable passage about ‘the priest Odberht’—involuntarily priested, if (as is probable) he is the Eadberht who a few months later seized the vacant Kentish throne—and other exiles from Mercia whom the Frankish king had taken under ‘the wings of his protection’: it appears to be saying, however, that Odberht had already been in Rome (invoking the late Pope Hadrian’s help?) and was about to be sent back there (Romam diregimus) with his fellow-exiles for final judgement by the Pope in their disputes with both Offa and the archbishop of Canterbury, who were in different ways their superiors.105 The letter reports that royal gifts of vestments have 103

Ep. no. 100. For the address-clause, compare ep. no. 85 (certainly composed by Alcuin), and the comments of Wolfram, Intitulatio, 1, 242 and Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, p. 116 n. 78. 104 Patrocinium was historically, and still in the one capitulary of Charles’s in which the term occurs (MGH Capit. I, p. 158, of ?803), the protective authority exercised over a manumitted slave or serf or over a freeman who has put himself under another person. The protective authority of Frankish monarchs over advenae etc. was almost certainly mundeburdio or protectio et defensio: see, e.g., Epist. select., 1, ed. Tangl, no. 22 (pp. 37–8), for Boniface, and Louis the Pious’s Constitutio de Hispanis, MGH Capit., I, p. 261 (no. 132) (based on a lost diploma of Charlemagne?); further, F.-L. Ganshof, ‘L’étranger dans la monarchie franque’, Société Jean Bodin, 10 (1958), pp. 5–36, esp. pp. 24–31 and 34. 105 It begins De Roma rediens, pro Dei amore ut referre solet peregrinare volens, non vos accusare veniens and continues eum cum ceteris exulibus . . . Romam diregimus. That the concluding verb cannot be, as it is commonly translated, a past perfect has been pointed out elsewhere (ASE 22, 111 n. 63); but the problem of the string of present participles remains. Volens is evidently present tense; but both veniens and rediens are surely instances of the common usage in Eccl. Lat., and particularly in the Vulgate NT (a good example is Acts 20.11, Ascendens autem . . .) by which they ‘denote action which took place before the action of the main verb’: it is hardly permissible to suppose (as do Whitelock, Allott and others) that rediens refers to a future

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been sent to the episcopal sees of both Mercia and Northumbria, ‘in alms for Pope Hadrian’, whose soul should be prayed for (‘not that there is any doubt that it is already in the Place of Rest’—a phrase that can be used as an argument both for and against Alcuin’s authorship); and that treasures from the Avar hoard have been sent both to ‘the metropolitan cities’ and to Offa himself.106 Whether Alcuin or a disciple had composed the letter to Offa, it is likely that it was sent either simultaneously with Alcuin’s circular later to the British bishops or not very much later, but in any case before King Æthelred of Northumbria’s assassination on 18 or 19 April 796 became known at Aachen. The dreadful news, which would presumably have reached the Palace some time in May, had been conveyed (as Alcuin records when writing to Offa shortly afterwards) in a letter picked up by Frankish messengers who had visited the Mercian Court on their way back from Scotia—probably Ireland proper, although Dalriada and/or Iona cannot be excluded.107 The address-clause of Alcuin’s letter, as in almost all private ones, names the addressee first, and the Mercian king’s ‘style’ is distinct from that used in letters composed in the name of the Frankish king. Offa (who may never have received the letter, since he died, apparently non-violently, at the end of July) is, however, immediately assured what a good friend he action. Allott’s ‘in accordance with their vow’ is surely far too weak for quo [sc. archiepiscopo] se . . . voto constrinxerunt: the semantic range of constringere in the capitularies centres on ‘coercion’, ‘compulsion’, ‘subjection to the authority of another’ (MLWB s. v.); the one example of the reflexive is, perhaps significantly, nisi qui se monachi voto constrinxerit in the Salzburg archidiocesan synods a few years later (MGH Capit., 1, 228 (no. 112, c. 20), which has an exact parallel in a letter from Alcuin to the Jarrow congregation, ep. no. 286 (. . . servis Dei qui monachicae vitae voto se constrincxerunt). Whether the authority/jurisdiction which Odberht and the others had previously acknowledged was ecclesiastical or secular remains unclear. 106 Although Alcuin used requies of the intermediate place (or state) for the souls of the good awaiting the Last Judgement, he supposed in his epitaph for Hadrian that the deceased Pope had been admitted directly to the Divine Presence: above, pp. 460–1 and n. 91. 107 Assassination on 18/19 April: HR ed. Arnold, 2, 57, ASC ‘D’ and ‘E’, s.a. 794. Alcuin’s letter: ep. no. 101 (in Tib. only, from which William of Malmesbury made extracts—good evidence that it reached England, even if after Offa’s death), Engl. transl. by Whitelock, EHD.2, pp. 849 ff. (no. 198); the content badly mis-represented by Kirby, Earliest English Kings, p. 155. Elsewhere Alcuin uses Hibernia, rather than Scotia, of the country, although Scotti of its people: see epp. nos 87 and 280; but Scotia occurs in the ?contemporary lemma of ep. no. 7 in Tib., which here, however, could be North Britain if it is not northern Ireland). AU. s.a. 795 = 796, ed. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, p. 250, records Offa rex bonus Anglorum moritur.

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has in King Charles: ‘he has often spoken of you to me in a loving and trusting way’! He had been preparing to send legates to Rome to get a judgment from the Pope, in association with the archbishop of Canterbury, in the matter of the Mercian exile Odberht?Eadberht, and gifts were likewise due to be sent to Offa and to his bishops, with requests for prayers for himself and for the pope (Leo).108 Furthermore, he had actually put in the hands of other messengers similar gifts and letters for King Æthelred, when those returning from Britain arrived at the Court. Exploding with anger, Charles took his gifts back and cursed the unfaithful Northumbrians: which enabled Alcuin to claim—in characteristic language—that if he had not intervened the Frankish king would have withdrawn every favour and done every evil to that people that he could (quicquid eis boni abstrahere potuisset et mali machinare iam fecisset).109 But it also enabled Alcuin to decide that he had no future in his native country, and to combine admiration with admonition in addressing the king of Mercia and his family. That the letter brought from the Mercian Court rightly attributed the assassination to Northumbrian seniores populi is established by two later entries in the ‘Northumbrian Annals’, recording that two years later the same men tried unsuccessfully but bloodily to kill another king: Duke Wada subsequently fled, Duke Aldred (Ealdred) remained, to be killed by ‘a faithful dependent’ of the late King Æthelred a year later (799).110 Of all this, it should be noted, contemporary and later Frankish annals report absolutely nothing. The assassination, like the sack of Lindisfarne, prompted other letters from Alcuin, but only (it appears) to a restricted group of the dead king’s female kinsfolk.111 One went to his mother Ætheldrutha, with whose daughter Alcuin had possibly travelled to Italy in 780/81, another and perhaps a second also, to Æthelred’s sister-in-law (Offa’s daughter) Æthelburga, abbess of an unidentified Mercian religious 108 Note that the verbal forms are the present tenses dirigit and transmittit, compared with direxit etc. in the next section. Odberht’s name does not figure in Alcuin’s letter, only in the earlier one from the king. 109 The receipt of the news is also the terminus post quem for Charles’s departure for Saxony with his two sons Charles and Louis (Ann. Laur.)—but not, evidently, his daughters. 110 HR 2, ed. Arnold, 59, 62. 111 It is impossible to tell whether he was acting deliberately here: the dead king may well have left no close male relatives; but I have suggested above that from 794/5 Alcuin was corresponding with more high-born or well-connected women than previously.

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community.112 The letter to Æthelburga is primarily concerned with the recipient’s, and the writer’s, current miseries and future wellbeing, with no more than a perfunctory offer of consolation. That to the bereaved queen-mother is properly an epistola consolatoria; and unless—as is not absolutely excluded—a letter in Alcuin’s ‘personal’ collection addressed to an anonymous mater is a pre-existing formulary text rather than partially dependent on the Ætheldrutha letter,113 it is the earliest example of the genre in the extant correspondence. It owes very little, however, to the literary tradition of such letters, Christian or pre-Christian. Their basic pattern is a rehearsing of the virtues displayed in life by the person now lamented, often at considerable length, and the suggestion that the promise of a more glorious life in eternity is a reason rather for rejoicing by the bereaved.114 Alcuin can offer no such promise here: Christ is the only true consoler of the living, the only one who can save the dead by his mercifulness; and if the late king had died in sin ( forte, but it is apparent that Alcuin had little doubt), he is fortunate and his mother is also fortunate that she survives him to offer intercessions and give alms, so that Christ’s mercy extends to him! Alcuin concludes his letter with an exhortation directed to the doubly-bereaved Ætheldrutha herself, in part in quite material terms: while she still has power of disposal over her not inconsiderable possessions ( potestatem rerum tuarum: as a royal widow, rather than as abbess?), she should be distributing them in a fitting way, to her own eternal benefit.115 What became of her is indicated by another letter, 112 Epp. nos 105 (preserved only in the St.-Amand book S ), 102, 103. But the last of these is very different in tone from the letter addressed to Æthelburga by name (for her identification, see above, p. 444), and it is not clear to me that the dilectissima domina to whom Alcuin wished his greetings to be conveyed is the widowed Æthelfleda; in ep. no. 105 it is the king’s mother who is fortunately superstes. For the daughter in Italy, see above, p. 332 (ch. 3) and n. 6; for ep. no. 106, see next note. 113 Ep. no. 106: but if in huius tempestatis miseria quae nuper nostram turbavit gentem is a reference to troubles following the assassination, it is necessarily of very recent composition. 114 The Early- and High-mediaeval tradition of consolatio and its forms of literary expression has been exhaustively explored by P. von Moos, Consolatio: Studien zur mittellateinischen Trostliteratur über den Tod und zum Problem der christlichen Trauer, 4 vols. (Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften, 3; Munich, 1971–72): for Alcuin’s letters, see esp. ‘Darstellungsband’ (4), pp. 105–9; but note that my ‘reading’ of the individual letters is often very different from his. An excellent study of a major Patristic epistola consolatoria is J.H.D. Scourfield, Consoling Heliodorus. A Commentary on Jerome Letter 60 (Oxford, 1993); Alcuin knew and used this particular letter later. 115 Is ep. no. 105’s non illum doleas amissum sed tibi in requiem gaudeas praemissum an

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which Dümmler supposed was written in her son’s lifetime but which almost certainly belongs to the end of the century: here she is revealed as the head of a ‘double monastery’—whether one sustained by her own former possessions or long established (or both) is not clear— and ‘steward of the Lord’s estate’.116 No extant letter is addressed to the murdered king’s wife, and the other letters in this group suggest that none was written. In Alcuin’s letter to her sister, Abbess Æthelburga, he advised her to encourage the widowed queen, whom he does not name, likewise to serve Christ in a religious community, ‘so that worldly woe may be a spur to lasting joy’.117 In the midst of his demonstrable concern with events in Northumbria and his claim that they engaged the Frankish king also, Alcuin received a letter from Bishop Arn—on the Wednesday after Pentecost, i.e. 25 May, as he uncharacteristically records—to which he responded with the minimum of delay.118 He is not so specific on where he is writing from, but in spite of the incidental reference to himself as being among the matriculares (sic) who pray for Arn and his work,119 it is reasonably clear that Alcuin is still at the Aachen palace: because of a lack of obvious parallels to key phrases, his Latinity although syntactically sound is irritatingly obscure; but it appears that the king (who is on the point of leading a punitive expedition into Saxony) and his counsellors have just decided that the bishop of Salzburg should accompany the Bavarian and Alamannian army, intended to link up with Pippin’s from Italy for the decisive attack on the Avars, and begin the work of mission in the region north of the River Drau. Alcuin’s wording characteristically suggests that he would like Arn

echo of Jerome, as in e.g. epist. 79, 1.3 mortem . . . sic tulit ut eum profectum crederet non amissum? compare Alcuin’s ep. no. 103, semper amantes profectum illius ad salutem anime sue etc. There is little justification for linking ep. no. 105’s latro qui in scelere suo suspensus est cum Christo, sed in misericordia salvatus est Christi with Jerome’s epist. 60, 3.2: Alcuin here is closer to, although not quoting, the NT accounts of the Passion. Note that none of these letters seeks the suffrages of the Virgin Mary: even a phrase such as habet bona mater Christum consolatorem pro filio (p. 153) did not prompt an ‘appositive’ reference to Mary (mother of God) as, e.g., consolatrix, a term used later (with afflictorum) in a long prayer included in the Winchester book of c. 1060, London BL Arundel 60, printed Barré, Prières Anciennes, pp. 140–2. 116 Ep. no. 79, in T but not in K. 117 Ep. no. 102 (p. 149). 118 Ep. no. 107; preserved only in copies—often careless ones—of the ‘recipient’s text’. 119 In the address-clause of letters written ca. 801–3, Alcuin several times describes himself as matricularius (S. Martini ): epp. nos 220, 221, 222, etc.

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to believe that he had influenced the royal decision.120 But while his letter to Paulinus the previous year, when he expected him to lead the mission, had been richly rhetorical, the body of this to Arn is by contrast thoroughly practical with a solid Biblical base. ‘For a long time [the Avar] kingdom was stable and strong’, he remarks—an unexpected judgement, perhaps in implicit contrast with his own. Now that the opportunity of conversion has presented itself, Alcuin was concerned that it should not be thrown away; the bishop was being sent to respond to the Avar legation that had sued for peace, although with a protective expeditionary force. ‘Preach the Gospel, not reach out for tithes’ is his earnest recommendation, with an allusion to a remark ostensibly made by the apostle Paul (in fact in the falsely-attributed Letter to the Hebrews) that it is necessary for infants to be fed on milk until they have have grown enough to take solid food;121 the imposing of tithes, which we ourselves resent, and was imposed on Saxons right from the start as a ‘mandate of God’, has already turned them from the Christian faith. It is possible that a letter addressed to the king and his bishops on the right and wrong ways of ‘converting’ the defeated Avars was also composed and sent before Alcuin left Aachen; but it is more likely that it belongs with others written not long after his move to St. Martin’s at Tours. A very personal letter addressed to Alcuin’s ‘dearest son’ Damoetas, i.e. Archbishop Riculf of Mainz, evidently was written while he was still at the Palace (ego . . . remaneo domi ) and the king and most of his court were away in Saxony. He is alarmed at the risks Riculf would be running, but hopeful that his Christian conduct and a watchful ‘angel of the Lord’ will ensure his safe return. To add to his misery all his younger friends and disciples are away somewhere—among them, Angilbert in Italy, Candidus back in 120 Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum, ed. Wolfram (1979), c. 6, as expounded ibid., pp. 105–7, and idem, Salzburg, Bayern, Österreich (Vienna-Munich, 1995), pp. 285–7: but Wolfram cannot be right in asserting (Salzburg, p. 286) that Arn’s letter went to Tours. It seems to me that Alcuin’s Nec me spes fefellit consilii nec societatis cooperatio retardavit is sense-linked with the following Vestrum [mss. vester] vero iter ad probandum rei veritatem modo in praesentia dispositum est (Dümmler starts a new paragraph with Vestrum). But whether the words societatis cooperatio have the sense of a collective decision (or action) of the Court-circle is, I acknowledge, very debatable. 121 Hbr 5.12–13, on which see Alcuin’s own (Chrysostom-derived) exegesis, PL 100, cols 1055D–1056A, and especially the passage Nunc autem tales facti sunt ut infantes, quibus prima elementa litterarum traduntur ad legendum; dum illorum fuit fortes esse in fide et alacres in scientia, ad percipiendum solidum sapientiae cibum qui est perfectorum, nunc facti sunt etc.

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Britain—or ill, or both. Military victory and safe return will bring cheer; but of an increase of faith among the Saxons there is not a word.123 By the time that letters written in the late spring/early summer of 796 would have reached their intended recipients, those to England conveyed perhaps by the greatly-trusted Candidus, Alcuin was probably no longer resident at the Palace. Like the royal widows, he had been ‘monasticized’, depriving him of the friendships (and their converse), resources and able pupils that he had latterly enjoyed at the Aachen court. In the very different and initially apparently unwelcome setting of his new home, his correspondence may well have served a deepened psychological need. Yet the continuities in his life are as recognisable as the discontinuities. When he wrote to King Charles from Tours in the winter of 796(–7) he declared: In the morning, when my studies shared the vigour of youth, I sowed in Britain. Now, with my blood growing cold, in the evening as it were, I do not cease to sow in France. To me in my broken state of health, there is solace in the sentiment of St. Jerome, “Almost all the physical virtues change in old men and, with the increase of wisdom alone, other characteristics decrease;

and a little later on, Old age in those who equipped their youth with honourable skills becomes more learned with time, more expert with experience, wiser with the lapse of years, and reaps the sweet fruit of past studies.124

Alcuin here, like Jerome before him, was making claims for the ageing and aged which have not readily been conceded in recent decades. He was also suggesting that neither 796 nor 786 had marked a fundamental change of direction: that however much knowledge he acquired, whether of the secular world and its affairs or of books and ideas, the purpose to which it was consciously directed and the use made of it, even in the face of failure, remained constant.125 123 Ep. no. 25, dated ‘794?’ by Dümmler, doubtless because Homerus Italiam . . . recessit. 124 Ep. no. 121 (p. 178). 125 An earlier version of this chapter was read by Prof. T.F.X. Noble (Notre Dame), who made a number of critical comments of which I was happy to take account. A partially-revised version, without the supporting documentation, is to be found in my ‘Unsettled at Aachen: Alcuin between Frankfurt and Tours’, in Court Culture in the Early Middle Ages, The Proceedings of the York Alcuin Conference, ed. C. Cubitt (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 17–38. I am grateful to the publishers for agreeing to the near-simultaneous publication of the two slightly different versions.

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495

INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS CITED

Antwerp, Musée Plantin-Moretus M. 17. 4 (176): 221 n. 276, 279 n. 79 Autun, Bibliothèque municipale 107 (S.129): 221 n. 274 Bamberg, Stadtbibliothek Msc. Bibl. 1 (Alcuin Bible): 20, 107 and n. 268 Msc. Patr. 17 (B. II. 10) (De laude Dei ): 177, 178 n. 141, 181 n. 154, 185 n. 167, 187 n. 173, 193, 201 n. 218, 261 n. 29, 262 n. 30, 266 n. 42, 277 n. 78, 278 n. 78 Basel, Öffentl. Bibliothek F. III 15 a: 274 n. 67 F. III 15 f: 274 n. 67 Basel, Univ.-Bibliothek B. VI. 3: 108 n. 270 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Diez B.Sant.66: 358 n. 85, 359 n. 87, 370 n. 122, 406 n. 237, 454 n. 69 Grimm 132.1: 256 Hamilton 132: 350 n. 64 Hamilton 553: 329 lat. 4o 404: 113 n. 282 Phillips 1784: 289 n. 113 Phillips 1831 (128): 15 n. 31, 284 n. 100, 288 n. 108, 289 n. 113, 292, 360 Phillips 1869 (Rose 131): 156 n. 84, 169 n. 118, 205 n. 228, 207 n. 234, 216, 217, 239, 250–1, 271 n. 58, 284 and n. 100, 285 n. 101, 292–3, 302 n. 155, 313 n. 191, 315 n. 196, 320 n. 217, 322–5, 334 and n. 11 Bern, Burgerbibliothek 123: 9 n. 15 165: 280 n. 87, 281, 282 n. 93 212: 372 289: 169 n. 118 Boulogne, Bibliothèque municipale 58: 95 n. 234 Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 1650: 253 n. 5 2839–42: 378, 379 n. 148 4433–38: 406 n. 237 5354–61 (1352): 39 n. 85

8860–67: 203 n. 221 10127–10144: 194 n. 195, 195 n. 198 II 2572: 244 n. 345 Budapest, National Szechenyi Library Clmae. 1: 46 n. 103 Clmae. 316: 6 n. 7 Cod. lat. 441: 256 Cambrai, Bibliothèque municipale 162: 211 n. 244, 326 n. 237 163: 211 n. 244, 326 n. 237 164: 209 n. 238 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 139: 16 n. 32 173: 263 n. 32 190: 172 n. 127 197: 188 Cambridge, Trinity College O.2.24 (1128): 209 n. 237 O.9.22 (1434): 122 O.10.16 (1468): 81 n. 195, 123 Cambridge, University Library Add. 3578: 22 n. 50 Kk. 4. 6 (2021): 152 n. 73 Kk. 5. 16 (Moore Bede): 303 n. 160 359 Ll. 1. 10 (Book of Cerne): 113 n. 281, 128 n. 2, 147 n. 59, 162, 178–9 and n. 144, 181, 183 n. 158, 201, 210, 211, 239 n. 330, 272 n. 59, 273, 328, 329 Cava, Biblioteca della Badia doc. 3 pt. iii: 36 n. 79 Chicago, Newberry Library Fragment 15 [N]: 69 Cologne, Dombibliothek 83 II: 207 n. 234, 216 n. 260, 284 and n. 100, 323 n. 228 103: 288 n. 110, 289 nn. 111, 112, 292 106: 9 n. 15, 107 n. 270, 178 n. 142, 182 n. 155, 322 n. 222 212: 231 n. 309, 423 n. 292 213: 231, 232, 350 Copenhagen, Kong. Bibl. Ny. Kgl. Saml. 58 8o: 234 n. 319

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   

Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibl. A.145b ( g): 348 n. 55 Durham, Cathedral Library B.II.30 (Durham Cassiodorus): 206 n. 230, 256–7, 258 B.II.35: 216 n. 261 Durham, Ushaw College Library 44: 265 n. 40 Düsseldorf, Hauptstaatsarchiv (Universitätsbibliothek) Fgm. K 16 Z 4–2: 268 n. 46 Fgm. K 16 Z3/1 (Cassiodorus): 256 Fgm. K 19 Z 11–2: 268 n. 46 Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek 182: 189 n. 181 191: 426 n. 302, 429 326: 246 n. 351 El Escorial, Real Biblioteca del Monasterio San Lorenzo B.IV.17 (De laude Dei ): 177, 181 n. 154, 187 n. 173, 193 n. 193, 201 n. 218, 261 n. 29, 266 n. 42, 277 n. 78 R.II.18: 55 n. 126 Épinal, Bibliothèque municipale 72 (Épinal Glossary): 223 n. 281 149: 226 n. 291 Erfurt, Wissenschaftliche Allgemeinbibliothek Amplon F. 10: 279 n. 84 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana Amiatino 1 (Codex Amiatinus): 132, 180, 187, 270, 329, 353, 408, 409 pl. XVI, 39: 252 n. 2, 360 n. 91 pl. XXXIX, 32: 454 n. 70 Geneva, Bibliothèque publique et universitaire 50: 361 n. 92 Ghent, Rijksuniversiteit Bibliotheek 224: 394 n. 193 Glasgow, University Library Hunterian Collection T.4.2 (85): 16 n. 32 Gotha, Forschungs- und Landesbibliothek Membr. I. 58: 377 n. 144 Göttingen, Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Theol. 231: 198 n. 209 Graz, Universitätsbibliothek 790: 123 807: 203 n. 221

The Hague, Kon. Bibl. 70.H.7: 36 n. 79, 198 n. 207, 230 n. 305 Halle, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Qu. cod. 76: 257 n. 21 Ivrea, Biblioteca capitolare CVI (33): 195 n. 197 Karlsruhe, Bädische Landesbibliothek Aug. XVIII: 23 n. 51, 403 n. 227 Kassel, Gesamthochschulbibliothek Mss.-Anhang 19, 1c: 113 n. 281 Theol. fo. 21: 266 n. 41 Klosterneuburg, Stiftsbibliothek 848: 55 n. 126, 56 n. 130 Laon, Bibliothèque municipale 122 bis: 6 n. 7 273: 278 n. 80 279: 278 n. 80 Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit Voss. Lat. F. 4: 260 n. 26, 283 n. 98 Voss. Lat. F. 74: 272 n. 60 Voss. lat. F. 111: 221 n. 274 Voss. lat. Q. 20: 379 n. 148 Voss. lat. Q. 69: 285 n. 101 London, British Library Add. 15222: 172 n. 127 Add. 37518: 206 Arundel 60: 468 n. 115 Cotton Faustina B.iv: 88 nn. 215, 216, 188 n. 178 Cotton Faustina B.ix: 16 n. 32 Cotton Otho A.i: 295 n. 134 Cotton Tiberius A.ix: 22 n. 50 Cotton Tiberius A.xv [A1] [Tib] [CC, Canterbury] [‘personal collection’, English]: 48 n. 109, 53 n. 122, 63, 64 n. 153, 72 and n. 172, 78 n. 186, 81–101, 102, 123–4, 140 n. 36, 152 n. 73, 176 n. 139, 179, 240 n. 334, 265 n. 39, 277 n. 77, 304 n. 163, 310 n. 185, 314 n. 193, 324, 329, 331 n. 1, 363, 364 n. 106, 365 n. 108, 366 n. 110, 367 and n. 115, 370, 390 n. 186, 392 n. 191, 395 n. 198, 396 n. 203, 410 and n. 251, 412 n. 253, 418, 432 n. 1, 442, 458 n. 84, 464, 432 n. 1, 465 n. 107 Cotton Tiberius B.v: 335 n. 13 Cotton Vespasian A.i (Vespasian Psalter): 186, 187

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    Cotton Vespasian A.xiv [A2] [Vesp] [‘personal collection’, English]: 48 n. 109, 54 n. 123, 72, 81, 82, 83 n. 202, 84–6, 87 nn. 212, 214, 88 and n. 217, 89, 90, 91–3, 94 n. 233, 95, 96–7, 98–101, 102, 140 n. 36, 152 n. 73, 176 n. 139, 179, 185 n. 165, 188 n. 178, 240 n. 334, 304 n. 163, 310 n. 185, 314 n. 193, 324, 328, 329, 331 n. 1, 338 n. 22, 347 n. 49, 364 n. 106, 367, 392 n. 191, 395 n. 198, 396 n. 203, 410 and n. 251, 412 n. 253, 418, 432 n. 1, 442, 458 n. 84, 464 Cotton Vespasian B.vi: 106 n. 264, 209 n. 237, 241 n. 336, 242 Cotton Vitellius A.xii: 135 n. 22 Egerton 609: 187 Egerton 1046: 108 n. 271, 226 n. 293, 258, 259 Harley 208 [H] [St.-Denis] [‘personal collection’, English]: 38 n. 84, 39 n. 85, 51 n. 115, 54 n. 123, 61 n. 142, 64 n. 152, 75–6, 77–8, 79, 85, 86, 87, 101 n. 254, 102, 109, 110 n. 273, 127, 138 n. 29, 184, 183 n. 159, 185 n. 167, 190–1, 204 n. 224, 242 n. 339, 243, 245 n. 349, 271 n. 58, 299 n. 146, 314 nn. 193, 194, 195, 340, 342, 363 n. 100, 369, 396 n. 203, 434 n. 7, 451 n. 63, 463 n. 101 Harley 633: 152 n. 73 Harley 1775: 188 Harley 2767: 285, 286 n. 104 Harley 2790: 106–7 and n. 268 Harley 2793: 185 Harley 2965 (Book of Nunnaminster): 178 n. 143, 201 n. 217, 210, 329 Harley 3865: 407 n. 238 Harley 4688: 230 n. 305 Harley 5915: 259 n. 25 Harley 7653: 178 n. 143, 203, 329 Royal 13.A.vi: 16 n. 32 Royal 13.A.xi: 290 n. 113 Royal 2.A.xx (Royal prayer-book): 128 n. 2, 178 n. 143, 186, 193, 194 n. 194, 201, 210, 272 n. 59 Royal 2.E.vii: 11 n. 18 Royal 5.B.iii: 78 n. 188 Royal 5.E.xix: 11 n. 18 Royal 6.B.viii [R]: 80 n. 192, 123 Royal 8.E.xv [K1, K‘3’/K] [St.-

497

Vaast] [‘basic Tours collection’], 47 n. 106, 48 n. 106, 53 n. 121, 59 n. 135, 60 n. 142, 61 nn. 142, 64, 83–4, 91 n. 223, 94, 97 n. 239, 99, 100, 143, 144, 62 and n. 147, 64–5, 65 n. 154, 66–7, 68–70, 70 n. 167, 73, 76, 78, 83–4, 86, 87, 88, 89, 89 n. 219, 92 n. 227, 93, 99, 102, 127, 176 n. 139, 304 n. 163, 331 n. 1, 363, 365 n. 108, 400 n. 217, 403 n. 228, 438 n. 19, 446 n. 44, 449 n. 55, 468 n. 116 London, Lambeth Palace Library [L] 59: 38 218: 68–9 419: 22 n. 50 Lorsch-Bamberg (medical texts): 398 n. 207 Lucca, Biblioteca Capitolare 490: 362 Madrid, Archivo Histórico Nacional B. 1007: 36 n. 79 Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional 19 [A 16]: 36 n. 79 Melk, Stiftsbibliothek 412: 31 n. 71 Merseburg, Dombiblliothek 105: 105 n. 261 Metz, Grand Séminaire 1: 24 n. 53 Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana A. 135 inf.: 261 n. 27 C. 5 inf. (Antiphonary of Bangor): 193 n. 193, 200, 200 n. 216 C. 74 sup.: 373 n. 131 C. 243 inf.: 9 n. 15 H. 150 inf.: 289 n. 112, 292 I. 89 sup.: 48 n. 106, 183–4 n. 161, 387 n. 175 M. 12 sup.: 207 n. 234, 216 n. 260, 239, 250–1, 271 n. 58, 284 n. 100, 302 n. 155, 323 n. 228, 324 n. 231, 361 n. 93 S. 17 sup.: 6 n. 7 Monte Cassino, Abbazia 3: 290 n. 113 Montpellier, Bibliothèque Universitaire (Faculté de Médicine) 55: 121 141: 5 n. 6 412: 245 n. 346, 309 n. 182 H. 48: 288 n. 110

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Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm. 210: 361 n. 92 Clm. 4650 [B]: 53 n. 121, 54 n. 122, 74, 74 n. 176, 109 n. 272, 123 Clm. 5508: 368 n. 116 Clm. 6310: 355 n. 79 Clm. 6382: 121 Clm. 6404: 252 n. 2 Clm. 6407: xi, 10 n. 16, 105 n. 262 Clm. 6411: 252 n. 2 Clm. 6424: 19 n. 42 Clm. 6433: 180 n. 148 Clm. 13561: 54 n. 123 Clm. 13581 [D] [Tours-St. Emmeram]: 10 n. 16, 71–4, 92 n. 227, 98 n. 244, 432 n. 1 Clm. 14391: 73 n. 174 Clm. 14445: 355 n. 79, 387 Clm. 14447: 107 n. 270 Clm. 14468: 67, 68 n. 163, 429 Clm. 14614: 9 n. 15, 72 Clm. 14743 [S1*]: 53 n. 121, 53–4 n. 122, 54, 55 n. 127, 56, 67 n. 161, 79 n. 190, 109 n. 272, 182 n. 155, 455 n. 72 Clm. 15817: 56 n. 128 Clm. 18375: 375 n. 137 Clm. 18628: 122 Clm. 19437: 222 n. 278 Clm. 22053: 303 n. 160 Clm. 28135: 429 Munich, Hauptsaatsarchiv Raritätensel. no. 108: 215 n. 258 Münster, Universitätsbibliothek Fragmentensammlung IV. 8: 205 n. 227 Namur, Bibliothèque municipale 53: 386 n. 171 Orléans, Bibliothèque municipale 65: 5 n. 6 85 (82): 189 n. 181 Oxford, Bodleian Library Bodley 309: 291 Digby 63: 210 n. 239, 215 n. 258, 324 n. 231 Hatton 93: 6 Laud misc. 126: 385 n. 167 Laud misc. 130: 263 n. 34 Rawlinson G. 167: 188 Oxford, St. John’s College 17: 16 n. 32 97: 16 n. 32

Padua, Biblioteca Antoniana 27: 9 n. 15 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France lat. 528: 76 n. 180, 317 n. 206, 343 n. 36, 376 n. 140 lat. 943: 94 lat. 1092: 203 n. 223 lat. 1153: 273 n. 63 lat. 1572: 103 n. 258, 223 n. 281 lat. 1603: 350 n. 64 lat. 2328: 122 lat. 2384: 5 n. 6, 76 n. 180 lat. 2386: 43–4, 67 n. 163 lat. 2388: 44 n. 98 lat. 2390: 18 n. 38 lat. 2773: 459 n. 87 lat. 2777: 369 n. 118 lat. 2826 [Li]: 80 n. 192, 122, 123 lat. 2832: 122 lat. 2840: 37 n. 80, 294 n. 130 lat. 2848: 44 n. 98, 67 n. 163 lat. 2996: 78 n. 188 lat. 3244: 89 n. 219, 387 n. 175 lat. 3846: 350 n. 64 lat. 4613: 357 n. 84 lat. 4629: 122 lat. 4884: 347 n. 50 lat. 4886: 392 n. 191 lat. 4950: 259 n. 25 lat. 5577: 36 n. 78, 68 n. 163, 80, 122 lat. 7193 (Old Gelasian Sacramentary): 204 lat. 7530: 255 n. 14, 298 n. 145, 344 lat. 7539: 268 n. 47 lat. 7774A: 287 n. 106 lat. 7906: 282 n. 93, 400 n. 215 lat. 8051: 281 lat. 8093: 221 n. 274 lat. 9452: 19 n. 42 lat. 10575 (Egberht Pontifical): 233 n. 318 lat. 10837: 206, 216 n. 260 lat. 10861: 9 n. 15, 323 n. 228 lat. 11326: 221 n. 276 lat. 11711: 347 n. 52 lat. 12050: 198 n. 210 lat. 12098: 425 n. 295 lat. 12168: 263 n. 34 lat. 13013: 15 n. 31, 289 n. 111 lat. 17448: 80 n. 192 nouv. acq. lat. 1096 [H2] [St.-Denis] [‘personal collection’]: 75–6, 77–8, 79, 87, 110 n. 273, 138 n. 29,

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    183 n. 159, 189 n. 179, 242 n. 339, 243, 245 n. 349, 271 n. 58, 299 n. 146, 314 nn. 193, 194, 195, 381 n. 156, 432 n. 1 nouv. acq. lat. 1613: 122 nouv. acq. lat. 1615: 15 n. 31 Prague, Knihovna metropolitni kapituly A. CLVI: 388 n. 178 Regensburg, Staatliche Bibliothek Rat. ep. 422: 74 n. 175, 406 n. 237 Rheims, Bibliothèque municipale 8 (Index of St.-Thierry): 175 385: 67, 67–8 n. 163, 429 1395: 21–2 n. 47, 22 n. 49, 28 n. 62, 120–1 Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense 641 pt. ii: 36 n. 79 Rome, Biblioteca Vallicelliana B.6: 107 E 26: 285 n. 101 Rome, Casa Madre dei Padri Maristi s.n.: 377 n. 144, 403 n. 227 St. Gallen, Stiftsarchiv C3 B55: 62 n. 146 St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek 267: 108 n. 270 271 [K2] [St. Gallen] [‘basic Tours collection’], 11 n. 18, 48 n. 106, 61–2, 63, 64, 73, 75 n. 176, 78, 83, 84, 107, 127, 140 n. 36 St. Petersburg, Russian National Library cod. F. v. I. 7: 358 n. 86 Salisbury, Cathedral Library 38: 253 n. 5 150: 324 n. 231 Salzburg, Stiftsbibliothek St. Peter a X 3: 46 n. 103 a XI 16: 46 n. 103 Sélestat, Bibliothèque de la Ville 1: 195 n. 196 Solothurn, Zentralbibliothek S 208: 23 n. 51 Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek HB VIII 13: 23 n. 51 HB. XIV. 1: 107 n. 269 Toledo, Biblioteca capitolare 14–23: 420 n. 280 Tours, Bibliothèque municipale 42: 122

499

Trier, Stadtbibliothek 1245 (1418): 203 n. 221 Troyes, Bibliothèque municipale 1165 pt. i [T] [St.-Martin’s, Tours], 11 n. 18, 20 n. 43, 47 n. 105, 47 n. 106, 53 n. 121, 57–61, 61 n. 142, 62 n. 147, 64, 65–6, 69, 70, 73, 75 n. 176, 78, 80, 84 n. 204, 88, 89, 89 n. 219, 90–1 n. 222, 92 n. 227, 99, 101 n. 254, 102, 105 n. 263, 107, 113 n. 282, 123, 140 n. 36, 176 n. 139, 183 n. 161, 272 n. 59, 290, 291 n. 121, 304 n. 163, 314 n. 193, 331 n. 1, 345 n. 41, 387 n. 175, 400 n. 217, 403 n. 228, 418, 436 n. 15, 442, 446 n. 44, 449 n. 55, 451 n. 63, 461 n. 94, 468 n. 116 1712: 22 n. 47 1742: 183 n. 158, 201, 329 Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale G. v. 38: 200–1 n. 216 Valenciennes, Bibliothèque municipale 247 (237): 20 n. 43 395 (378): 268 n. 47 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana lat. 651: 10 n. 16 lat. 1339: 37 n. 79 lat. 3827: 41 n. 92 lat. 4951: 23 n. 51 lat. 5096: 10 n. 16 lat. 5756: 262 n. 30 lat. 6451: 23 n. 51 lat. 7172: 203 n. 223 lat. 7207: 403 n. 227, 420 Pal. lat. 57: 63 n. 149 Pal. lat. 68: 276 n. 76 Pal. lat. 243: 18 n. 36 Pal. lat. 554: 235 n. 322 Pal. lat. 556: 266 n. 42 Pal. lat. 582: 379 n. 149 Pal. lat. 1448: 220 n. 273, 287, 288 and n. 108, 361 n. 93 Pal. lat. 1449: 15 n. 31, 220 n. 273, 287, 288 nn. 108, 109, 289 n. 111 Pal. lat. 1753: 268 n. 47 Pal. lat. 1877: 63, 260 n. 25 Reg. lat. 11: 184 n. 163 Reg. lat. 69: 36 n. 78, 68 n. 163, 80 Reg. lat. 96: 76 n. 180 Reg. lat. 123: 392 n. 191

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   

Reg. lat. 124: 19 n. 40, 20, 20 n. 44 Reg. lat. 140: 108 n. 270, 330 Reg. lat. 226: 68 n. 164, 290, 291 nn. 119, 121 Reg. lat. 251: 280 Reg. lat. 272 [T*] [Rheims] [‘expanded Tours collection’], 48 n. 106, 55 n. 125, 58–9 and n. 135, 60, 61–6, 69, 70, 73, 75 n. 176, 76, 76 n. 180, 78, 78 n. 186, 79 n. 189, 80, 102, 108 n. 271, 116 n. 291, 123, 127, 189 n. 179, 272 n. 59, 290, 345 n. 41, 388 n. 178, 449 n. 55, 450 n. 59, 455 n. 73, 456 n. 77 Reg. lat. 310: 76 n. 180 Reg. lat. 316 (Old Gelasian Sacramentary): 175, 204, 205 nn. 227, 228, 206 Reg. lat. 317: 250 Reg. lat. 598: 61 n. 143 Reg. lat. 755: 320 n. 218 Reg. lat. 1040: 362 n. 97 Reg. lat. 1578: 122 Reg. lat. 2078: 122 Urb. lat. 308: 280 Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare XCI: 211 n. 244 CLXIII (150): 221 n. 274 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek lat. 89: 55 n. 126 lat. 387: 361 n. 92 lat. 430*: 18 n. 36 lat. 449 (Codex Carolinus): 117, 192 n. 191, 297, 337 n. 20, 338 nn. 20, 21, 358 n. 86, 368 n. 116, 420 n. 280, 453 n. 67 lat. 515: 439 n. 23 lat. 751: 295 n. 133 lat. 795 [S] [St.-Amand]: xi, 15 n. 31, 44–51, 52, 54 n. 123, 65, 74 n. 176, 87, 89, 94 n. 233, 97,

104 n. 259, 109, 123, 176 n. 139, 183 n. 161, 188 n. 176, 190, 280 n. 84, 302, 387 n. 175, 403 n. 228, 467 n. 112 lat. 808 [S1] [Salzburg]: 29 n. 64, 50, 52–3, 54 nn. 122, 60 n. 140, 61 n. 142, 123, 54–7, 60, 64 n. 152, 71, 72, 74, 74 n. 176, 89 n. 219, 90–1 n. 222, 92 n. 227, 99, 107, 109 n. 272, 140 n. 36, 181 n. 155, 271 n. 58, 326 n. 236, 367 n. 114, 400 n. 217, 411 n. 253, 432 n. 1, 436 n. 15, 446 n. 44, 447 n. 45, 455 n. 73 lat. 964: 46 n. 103 lat. 966: 72, 74 lat. 997: 46 n. 103 lat. 1008: 44–5 and n. 100 lat. 1190: 406 lat. 1861 (Dagulf Psalter): 184, 366 n. 108, 403 n. 227, 449, 461 n. 92 lat. 2223: 135 n. 22, 235 n. 322 Ser. nov. 3755 [S]: 44, 45–8 Warsaw, Bibl. Univ. 1: 65 n. 155 Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek cod. Helmst. 454: 337 n. 19 cod. Helmst. 496a: 379 n. 150 cod. Weissenburg 34: 359 n. 89 cod. Weissenburg 64: 272 n. 60 cod. Weissenburg 91: 194 n. 195 Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek M. p. th. f. 46: 15 n. 31 M. p. th. f. 62: 191 n. 185, 228 n. 301, 250 M. p. th. q. 2 (Cuthswith manuscript): 223 n. 280, 266 n. 41 M. p. th. q. 15: 355 n. 79 Zürich, Zentralbibliothek Rheinau 41: 265 n. 39

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501

INDEX ON ALCUIN

general as a probable agent for transmission of texts to the Continent, 282, 286, 298, 302, 359–60, 361, 404 dicta of, 9 interest in pagan literature, 378–9 King Æthelred, support of, 340 Mercian genealogies and, 242 relations with women, 466 and n. 111 relics, desire for, 462 role in development of Carolingian script, 13 his thought against Adoptionism, xviii, 118, 403–5, 419, 422–5, 429, 458, and see Adoptionism familiarity with the ‘Seven Liberal Arts’, 253 his expositio fidei of the Frankfurt synod: see creeds: Frankfurt image controversy and, 399 n. 212 in defence of the Catholic faith, 30 intellectual development of, 117–18 on alms-giving, 307, 467 on amicitia, 367–8, 369, 370 expressions of in his letters, 110–16 homoerotic language used by, 113–15 sexual orientation of, 113–14 on anchorites, 313 on baptism, 175, 387 n. 175, 453 on bishops, 381 on carnalis, 176 on confession and penance, 353, 355, 361, 386–90, 453–4, and see Index of Alcuin’s Writings under ep. no. 131 on confession, 48, 116, 176, 183, 184, 192, 211 on fasting, 245 on friendship: see amicitia on good behaviour, 364 on imitation and writing, 294 on justification, 405 and n. 233 on kingship, 47, 238, 240 n. 334, 262, 275, 276, 283, 349 and n. 58, 351,

368, 381–2, 410, 414–17, 416–17, 418, 457 and n. 78 on law, 382 on learning, 470 on life after death, 460, 463, 465 n. 106 on nobilis-liber-servus, 139 on penance, 192, 388–90, 393, 405 on praedicationis officium, 307–12 on prayer and fellowship, 430–1 on praying for those who died unrepentent, 353–4 on reciprocal prayer, 369 on simony, 454 on sin and intercessions, 467 on sin, 462 on slavery, 138–9 on the Cross as an instrument of salvation, 374 on the episcopal office, 415–16, 417–18 on the Final Judgement, 460, 465 n. 106 on the mercy of Christ, 467 on the number ‘72’ and the books of the Bible, 408–9 on the poor, 137 on the Tabernacle, 409 on the Trinity, 108 n. 270, 266, 407 n. 240, 419 on the unity of the Northumbrian church, 132 on the urbs regia, 153–4, 157 on the Virgin Mary, 405 and n. 234 on tribulatio, 176 on virtue and good behaviour, 371 Papal authority, concept of, 457 n. 79, 462 peregrinatio, concept of, 128 topography and buildings, lack of interest in, 155 his life as intermediary between King Charles and Pope Leo III, 455–6 as legate of the Northumbrian king and archbishop in Mercia, A.D. 786, 346–7

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502

  

as advisor to the mission to the Avars, 445–6, 447 n. 45 as possible successor to archbishop of York, 454 background of, non-noble origins, 306 birth date, 34 books which accompanied him to the Continent, 359, 361 cult of, 27, 28 n. 62 spurious chapel dedicated to, 27–8 n. 62 and see vitae below death of (A.D. 804), 18, 87 dispute between Charlemagne and Offa, role in, 394 English years, at York, xii, xvii, xviii, 24, 33, 34, 38 n. 83 Archbishops Egberht and Ælberht as teachers of, 172, 173, 229, 236, 243 as a member of the scola puerorum at York, 168, 170 as a member of the York cathedral community, 165–6, 168–9 at York as magister, 171 n. 123, 304–5 at York, 27, 65, 112, 118, 127–9, 164–5, 314 baptismal name of, 164 bishopric, possible offer of, 433 beginning of biblical study, 225 dreams/visions of, in vita Alcuini, 28–9 early writing exercises of, 222–3 education of, 170–3 election of the archbishop, 463 English connections during first stay in Francia, 365 n. 108, 367–9, 391 exile from, 466 family background of, 164–5 miracles of, in vita Alcuini, 27, 28 musical education of, 170, 172–3 new building at York in the late 770s, 320, 326 ordination as deacon, 30–3, 306–7, 174 return to Northumbria (A.D. 790–93), 64 n. 153, 90, 101, 104, 113, 157 n. 85, 178 n. 141, 315, 360, 365, 367, 376, 394, 396, 399, 401, 442 script used by, 223 secular or monastic background of, 165–9

supporter to King Æthelred of Northumbria (in vita Alcuini ), 318 epitaph of (now lost), 18–19, 308 n. 180, and see verse epitaph under Index of Alcuin’s works Frankish Court years (from A.D. 786), xii, xvii–xviii, 6, 13–14, 24, 27, 28, 33, 34, 38 n. 84, 102, 104, 298, 320, 331–2, 343–4, 346, 352 n. 67, 356, 396, 416, 431, 435–6, 437, 438, 445, 470 as a composer of letters in the king’s name, 436 as an ‘exile’, 315 as teacher (in the late 780s), 371, 436 bishopric in Francia, failure to obtain, 306–8 on his move to Francia, and problems with the dating of (in vita Alcuini ), 336, 338 n. 20, 337–40 Francia, return to (A.D. 793), 401, 402, 405 Frankfurt synodal acta (A.D. 794), mention of, 430 importance of Bede to, 227, 229 in contemporary annals, 14–17 inherited rights of an oratory, 152 involvement in Northumbrian politics, 398–9 legatine council (A.D. 786), present at, and leaving England with the papal legates, 339–40 Mercian monastery, possible connection with, 242 and n. 338 obit, prose record of, 121 on the death of Ælberht of York (in vita Alcuini ), 237, 238 on the grant by Charlemagne of two monasteries (in vita Alcuini ), 342 Parma, meeting with Charlemagne at, 316, 331–2, 333, 334–5, 336, 340 personal sin of, 462, 463 confession of to Pope Hadrian, 453–4 prophetic gifts of (in vita Alcuini ), 28 relations with Aachen Court, 406–7 Abbot Fulrad of St.-Denis, 317 Abbot Richbod, 371 Ælberht of York, 237–8, and see

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   the ‘York poem’ in the Index of Alcuin’s Writings Angilbert, 363 n. 99, 371, 462 Angilram of Metz, 365, 385 Archbishop Richbod, 346 Arn of Salzburg, 237, 362, 367, 398 Benedict of Aniane, 22 Charlemagne, 24–5, 29 n. 65, 46–7, 352, 368, 377 Frankish Court (A.D. 786–90), 128, 363–7 King Æthelwald Moll of Northumbria, 332 King Æthelred I of Northumbria, 332, 396 Mercian Court, 338 n. 20 Northumbria and York, 128–9 Paul the Deacon, 344 Paulinus of Aquileia, 344, 363 Peter of Pisa, 344, 345, 363 Sigwulf, 115–16 papacy, 462 Wearmouth-Jarrow, 314–15 relics and acquisitions of, 324 reputation of, 306 at the Frankish court (A.D. 789/90), 372, 390–1 contemporaneous, 13–17, 119–20 in Northumbria before his arrival at the Frankish Court, 314–16 middle years (780s), 331, 346 modern, 12–13 posthumous, 17–24 with Continental acquaintances, 318 Rome, and Francia, journey to (late 770s), with Ælberht as magister at York, 160 n. 92, 243–4, 245, 316–18, 335, 344, 358 n. 85 Rome, journey to (A.D. 780–81), and return via Parma, to obtain the pallium for Archbishop Eanbald of York, xvii, 30, 331–2, 333, 334–5, 337, 340, 357 St. Martin’s (Tours) years, xii, 27, 38, 38 n. 84, 39, 59, 65, 79, 102, 107, 155, 163 n. 101, 166, 200, 227, 264, 271, 286, 341–2, 344–5, 352 n. 67, 408, 435, 436, 439, 451 n. 63, 462, 469–70 as abbot, xviii, 14, 29, 41, 66, 139 as magister, 244–5 religious houses granted to, 341–2 vita of, Ferrières (anonymous) vita of (post-821), 9, 18, 21–2, 22 n. 49,

503

24, 25, 26, 27, 28 n. 62, 29, 30, 33, 138 n. 30, 164, 168 n. 117, 227, 229, 301 n. 151, 328, 419, 435 his liturgical world, 27, 38, 176, 210 n. 241, 353 All Saints and, 250 as exemplified in his De laude Dei, 177–9, 193–204 on antiphons (his De antiphonario), 194–9, 211, 216, 250, 251 on hymns (his De hymnis), 200–4 on mass-books, 204, 206 Bible text and, 20 n. 44 devotional prayers composed in Northumbria after he left for Francia, 211 Egberht’s Penitential and: see Egberht’s Penitential influence on, 176, 187–91 ‘Marian’ feasts and, 250 Mass-lectionary associated with, 409 ‘missal’ associated with, 211 Psalter, importance of to, 171–2, 180–6, 191, 192, 222 Psalter, type of used by, 181–6 Sacramentary of Trent and, 204 n. 225 Vigil of St. Martin and, 250 his writings, general anti-Adoptionists ‘dossier’, 35 n. 77, 67, 70, 76, 80, 196, 262, 267 and n. 44, 276 n. 72, 384, 403, 421–6, 426, 430 Bible-poems of, 406–8 calendar associated with at York, 302, and see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Vienna, Nationalbibl., lat. 795 copying and availability of, 22–3 grammatical writings of, 221 Gregorian Supplement and, 8, 12 knowledge of Vergil, 372 literary topos used by, 222 n. 277 martyrology and, 8 on acquiring relics, 246 on Ælberht of York, 236, 237–8 and n. 327, 247, 253–5 on anchorites, 313 on baptism, 212, 213 on Benedict Biscop, Ceolfrith, Bede, 227–8 on Boniface, 299 and n. 146 on Cassiodorus, 257

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504

  

on deacons, 307, 308 on doctors’ responses to pestilentiae lues, 267 on explanations of ‘Septuagesima’, etc., 244 on his lack of interest in the religious life of the Northumbrian parrochiae, 309–13 on Jerusalem, 245, 246 on King Æthelred of Northumbria, 354 n. 76, 397 on kings of Northumbria and Æthelwold Moll, 240–1 on Latin/Greek prefixes, 184 on Lindisfarne, 245, 246, 410–14, 416, 418, and see Lindisfarne, carm. ix in the Index of Alcuin’s Writings on medicine, 390 on Northumbrian pastoral work among the laity, 311 on preaching and travelling in the diocese, 311–12 on puer noster Seneca, 241 on reading aloud, 224 on Rome, 243–6 on rubus, 200 on sacramentaries, 204, 206, 211 on the computus, 219–20, 359–60 on the Court library, 359 n. 87 on the disputatio of Peter of Pisa and ‘Iulius’, 244 on the grades of acolyte and exorcist, 175 on the magister, 227 on the parochial clergy, 310–11 on the rustici, 309–10 on Vikings, 414 on virtues and vices, 330 orthography, 74 n. 176, 105–10, 272, 304 prayers associated with, 179 n. 144 quotations from the ‘Wisdom books’, 226–7 reference to the ‘Symmachan forgeries’ canons, 352 Roman churches cited in, 245 spurious attributions to, 5–11 style, general cadences and sentence structures, 422 correctio tone of, 381 riddling and word-play, 303 use of disease-metaphors, 421 n. 281 use of elegiac distichs, 406, 407

use of Roman epigraphic verse-formulae, 246 tituli, 299 n. 146 votive masses, 8, 306 Wearmouth-Jarrow Bible pandects and, 180 n. 149 his language, general, 103, 104, 105, 123, 176, 269–70, 375 n. 138 specific terms/concepts noted in general: aequiparabilis, 381 n. 156; allusion to ‘penitential tears’, 389 n. 182; Alma Sophia, 322; almus, -a, 321–2, 407 n. 241; amicitia, 369 and n. 121; audiens/audire, 412 n. 254; basilica, 320 n. 216; beatitudo, 315 n. 197; castigatio, 413 n. 256; catholicae fidei agnitione munire, 457–8; clerus, 168 n. 115; consiliarius, 351 n. 66; ‘David’, 368; defensor sanctae [Dei] ecclesiae for kings, 382; doctores et ductores, 331 n. 1; ductor/doctor, 331 n. 1, 356, 357 n. 83; flagella, 299–300; Flavius, 375 and n. 138; gazae, 246 n. 350; germanus, 366 and n. 111; heres, 349 n. 58; heu, 402 n. 224; inops, 407–8; ius/iura, 299 and n. 147; karitatis familiaritas, 315; legifer, 371 n. 123; light imagery, 416; medical metaphors, 388–90, 393, 450; memor, 399 n. 211; normula-formula, 397 n. 205; pagani, 414; peregrinus, 382; pietas, 367 n. 115, 369; praedicatores, 312–13; pseudodoctores, 384; rector for kings, 381 and n. 157; resauciare, 389 and n. 181; rex, 407 n. 240; saepta, 334 n. 9; seculare subsidium, 370; sophia, 377; terror, 299; vestigia, 244 n. 343; Vive Deo florens, 368 n. 117 specific terms noted in the letters: ammoneo, 405; baptismatis adunationem, 453; consacerdotes, 458 n. 84; constingere, 465 n. 105; immaculata columba for the Church, 462 n. 95; iustitia, 405; lepiditas, 463 and n. 99; loca sanctorum, 310 n. 185; princeps ecclesiae and pater optime and apostolicus pater/pastor to describe the pope, 460 n. 89; requies, 460 n. 91; ‘royal palace’, 443; Scotia/Hibernia, 465 n. 107

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   his sources (where cited as a source for a specific Alcuin text listed below. For general discussions of source material, see in the General Index under the following: Athanasius, Augustine, ‘Augustinus Hibernicus’, Basil, Boethius’s Consolatio, Caper, Cassiodorus, Chrysostom, Cicero, Cummian, Cyprianus Gallus, pseudo-Cyprian, Enchiridion, Eutropius, Gildas, Gregory the Great, Horace, Isidore, Jerome, Orosius, Probus, inscriptions, Statius, Vergil, Vitruvius; and more generally, in this Index on Alcuin, see influences of the Bible, liturgy, and patristic writings) Admonitio generalis pseudo-Cyprian, 275 Commentaria in S. Joannis Evangelium Bede, 370 n. 122 De dialectica Boethius’s commentary on Aristotle’s De interpretatione, 404 De grammatica Boethius’s commentary on Aristotle’s De interpretatione, 404 n. 230 Cassiodorus, 271 Cicero, 286 n. 106 Pompeius’s commentary on Donatus, 283 Vergil, 280 De fide s. Trinitatis biblical/liturgical sources, 185 De laude Dei, 221, 277–8 and n. 79, 306 non-Biblical excerpts in, 261, 266 Isidore, 273 Prosper of Aquitaine, Sedulius, and Dracontius, 277, 278 n. 78 biblical/liturgical sources, 180, 184 n. 163, 193–204, 211, 216 De orthographia Bede and Cassiodorus, 279, 280 n. 84 Cassiodorus’s De orthographia, 270 Isidore’s Etymologiae, 272 De ratione animae, 246 De rhetorica Augustine, 264 n. 37 Cassiodorus, 271 Cicero, 286 Julius Victor, 295 n. 132 De vera philosophia Boethius, 449 n. 55

505

De virtutibus, 354–5 Isidore, 273 n. 63 Interpretationes nominum hebraeicorum Aileran, 274–5 Interrogationes et Responsiones in Genesin, 254 n. 9, 261 Augustine, 263 ‘Augustinus Hibernicus’, 274 letters Augustine, 425, 426, 459, 464 Bede, 391 n. 187 Bible, 364, 367 n. 115 Boethius, 449 n. 55 De imagine Dei, 366 Fathers, 422 Gildas, 271 Gregory the Great, 274 n. 67, 296 hymns, 444 n. 49 Isidore, 271, 274 n. 67, 413 n. 258 Jerome, letters of, 367, 398 n. 209, 444, 467 nn. 114, 115, 470 Julius Victor’s Ars rhetorica, 298–9 letters from the Papal curia, 456 liturgy, 353, 422 Ovid, 462–3 papal letters, 296, 298 parallels with earlier verse, 405 n. 232 Proverbs and Sirach (Ecclesiastes), non-standard forms, 259 n. 24 Psalter and the Bible, versions of, 422 pseudo-Cyprian, 275–6 Vitruvius, 286 Liber contra haeresim Felicis Cassiodorus’s translation of Chrysostom’s homilies, 260 n. 27 Praecepta vivendi Distichae Catonis, 221 Vita Willibrordi Dracontius, 278 n. 78 ‘York poem’, 221, 243 n. 342, 253 n. 4, 255 n. 11 Bede, 244 n. 343 Bede’s metrical Vita Cuthberti, 310, 408 n. 242 Boethius, 269–70 Fortunatus’s Vita s. Martini, 408 n. 242 ?Gildas/?Bede, 370 n. 122 Isidore’s Etymologiae, 272 n. 61 Maccabees, 276 n. 72 Prosper, 278 n. 78 pseudo-Cyprian, 275–6 Statius, 281–2, 289 n. 111 Vergil, 280–1, 279, 334 n. 9

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506

  

his poems, 24, 79 assessment of biographical information in, 118 carmina figurata, 373–6, 378 n. 147 language, 374 and n. 136 on the Frankish Court and its personalities, 439–40 style hymnic-forms, 417 panegyric, 418 his computus material, xvii, 8, 9 n. 13, 361 calculatio/argumenta associated with, 287–9, 290–2, 306 manuscript exemplar of the Alcuin collection, 292 sources for, 219 spurious computistical material attributed to, 289–93 his letters, 20, 24, 38 addressed to England, 442–5 advice given to high-ranking figures in, 314 as a ‘school-book’ text, 102 as formulary-texts, 365 n. 108 as handbooks, 68 assessment of biographical information in, 117–20 audience for and contemporary reception of, xiii, 109 autographs, 43, 400 composition of use of amanuenses, 103–4 use of notaries, 104 notaries and textual errors, 104 as a record of his dictated language, 104 dating of, 49, 294 epistolae vs. epistiunculae, 39–40, 367 form of, 42–3, 294–5 address-clause, 366, 380 and n. 152, 388, 390 n. 186, 432, 449 n. 55, 459, 464 n, 465, 468 n. 119 beginnings of, 293–300 English letter-formulary, 297 farewell-clause, 296, 297–8, 367 n. 114, 368 and n. 117, 394 n. 194, 411–12 n. 253, 459 letter-conclusions, 189 letter-prefaces, 35 opening words (Acceptis litteris), 297

autograph additions (to ep. no. 10), 398 n. 209 language, 456 use of the vernacular, 301–4, 313 vocabulary of, 50 n. 113, 74–5 n. 176, and see language in this section epithets used in, 392 and n. 190 letter collections, 21, 294, 363 development of, 101 English, 79 indexes to, in early manuscripts, 63–4, 83, 84, 85, 87 letter-poems, 79, 293 letter-prefaces, 79 manuscript transmission of earliest copy (at Lucca) of an Alcuin letter outside the primary collections, 237 survival rate of, 41–2 scholarship on, 43 n. 97 early transmission of, 43–57, 79–80, 101–2 ‘recipient’s texts’, 56, 60, 60 n. 142, 61, 65, 67, 70 n. 167, 72, 78 n. 186, 79, 80, 86, 87 n. 212, 88 n. 216, 90, 91 n. 222, 102, 103, 367, 387 n. 175, 432 n. 1, 458 n. 84, 468 n. 118 initially as libelli, 65, 102 dissemination of in larger ‘register’ copies, 102 registering of, esp. in the English collections, 49 n. 112, 54, 67, 74, 83, 87 n. 212, 92–3, 100, 102, 103, 396, 463 later transmission of, 102 and see Index of Manuscripts Cited under London, BL, Royal 8 E. XV [K1][St.-Vaast]; St. Gallen, Stiftsbibl. 271 (‘basic Tours collection’)[K2][St. Gallen]; Troyes, BM 1165 pt. i [T][St.Martin]; Vatican City, BAV, Reg. lat. 272 (‘expanded Tours collection’) [T*][Rheims]; Vienna, Natbibl. lat. 795 [S][St.-Amand]; Vienna, Natbibl. lat. 808 [S1][Salzburg]; and the English collection as witnessed in London, BL, Cotton Tiberius A. xv [Tib.] (‘recipient’s text’) and London, BL, Cotton Vespasian A. xiv [Vesp], and in

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   London, BL, Harley 208 [H] (Alcuin’s personal collection) topics noted in: on Angilbert, 448 on archiepiscopal consecrations in response to Offa’s queries, 296, 412 on Benedict and Ceolfrid as model abbots, 315 n. 197 on boats on the Rhine, 316 on Boniface, 299 on Duke Gerold, 371 on Gildas, 415, 416 on King Ælfwald of Northumbria, 319–20 on King Æthelred of Northumbria, 318–19, 398 on kingship, 416–17 on Offa of Mercia, 401 on request of relics from Paulinus of Aquileia, 363–4 on the contrast between Mercia and Northumbria, 241

507

on the consecration of Æthelheard as archbishop of Canterbury, 401 on the destruction of the Assyrians, 414 on the events of A.D. 796, 445–8 on weights of silver, and colours for paintings, 397 ‘private’ nature of, 110, and see amicitia prose letters, 294 style of, 243 nn. 341, 295, 298, 299, 300, 342, 392, 393, 399, 418 adaptation of epistolary style, 464 admonitory, 299–300, 316, 370, 371, 396, 405 ‘appositive’, 397, 405 baroque epistolary style, 449–50 business, 39 consolatory, 371, 456 and n. 76, 467 ending letters with a verse, 417 rhetorical devices of, 434 n. 6 ‘worrying’ letters, 398 women, lack of as addressees, 316 writing as a foreigner, 370

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508

INDEX OF ALCUIN’S WRITINGS

Admonitio generalis (A.D. 23 March 789), 140 n. 36, 275 n. 70, 312, 313, 351, 356 n. 81, 363, 379–84, 410, 418 Adversus Elipandum, 332 n. 5, 427 n. 303 Beatus igitur David, 8 n. 10 Calculatio Albini magistri, with concluding hexameter verses, xvii carmina, 11, 52, 121, 157 n. 86, 169 n. 118, 196, 437, 438, 439–40, 460 n. 89 carm. 1 (‘York poem’), 28–9, 34, 41 n. 90, 74 n. 176, 130 nn. 10, 11, 134, 138 n. 29, 139 n. 34, 145 n. 55, 146 n. 57, 147 n. 61, 150, 154–6, 157 n. 86, 158, 164, 197 n. 203, 297 n. 140, 314, 375 n. 137, 409, 413 n. 259, 423 conclusion of, and request for protection through prayer, 405 n. 232 Northumbrian visions in, 28, 29 n. 64 on Ælberht of York, 236, 237–8, 243, 247, 253–4, 276, 299, 304–5, 308 n. 178, 326 n. 236, 357 n. 83, 398 n. 210 on Ælberht of York’s retirement and death (A.D. 780), 333–4 on Ælberht’s resignation, 339 on Alcuin’s departure to the Frankish Court, 339 on Alcuin’s inheritance of Archbishop Ælberht’s books, 339, 340 on Bede, 227 n. 299, 244 n. 343 on Bede’s biblical studies, 225 n. 289 on Bede’s monastic career and writings, 227 n. 298 on Bosa, 215 n. 258, 357 n. 83 on Ceolfrith’s death and translation, 227 n. 298 on computus studies, 219 n. 270 on Dryhthelm’s vision, 354 n. 76, 460

on Eanbald of York’s succession, 333–4, 339 on Egberht of York, 229, 235 n. 322 on John of Beverley, 334 n. 9 on King Æthelred of Northumbria, 319 on King Eadberct, 276 on King Edwin, 313 n. 190 on King Offa’s benefaction to St. Oswald’s tomb at Bardney, 242 on Oswald’s (king of Northumbria) death, 334 n. 1 on Paulinus, 215 n. 258 on requies, 460 n. 91 on Rome, 460 n. 90 on St. Oswald’s relics, incl. two visions and death of an influential young man, 241 on the anchorites Balthere and Echa, 241, 313 on the arrival of King Oswald’s relics at Bardney, 309 on the Bible as a means of instruction in other disciplines, 254 on the consecrations of A.D. 767, 304–5 on the death of Archbishop Alberht, 320 on the miracles of Cuthbert and the use of holy oil, 310 on the nauta rudis, 222 n. 277 on the new building at York in the late 770s, 320–6, esp. 326 n. 236 on the relics of Abbot Ceolfrid, 315 on the responsibility of spiritual office, 397 n. 205 on the Seven Liberal Arts, 254 on the unjust ruler, 240 n. 334 on Wilfrid II, 215 n. 258, 334 n. 9 on the ‘York book-list’, 244 n. 343, 255, 256, 260–1, 266, 268, 274, 277, 281, 282, 425 n. 296 on York’s baptismal font, 213 n. 251 and see Index on Alcuin under his sources carm. ii (epitaph for Ælberht of York): 238, 243 n. 342, 245, 253, 377 n. 144

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  ’  carm. iv (Cartula, perge cito, S.-K. no. 2146): xvii, 76 n. 180, 160 n. 95, 272 n. 61, 279, 282 n. 94, 293, 304 n. 162, 316–18, 335–6, 343 n. 36, 344 n. 40, 346, 358 n. 85, 363 n. 99, 378 n. 147, 396 n. 199, 454 n. 70 carm. v: 363 n. 100 carm. vi (Crux, decus es mundi ): 373–4, 392 carm. vii (Magna quidam pavido): 375–6, 378 n. 147 carm. ix (Postquam primus homo, lament on the destruction of Lindisfarne): xviii, 134 n. 19, 238 n. 327, 245, 267, 272 n. 61, 389 n. 182, 397 n. 205, 402 n. 224, 407 and n. 238, 409, 411, 413, 414 n. 261 carm. ix (Hic pater ecclesiae, Romae decus, inclytus auctor, epitaph for Pope Hadrian; MGH, Poet. 1, 113–14): 439 n. 24, 442 n. 34, 456 n. 76, 459–61 carm. x (Urbs aeterna Dei ): 417 carm. xii: 439 n. 23 carm. xiv: 375 n. 137 carm. xvii (S.-K. no. 16381): 447 n. 45 carm. xviii (S.-K. no. 16380): 447 n. 45 carm. xix (S.-K. no. 6592): 447 n. 45 carm. xxi: 246 n. 350, 356–7 carm. xxiii (O mea cella): 155 n. 80, 327, 345, 441 carm. xxiv: 297 n. 140 carm. xxv: 246 n. 350 carm. xxvi: 174 n. 132, 346, 379 n. 152, 434 n. 7, 438 n. 19, 440–1, 441 n. 31 carm. xxxii: 157 n. 85, 165 n. 105 carm. xxxiv: 322 n. 224 carm. xlv: 246 n. 350, 382 n. 159 carm. xlvi (S.-K. no. 2145): 75 n. 177, 79 n. 190, 182 n. 158 carm. xlvii: 75 n. 177, 79 n. 190 carm. xlviii: 75 n. 177, 79 n. 190 carm. liv: 297 n. 140, 322 n. 224 carm. lvii: 391 n. 189 carm. lviii: 20 n. 44 carm. lix (S.-K, no. 10727): 128 n. 5, 391, 155 n. 79, 161 n. 97, 322 n. 224 carm. lxii (S.-K. 5960): 221, 326 n. 236 carm. lxv: 289 n. 111 carm. lxvi: 279 n. 81, 322 n. 224, 407 n. 241, 408 n. 243 carm. lxvii: 408 n. 243 carm. lxviii (‘In hoc quinque libri’): 406, 407 n. 239, 408 n. 243 carm. lxix (Dum primus pulchro fuerat homo pulsus ab horto, S.-K. no. 204): 254

509

n. 10, 265 n. 39, 322 and n. 224, 371 n. 123, 406–10 carm. lxxii (S.-K. no. 16886): 228 n. 299, 287 n. 108, 360 carm. lxxiii (S.-K. no. 2716), incl. De categoriis decem: 376–8, 391 carm. lxxxi (S.-K. no. 5562): 378 and n. 147 carm. lxxxvi: 299 n. 146 carm. lxxxvii: 346 carm. lxxxviii: 197 n. 203, 279 n. 81, 325.235 carm. xcii (Nudus eat hospes, placeat cui ludere mecum, S.-K. no. 10653): 115, 169 n. 119, 344 n. 38 carm. xciii (S.-K. no. 6634): 172 n. 127, 173 n. 128, 134 n. 19 carm. xciv (S.-K. no. 6704): 222 n. 277 carm. xcvi/1: 29 carm. xcvii: 374–5 n. 136, 450 n. 58 carm. xcix: 322 n. 224 carm. cii (S.-K. nos. 12123 and 1724): 365 n. 107 carm. ciii: 169 n. 118, 297 n. 140 carm. cv: 322 n. 224, 326 n. 236 carm. cvii: 297 n. 140 carm. cviii: 322 n. 224 carm. cxxiii (Alcuin’s epitaph: Hic rogo pauxillum veniens subsiste, viator, SK: no. 6688), 18–19, 26 n. 58, 33, 121, 122 carmina by other authors carm. xxxv (in ‘Pauli et Petri carmina’, MGH Poet. 1, 69–70; S.-K. no. 2201), written to Pope Hadrian, Peter of Pisa and Paul the Deacon, in the name of Charlemagne, by Alcuin or Angilbert: 282, 344 n. 37 carm. xxxvii (in ‘Pauli et Petri carmina’, MGH Poet. 1, 70–1; S.-K. no. 4459): 343 n. 36 carm. xlii (in ‘Pauli et Petri carmina’, MGH Poet. 1, 75), written by Angilbert to Peter of Pisa, 363 n. 99 carm. Multiplices grates tibi sint laudesque salutes (S.-K. no. 9863; in letter to Dunstan, ed. Stubbs, Memorials of St Dunstan, no. x): 84 n. 205 Commentariorum in Apocalypsin (inc. praef. ‘Devotissima ac inextricabilis et vitia dixerim’), 10, 222 n. 279 Commentaria super Ecclesiasten, 226, 259 n. 24

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  ’ 

Commentaria in S. Joannis Evangelium, 370 n. 122 Confessio fidei (Alcuin’s creed, in MGH Conc. 2, 163–4), 420, 421, 426, 427–9 Contra haeresim Felicis: see ep. no. 23 below De animae ratione, 5, 77 n. 183, 246, 263–4, 359 n. 87 De categoriis decem: see carm. lxxiii De dialectica, 10, 23, 271, 404, 222 n. 278, 286 n. 106, 377 De fide sanctae Trinitatis, 5, 10, 12, 18, 18 n. 38, 23, 80 n. 192, 185, 331 n. 1, 424, 427, 428 n. 310 De grammatica, 11 n. 18, 252, 271, 280, 283, 286 n. 106, 404 n. 230 De laude Dei, xvii, 10, 177–80, 184 n. 163, 186–7, 193–204, 211, 216, 221, 224, 261, 266, 273, 277–8 and nn. 78, 79, 306, 361, 423, 427 De antiphonario, 194–9, 250, 251 De hymnis, 201 De litteris colendis: xvii, 365 n. 107, 379, 384–6, 410, 435 n. 9, and see General Index under capitularies De natura rerum, 254 De orthographia, xviii, 15 n. 31, 45 n. 101, 132, 138, 270, 272, 279, 280 n. 84, 302, 361 De ratione animae, 246 De rhetorica, 11 n. 18, 23, 105, 236 n. 324, 264 n. 37, 271, 286, 294–5 n. 132, 382 n. 158 De Sancta Cruce, votive mass, 374 De vera philosophia, 252, 449 n. 55 De virtutibus et vitiis, 23, 78 n. 188, 105, 122, 184 n. 161, 273 n. 63, 330, 350 n. 62, 351, 354–5, 382 n. 159, 389, 399 n. 211 Disputatio Pippini cum Albino, 41, 52 epistolae, 12, and see Index on Alcuin under his sources ep. no. 1: 38 n. 83, 183 nn. 158, 159, 227 n. 294, 340 ep. no. 2: 38 n. 83, 40 n. 89, 163 n. 101, 176 n. 139, 183 n. 159, 314 n. 194, 340, 378 n. 147 ep. no. 3: 359 n. 86 ep. no. 3–7: 64 ep. no. 4: 61 n. 143, 192 n. 190, 363 n. 100, 381 n. 156 ep. no. 5: 304 n. 163, 403 n. 228 ep. no. 6: 297 n. 140, 327 n. 240, 364 n. 106, 390 n. 186, 414 n. 260

ep. no. 7: 39 n. 86, 98, 128 n. 7, 146 n. 58, 176 n. 138, 277 n. 77, 307 n. 174, 310 n. 185, 313 n. 192, 343 n. 34, 391 n. 187, 392–3, 465 n. 107 ep. no. 8: 43 n. 96, 90 n. 221, 98, 128 n. 7, 235 n. 321, 277 n. 77, 341 n. 30, 343 n. 35, 390 n. 184, 395 nn. 196, 198, 397, 398, 402 n. 222 ep. no. 9: 46, 90 n. 221, 140 n. 36, 164 n. 104, 197 n. 206, 345 n. 41, 357, 359 n. 86, 366 n. 110, 376 n. 142, 394 n. 194, 395 n. 196, 398 n. 210, 417 n. 271 ep. no. 10: 43 n. 96, 54 n. 123, 56 n. 132, 87 n. 212, 90 n. 221, 100, 113 n. 284, 264, 265 n. 38, 367 n. 114, 398 n. 209, 454 n. 70 ep. no. 10–14: 64 ep. no. 11: 38 n. 83, 54 nn. 123, 125, 59 n. 137, 60 n. 141, 345 n. 41 ep. no. 12: 59 n. 137, 60 n. 141, 62 n. 147, 64 n. 153, 65 n. 154, 123 ep. no. 13: 54–5 n. 125, 59 n. 137, 60 n. 141, 128 n. 7, 346, 363 n. 100, 372, 399–400 and nn. 212, 214 ep. no. 15: 78–9 and n. 189, 183 n. 158, 304 n. 163, 367 n. 115, 369 n. 119, 389 n. 182, 405 ep. no. 16: 31 n. 70, 88 and n. 216, 90–1 n. 222, 100, 140 n. 36, 153 n. 76, 240, 267 n. 45, 304 n. 163, 320 n. 215, 389 n. 183, 395 n. 197, 399 n. 211, 411 n. 251, 414 n. 261 ep. no. 17: 40 n. 87, 55 n. 128, 60 n. 141, 84 nn. 203, 204, 99 and n. 247, 187 n. 175, 227 n. 295, 271 n. 58, 272 n. 59, 299 n. 147, 300 n. 149, 309 n. 181, 312 n. 188, 331 n. 1, 351, 410 n. 251, 417 n. 270, 453 n. 67 ep. no. 18: 40 n. 87, 48 n. 107, 56 n. 128, 60 n. 141, 100, 188 n. 178, 191 n. 186, 265 n. 38, 273 n. 63, 275 n. 71, 300 n. 149, 304 n. 163, 351, 398 n. 210, 400 n. 218, 410 n. 251, 412 n. 255, 415 n. 262, 417 n. 18, 422 n. 288 ep. no. 19: 55 n. 128, 59 n. 135, 60 n. 141, 92 n. 226, 145 n. 54, 166 n. 110, 167 n. 111, 176 n. 139, 183 n. 158, 190 n. 183, 228 n. 299, 263 n. 35, 302 n. 152, 304 n. 163, 315 n. 196, 389 n. 182, 410 n. 251, 413 n. 256, 414 n. 261, 418

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  ’  ep. no. 20: 56 n. 128, 60 n. 142, 246 n. 351, 315 n. 198, 410 n. 251, 411 nn. 252, 253, 420 n. 278, 433 n. 2, 446 n. 44 ep. no. 21: 88 n. 216, 167 n. 111, 315 n. 198, 411 n. 251, 412, 414 n. 261 ep. no. 22: 313 n. 192, 389 n. 182 ep. no. 23: 49 n. 110, 67 n. 162, 189 n. 181, 267 n. 44, 403 n. 228, 404 n. 229 ep. no. 24: 88 n. 216, 315 n. 198 ep. no. 25: 60 n. 139, 342 n. 33, 363 n. 100, 375 n. 138, 469–70 ep. no. 26: 43 n. 96, 84 n. 205, 363 n. 100 ep. no. 27: 116, 291, 445 n. 42, 448 n. 51, 449 n. 55, 453 n. 66, 457 n. 79, 460 n. 89 ep. no. 28: 42 n. 93, 64 n. 153, 81 n. 195, 113 n. 284, 222 n. 279, 246 n. 351, 265 and n. 38, 363 n. 101, 413 n. 259 ep. no. 29: 90 n. 221, 227 n. 295, 367 n. 115 ep. no. 30: 60 nn. 141, 142, 87, 90–1 n. 222, 139 n. 35, 140 n. 36, 309 n. 181 ep. no. 31: 60 n. 141, 65 n. 154, 92 n. 226, 99 n. 246, 108, 133 n. 17, 162 n. 100, 270, 319 n. 214, 400 n. 217 ep. no. 33: 40 n. 87, 59 nn. 135, 137, 60 n. 141 ep. no. 34: 54 n. 123, 54–5 n. 125, 60 n. 141, 227 n. 294 ep. no. 35: 60 n. 141, 89 n. 219 ep. no. 36: 43 n. 96, 55 n. 127, 60 n. 141, 444 n. 39 ep. no. 37: 56 n. 128, 60 n. 141, 65 n. 154 ep. no. 38: 60 n. 141, 65 n. 154 ep. no. 39: 60 n. 141, 84 n. 204, 89 n. 219 ep. no. 40: 64, 84 n. 204, 145 n. 53, 165 n. 106 ep. no. 41: 296 n. 137, 379 n. 152, 433 n. 2, 457 n. 78 ep. no. 42: 34 n. 75, 127, 128 n. 3, 460 n. 91, 164 nn. 104, 105, 169 n. 118, 224 n. 284, 241, 342 n. 32, 432 n. 1 ep. no. 43: 60 n. 141, 70 n. 167, 84 n. 204, 88 and n. 215, 89 n. 219, 100, 128 nn. 3, 6, 154 n. 77, 168 n. 115, 169 n. 118, 223 n. 281, 301 n. 151, 342 n. 32, 432 n. 1, 433 n. 2, 443 n. 34

511

ep. no. 44: 59 n. 135, 64, 65 n. 156, 84 n. 204, 128 n. 3, 168 n. 115, 301 n. 151, 352 n. 68, 412 n. 254, 432 n. 1, 433 n. 2, 460 n. 91 ep. no. 45: 86 n. 208, 100 n. 251, 301 n. 151, 390 n. 184 ep. no. 46: 40 n. 89, 86 n. 208, 100 n. 251, 143 n. 48, 432 n. 1, 433 n. 2 ep. no. 47: 434 n. 6 ep. no. 48: 433 n. 2, 445 n. 42 ep. no. 49: 60 n. 141, 346, 363 n. 100, 400 n. 217 ep. no. 50: 90 n. 221, 434 n. 7 ep. no. 51: 59 n. 137, 89 n. 219, 386 n. 174, 400 n. 217 ep. no. 52: 84 n. 203, 386 n. 174, 422 n. 288 ep. no. 53: 62 n. 146, 64 n. 153 ep. no. 54: 78 n. 187 ep. no. 55: 38 n. 84, 78 n. 187 ep. no. 56: 38 n. 84, 77 n. 185, 78 n. 187 ep. no. 57: 38 n. 84, 40 n. 88, 41 n. 91, 42 n. 95, 77 n. 185 ep. no. 58: 48 n. 109, 272 n. 59 ep. no. 60: 60 n. 138, 62 n. 147, 64 n. 153, 272 n. 61, 297 n. 139, 413 n. 258, 446 n. 44, 448 n. 48, 449 n. 55 ep. no. 61: 60 n. 141, 91, 227 n. 295, 242 n. 338, 309 n. 181, 349 n. 58, 444 n. 38 ep. no. 62: 242 n. 338, 337 n. 17, 342 n. 31, 369 n. 121, 443 n. 36 ep. no. 63: 62 n. 147, 444 n. 41 ep. no. 64: 442 n. 34 ep. no. 65: 61 n. 143, 62 n. 147, 64 n. 153, 72, 90 n. 221, 93 n. 229, 391 n. 189 ep. no. 66: 72 n. 172, 90 n. 221 ep. no. 67: 90 n. 221, 92 n. 226, 153 n. 75, 166 n. 110, 296 n. 138, 315 n. 197, 396–7 ep. no. 68: 90 n. 221, 100 ep. no. 69: 81 n. 195, 90 n. 221, 275 n. 71, 370–1, 400 n. 218, 407 and n. 241 ep. no. 70: 90 n. 221, 242 n. 338, 401 n. 219 ep. no. 71: 59 n. 137, 66 ep. no. 72: 90 n. 221, 344 n. 38, 367 n. 115, 455 n. 72 ep. no. 73: 64 n. 153, 65 n. 154, 85, 89 n. 219, 91, 365 n. 108, 391 n. 188

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ep. no. 74: 59 n. 135, 62, 63, 64, 65 n. 154, 66 and n. 158, 84 n. 203, 189 n. 180, 384 n. 164 ep. no. 75: 448 n. 51, 451 n. 62 ep. no. 76: 451 n. 63 ep. no. 77: 451 n. 63 ep. no. 78: 346 ep. no. 79: 144 n. 51, 148 n. 65, 468 ep. no. 80: 35 n. 77, 361 ep. no. 81: 46 n. 104, 462 n. 95 ep. no. 82: 59 n. 135, 64, 297 n. 142, 337 n. 17, 434 n. 6, 443 n. 35, 444 n. 41 ep. no. 83: 64, 450 n. 59 ep. no. 84: 297 n. 140, 437 n. 18 ep. no. 85: 35 n. 77, 188 n. 177, 249 n. 358, 436 n. 15, 449 n. 55, 464 n. 103 ep. no. 86: 113 n. 284, 272 n. 61, 411 and n. 252, 446 n. 44, 449 n. 55, 450 n. 59 ep. no. 87: 35 n. 77, 60 n. 139, 379 n. 152, 436 n. 15, 455 n. 72, 465 n. 107 ep. no. 88: 42 n. 95 ep. no. 89: 86 nn. 208, 209 ep. no. 90: 362 and n. 98, 365 n. 107, 434 n. 7, 452 n. 65 ep. no. 91: 452 n. 65 ep. no. 92: 35 n. 77, 55 n. 125, 60 nn. 139, 141, 245 n. 348, 379 n. 152, 436 n. 15, 448 n. 51 ep. no. 93: 35 n. 77, 55 n. 125, 60 nn. 139, 141, 436 n. 15, 448 nn. 51, 52, 455–7 ep. no. 94: 445 n. 42, 448 n. 51, 457 n. 79, 460 n. 89, 461 n. 94 ep. no. 95: 345 n. 41, 438 n. 20, 448 n. 51, 452 n. 64 ep. no. 96: 60 nn. 138, 139, 100 n. 252, 434 n. 7, 451 n. 60 ep. no. 97: 60 n. 139 ep. no. 98: 60 n. 139, 367 n. 115, 447 n. 48 ep. no. 99: 60 n. 142, 64 n. 153, 446–7 nn. 44, 45, 47, 452 n. 64 ep. no. 100: 35 n. 77, 82 n. 198, 85 n. 207, 100 n. 251 ep. no. 101: 16 n. 32, 40 n. 89, 85 n. 207, 128 n. 7, 140 n. 36, 352 n. 68, 465–6 ep. no. 102: 434 n. 7, 466, 467, 468 ep. no. 103: 86 n. 208, 100 n. 251, 297 n. 139, 467 n. 112, 468 n. 115 ep. no. 104 (circular letter to ‘the bish-

ops of Britain’): 40 n. 89, 41 n. 91, 42 n. 95, 85 n. 207, 187 n. 175, 388 n. 179, 416 n. 265, 458–9, 463, 465 ep. no. 105: 48 n. 109, 65 n. 156, 188 n. 176, 227 n. 294, 353–4, 456 n. 76, 466–7, 468 n. 115 ep. no. 106: 456 n. 76, 467 nn. 112, 113 ep. no. 107: 42 n. 94, 53 n. 121, 446 n. 45, 468 n. 118 ep. no. 108: 399 n. 213, 463 n. 101 ep. no. 109: 140 n. 37, 442 n. 32, 463 n. 101 ep. no. 110: 189 n. 179, 190 nn. 183, 184 ep. no. 111: 189 n. 179, 190 n. 184 ep. no. 112: 238 n. 327 ep. no. 113: 49, 123, 189 n. 179, 190 n. 184 ep. no. 114: 48 n. 109, 65 n. 156, 94–5, 100, 103 n. 258, 128 nn. 3, 7, 145 n. 54, 151 n. 72, 168 nn. 115, 116, 170 n. 122, 171 n. 123, 173 n. 128, 174 n. 132, 238 n. 327, 307 n. 174, 308 n. 179, 312 n. 188, 340 ep. no. 115: 77 n. 186, 79 n. 189 ep. no. 116: 48 n. 109, 65 n. 156, 238 n. 327, 309 n. 182 ep. no. 117: 65 n. 154, 189 n. 181, 192 n. 191, 315 n. 197 ep. no. 119: 108.271, 145 n. 52, 368 n. 117 ep. no. 120: 35 n. 77 ep. no. 121: 59, 84 n. 203, 227 n. 295, 229 n. 303, 238 n. 327, 259 n. 24, 340, 361, 470 n. 124 ep. no. 122: 85 n. 207, 104 n. 260, 352 n. 68 ep. no. 123: 267 n. 45, 381 n. 157 ep. no. 124: 42 n. 94, 77 n. 185, 183 n. 158, 185 n. 168 ep. no. 125: 185 n. 168, 448 n. 51 ep. no. 126: 20 n. 43, 42 n. 93, 220 n. 273, 413 n. 259 ep. no. 127: 245 n. 348 ep. no. 128: 83 n. 200, 85 n. 207, 99, 185 n. 168, 312 n. 188, 320 n. 216, 352 n. 70, 401 n. 221 ep. no. 129: 55 n. 127, 61 n. 142, 142 n. 33, 185 n. 168, 188 n. 178, 242 n. 339, 271 n. 58, 272 n. 59, 415 n. 262 ep. no. 130: 86 n. 208

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no. 163: 184 n. 162 no. 164: 53 n. 122 no. 165: 45 n. 100, 50 and n. 113 no. 166: 184 n. 162, 271 n. 58 no. 167: 49 n. 112, 53 n. 121, 54 n. 125, 55 n. 127, 60 n. 140, 64 ep. no. 168: 55 nn. 125, 127, 60 n. 140, 311 n. 187, 316 n. 199 ep. no. 169: 170 n. 122, 310 n. 183, 311 n. 187 ep. no. 170: 70, 80 n. 191, 224 n. 283, 285 n. 101, 359 n. 87, 413 n. 258, 436 n. 14 ep. no. 171: 417 n. 271 ep. no. 172: 154 n. 77, 244 n. 345, 345 n. 43, 363, 408 n. 244 ep. no. 173: 53 n. 121, 74 n. 175 ep. no. 174: 75 n. 176, 80 n. 191, 84 n. 204 ep. no. 175: 39 n. 85, 76 n. 182, 245 n. 349 ep. no. 176: 39 n. 85, 76 n. 182, 438 n. 20 ep. no. 177: 80 n. 191, 417 n. 271 ep. no. 178: 36 n. 78, 64 n. 152, 80 n. 191, 299 n. 147, 457 n. 78 ep. no. 179: 35 n. 77, 56 n. 131 ep. no. 181: 39 n. 85, 76 n. 182, 365–6 n. 108, 382 n. 159 ep. no. 184: 35 n. 77, 41 n. 90, 56 n. 131, 414 n. 260 ep. no. 185: 51 n. 115, 56 n. 131, 371 n. 124 ep. no. 186: 51 n. 115, 56 n. 131, 274 n. 67, 438 n. 20, 451 n. 61 ep. no. 188: 382 n. 159 ep. no. 189: 41 n. 91 ep. no. 190: 41 n. 91, 84 n. 204, 87 n. 214, 94 n. 232, 434 n. 7, 451 n. 60 ep. no. 191: 346 ep. no. 193: 50 n. 114, 265 n. 38, 367 n. 113 ep. no. 194: 54, 104 n. 260 ep. no. 196: 225 n. 289, 227 n. 295 ep. no. 197: 35 n. 77, 58, 456 n. 76 ep. no. 198: 69, 185 n. 167, 371 n. 124, 456 n. 76 ep. no. 210: 80 n. 192 ep. no. 211: 290 ep. no. 212: 41 n. 91 ep. no. 213: 35 n. 77, 185 n. 167, 228 n. 299 ep. no. 214: 86 n. 211 ep. no. 215: 109, 109–10 n. 273 ep. ep. ep. ep. ep.

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ep. no. 216: 128 n. 7, 185 nn. 165, 167, 225 n. 289, 228 n. 299, 369 n. 121 ep. no. 217: 79 n. 189, 382 n. 159, 394 n. 193 ep. no. 218: 77 n. 185 ep. no. 220: 39 n. 85, 76 n. 182, 468 n. 119 ep. no. 221: 42 n. 95, 468 n. 119 ep. no. 222: 39 n. 85, 76 n. 182, 468 n. 119 ep. no. 226: 204 n. 224 ep. no. 227: 77 n. 185 ep. no. 229: 59 n. 136 ep. no. 230: 77–8 n. 186, 78 nn. 186, 86 and n. 210, 87 n. 212 ep. no. 231: 59 n. 136, 145 nn. 53, 55 ep. no. 232: 145 nn. 53, 55, 395 n. 197 ep. no. 233: 145 n. 52, 147 n. 62, 148 n. 64, 238 n. 327 ep. no. 234: 80 n. 192 ep. no. 235: 86 n. 208, 100 n. 251 ep. no. 237: 39 n. 85, 76 n. 182, 244 n. 343 ep. no. 238: 59 n. 136 ep. no. 240: 42 n. 95, 59 n. 136 ep. no. 241: 77 n. 183 ep. no. 243: 178 n. 142, 181 n. 151, 189 n. 181, 417 n. 271 ep. no. 245: 80 n. 191, 267 n. 45 ep. no. 246: 53 n. 122, 440 n. 28 ep. no. 249: 184 n. 163, 283 n. 97 ep. no. 250: 171 n. 123, 299 n. 146 ep. no. 251: 189 n. 181, 408 n. 242, 417 n. 271 ep. no. 252: 54 ep. no. 254: 382 n. 159 ep. no. 255: 86 nn. 210, 185 n. 168, 211, 416 n. 267 ep. no. 256: 86 n. 208, 100 n. 251, 297 n. 139 ep. no. 257: 35 n. 77, 80 n. 192, 331 n. 1, 407 n. 240 ep. no. 258: 56 n. 129, 67 n. 161, 387 nn. 175, 176 ep. no. 259: 56 n. 129, 67 n. 161, 178 n. 142, 181 n. 155, 387 n. 176 ep. no. 260: 56 n. 129 ep. no. 263: 451 n. 63 ep. no. 264: 56 n. 129, 86 n. 211 ep. no. 265: 56 n. 129 ep. no. 266: 56 n. 129 ep. no. 267: 55 n. 127, 353 ep. no. 268: 72 n. 170, 74 n. 175

ep. no. 269: 39 n. 85 ep. no. 271: 166 n. 110, 167 n. 111, 189 n. 181, 238 n. 327, 243 n. 343 ep. no. 272: 342 n. 31 ep. no. 273: 88 n. 216, 133 n. 17, 177 ep. no. 274: 86 n. 208, 98, 100 n. 251 ep. no. 278: 185 n. 167 ep. no. 279: 77 n. 183, 185 n. 168 ep. no. 280: 78 n. 187, 384 n. 164, 465 n. 107 ep. no. 282: 166 n. 110, 189 n. 181, 315 n. 197, 396 n. 203 ep. no. 283: 198 n. 209, 274 n. 67, 314 n. 195 ep. no. 284: 166 n. 110, 228 n. 299, 315 n. 197 ep. no. 285: 77 n. 185 ep. no. 286: 166 nn. 110, 111, 315 n. 196, 465 n. 105 ep. no. 287: 88 n. 216, 163 n. 101 ep. no. 288: 86 n. 208, 88 n. 216, 331 n. 1 ep. no. 289: 227 n. 295 ep. no. 290: 86 n. 210, 309 n. 181 ep. no. 291: 86 n. 208, 185 n. 168, 309 n. 181 ep. no. 292: 86 n. 208, 100 n. 251 ep. no. 293: 86 n. 208, 100 n. 251, 185 n. 168 ep. no. 294: 42 n. 95, 53 n. 122, 54 n. 122, 54–5 n. 125, 55 n. 127, 74 nn. 175, 176 ep. no. 295: 61 n. 142, 276 n. 74 ep. no. 299: 88 n. 216, 89 n. 218, 123–4 ep. no. 300: 78 n. 186, 85 n. 207 ep. no. 302: 138 n. 29, 145 n. 53, 189 nn. 180, 181, 243 n. 341 ep. no. 303: 77 n. 185, 128 n. 7 ep. no. 304 (inc. Beatus igitur David ): 7 ep. no. 306: 35 n. 77, 244 n. 343 ep. no. 307: 257 n. 19, 267 n. 44 ep. no. 308: 77 n. 184, 78 n. 186, 79, 87, 200 n. 214, 267 n. 45, 286 n. 104 ep. no. 309: 35 n. 77 ep. no. 310: 451 n. 63 ep. no. 311: 86 n. 210, 97, 168 n. 117, 417 n. 271 epistola episcoporum Franciae (at Frankfurt council, A.D. 794), MGH. Conc. 2.1, 142–57: 74 n. 176, 261, 266 n. 41 epistola Karoli ad Elipandum (A.D. 794), MGH Conc. 2.1, 162: 189 n. 181

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epistola to Offa (Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century, pp. 245–6): 352 n. 68, 401 and n. 222

Liber contra haeresim Felicis: 31 n. 69, 43–4, 113 n. 281, 196 n. 200, 260 n. 27, 267 n. 44, 425

lost letter (accompanying the liber synodalis of A.D. 792, written ‘in the name of the Northumbrian bishops and leading laymen’): 403

Praecepta vivendi per singulos versus: 221

letters by others ep. no. 46: 35 n. 77 ep. no. 66: 35 n. 77 ep. no. 86 (Paulinus of Aquileia to Alcuin): 42 n. 95 ep. no. 144 (Charlemagne to Alcuin): 35 n. 77, 36 n. 79, 386 n. 173 ep. no. 147: 35 n. 77 ep. no. 151: 35 n. 77 ep. no. 152: 35 n. 77 ep. no. 182: 35 n. 77 ep. no. 183: 35 n. 77 ep. no. 196: 35 n. 77 ep. no. 199: 35 n. 77 ep. no. 247: 35 n. 77 letter of Maginarius of St.-Denis to Charlemagne (CLA 16, no. 629): 42 n. 94 letter of Candidus (MGH, Epist. 4, 561): 42 n. 95 Tangl, no. 105: 41 n. 91 Tangl, no. 117: 41 n. 91 Expositio in Canticum Canticorum (with verse preface inc. Hunc cecinit Salomon mira dulcedine mirum): 8, 11 n. 18 Expositio in epistolam Pauli apostoli ad Hebraeos, 189 n. 181, 422 Explanatio in epistolam Pauli ad Titum, 139 n. 34, 415 n. 264, 424 Expositio . . . in psalmos penitentiales, in psalmum CXVIII et graduale, 128 n. 7, 182, 184 n. 163, 185 n. 165, 257–8 Interpretationes nominum hebraeicorum, 274–5 Interrogationes et responsiones de Trinitate: 5 Interrogationes et responsiones in Genesin, 7 n. 8, 139 n. 34, 145 n. 52, 253 n. 2, 254 n. 9, 261, 263, 271, 274, 361, 416 n. 266, 417 n. 272 Libellus annalis: 359–60, 361 Libellus manualis: 67, 107, 181–2, 322 n. 222, 387, 388 n. 179

Vita s. Vedasti, 65 n. 154, 104 Vita s. Richarii, 140 n. 36, 244 n. 343 Vita s. Willibrordi, 29 n. 64, 105, 107, 139, 140 n. 36, 146 n. 58, 148 n. 64, 160, 165, 214, 224, 225, 246 n. 350, 278 n. 78, 302–3, 335 n. 14, 342 n. 31, 409 Vive Deo felix: 368 votive masses missa sacerdotis: 174 n. 133 Uncertain writings: carm. civ: 297 n. 140 carm. cxiv: 325 n. 235 computus (from MS Troyes BM 1165): 57–8, 59 De bissexto: 68 De musica: 9 De saltu lunae: 68 decrees of legatine synod in Northumbria (A.D. 786): 273, 347–8, 381, 382, 418 Dicta Albino: 9 ep. no. 100: 463–5, and see among authentic epistolae above epistle-lectionary, or Comes: 8, 19, 20 n. 42, 191, 193 n. 192, 227, 250, 251 Octo tonos in musica consistere: 9, 173 n. 128 Propositiones ad acuendos iuvenes: 9, 174 Quia<> Prophetiae spiritus: 7, 8 n. 10, 180 n. 151: 180 n. 151 Ratio de cursu lunae: 290 verses concluding the Alcuinian calculatio (S.-K. no. 5854): 289 Pseudo-Alcuin: Alcuini collectum ex sacra scriptura qualiter septies in die et semel in nocte domino laudes omnibus christianis oporteat referre: 36 n. 79 Apocalypse commentary (inc. praef. Beatus Beda in septem periochis dicit Apocalypsin consistere): 10 and n. 16, 450 n. 58 De divinis officiis: 405 n. 233 De imagine Dei (De dignitate conditionis humanae): 6, 72 n. 171, 366, 376

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Disputatio puerorum: 307 ep. no. 132 (rubric: capitula que tali convenit in tempore memorari ): 35, 36 n. 78 ep. no. 180: 35, 74 n. 175, 245 n. 348 ep. no. 299: 36 n. 78, 123–4 ep. no. 304: 36, 36 n. 79 ep. no. 304a: 36 n. 79

Fuganda sunt omnimodis: 9 n. 15 Igitur converso primum omnium dicere debemus, quando devota mente convertitur: 5–6 and n. 7 Item Flaccus dicit: vidimus ex Hebraeis virum elegantem et admirati eum sumus et amplexi: 9 n. 15 Officia per ferias: 273 n. 63

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INDEX OF BIBLICAL CITATIONS

Genesis 1.26: 192, 376 2.6: 417 2.10: 417 4.23: 106 7.6: 320 n. 215 8.21: 106 14.14: 145 n. 52 14.24: 145 n. 52 25: 115 25.23: 416 n. 266 26: 115 41.13, 14: 240 n. 334 47.3: 192 Exodus 3: 200 3.2–4: 200 n. 215 23.8: 382 n. 159 26.7: 161 n. 96 Deuteronomium 1.16, 17: 382 n. 159 6.4–5: 312 n. 189, 382 16.19: 382 n. 159 31.9: 371 n. 123 32.41: 186 Samuhel I Sm 9.7: 398 n. 208 26.8–11: 349 n. 56 26.11: 349 n. 56 28.2: 368 n. 116 Regum III Rg 1.6: 338 n. 20 2.32: 338 n. 20 IV Rg 20.6: 414 n. 261 22: 380 23: 380 Verba Dierum seu Paralipomenon (Chronicles) general: 61 n. 145

Tobias general: 115, 180 Tb 12.6: 196 n. 202 Iob general: 226 Psalmi 1.2: 183 n. 158 6: 182, 258 7.10: 272 n. 59 14.1: 350 n. 62 21.6: 422 n. 287 31: 258 31.3: 183 n. 161 31.5: 183, 184 n. 161, 355 33: 183 33.10: 183 n. 159 33.20: 183 n. 159 35.9: 181 n. 153 37: 182 38.8: 182 44.8: 422 49.3–4: 184 n. 162 57: 382 57.2: 382 n. 159 71.11: 422 n. 287 72.19, 20: 329 73–88: 257 n. 21 79: 195 80.11: 183 83: 185 83.5: 185 n. 167 91.2: 176 n. 139 100: 304 n. 161 105.1: 176 n. 139 110.9: 257 n. 19 112.7–8: 165 n. 106 118: 182, 258 119.5: 184 129.3: 184 134.6: 422 n. 287 139.5: 197 143: 183 143.2: 183 n. 159 149: 276 n. 76

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Liber Salomonis id est Proverbia general: 226, 227, 228, 351 5.18: 108 n. 271 8.30–31: 372 n. 127 13.1: 227 n. 295 18.19: 227 n. 295 27.1: 227 n. 294 30.31: 168 n. 117, 364 n. 103 Ecclesiastes general: 226, 227 5.6: 138 n. 30 10.20: 348–9 n. 57 11.6: 227 n. 295, 259 n. 24 Canticum Canticorum general: 226, 258 6.8(9): 462 n. 95 Sapientia general: 258 1.6: 272 n. 59 6.17: 451 n. 62 Sirach seu Ecclesiasticus 3.11: 227 n. 295 5.8: 227 n. 294 18.33: 240 n. 334 20.32: 227 n. 295 41.17: 227 n. 295 Isaias 6.1–10: 195 n. 196 6.7: 194–5 n. 196 38.5: 414 n. 261 43.26: 405 n. 233 Hieremias Ier 31.15: 238 n. 327

Hiezecihel general: 349 3.18–20: 349 n. 60, 353 11.19: 300 n. 149 13.18: 309 n. 181 33.12, 15 (18, 21): 355 Danihel general: 186, 244 n. 345 3.42, 43: 197 n. 205 3.52–88+90: 186 3.52–90: 186 n. 171 3.56–88: 186 4.22: 349 n. 56 13.22: 329 14.32–38 (Vulgate: 33–39): 113 n. 283 Abacuc 3.2–19: 186, 187 Malachi 2.7: 351 Macchabeorum I Mcc 4.60: 460 n. 90 6.56: 276 n. 72 Ad Timotheum I Tim 2.5: 428 n. 310 Ad Titum Tit 2.13–14: 424 Catholic Epistles Epistula Iacobi 5.14: 311 n. 186

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GENERAL INDEX

Aachen, 44, 115, 155 n. 80, 196, 224 n. 283, 352 n. 67, 360, 378, 428 n. 208, 432 n. 1, 439 n. 23, 447, 451, 459 Frankish Court at, 76, 77 n. 183, 406, 409, 439; and see Francia palace at, xviii, 127, 432, 434, 435, 436, 437 royal ‘writing-offices’ of, 435; and see writing-office synod of A.D. 799, 430 abbreviations, Insular, 403 n. 227 Abelard Ethica, 23 Sic et Non, 23 Theologia ‘scholarium’, 23 Aberlemno (Angus), church at, 144 n. 50 Acca, bishop of Hexham, 167, 170 dedicatory letters to from Bede, 37, 103, 225 Achilleus: see Nereus acolytes, clerical grade, 174, 175 Ada Group, manuscripts, 13 Adalhard (al. Antonius), abbot of Corbie, 39, 92, 244 n. 343, 357, 358 and n. 86, 366 Alcuin correspondence to, 76, 164 n. 104, 245, 345, 366, 394, 395 n. 196, 398, 417 n. 271, 438 n. 20 vita of by Paschasius Radbertus, 20–1 Adalram, archbishop of Salzburg, 52 n. 120, 73 n. 174 Adalung, abbot of Lorsch and St.-Vaast, 63 n. 149 Adam, Robert, 318 n. 209 Adaula soror, 100 n. 250 Addi, comes, 143 Addingham (Yorkshire, Wharfedale), 150–1 n. 70 Adelbaldus, abbot, 92 Adelberctus, bishop of Hexham, 92 Adeltruda Saxa, daughter of Æthelwald Moll of Northumbria, 332 admonitio generalis of A.D. 789: see Index of Alcuin’s Writings Adola of Pfalzel, 295 adolescens/adolescentia/adulescens, 105, 106, 107–8

Adomnan De locis sanctis, 154 n. 77, 368 n. 116, 422 n. 287 Vita Columbae, 29 n. 65 Adoptionism, heresy of, xvii, 30, 33, 35 n. 77, 47, 67, 76, 80, 88 n. 215, 196, 364, 402 and n. 224, 403, 419–27, 458 ‘Court Adoptionist-dossier’, 429 and see Alcuin, Elipand of Toledo, Felix of Urgel ‘Advent Lyrics’, Old English, 195 Advent, 194, 195 nn. 196, 198 and the ‘Great’ or ‘O’ Antiphons, 195 Adversus Elipandum Libri IV, 148 n. 64 Aeda: see Eada Ælberht of York, 30, 150, 155, 167, 169, 172, 247, 276, 299, 306 n. 169, 327, 331, 333, 377, 419, 433 Alcuin’s epitaph for, 243, 245, 253, and see Index of Alcuin’s Writings under carm. ii bequest of his books to Alcuin, 339, 340 books available to at York, 286 books of, 306 death of, 323, 333, 336 description of in Alcuin’s writings, 236, 237–8, 253–5, and see Index of Alcuin’s Writings under ‘York poem’ kinship of, 242 letters and decrees of, 101 n. 256 possible Alcuin authorship of the Ælberht-Coena letter, 297–9 possible Alcuin help in, 356 with Lul of Mainz, 235 n. 322, 236, 243, 255, 296, 297–9, 368 n. 117, 417 writing style of, 243 n. 341 magister, 219, 236, 243, 304 new building at York in the late 770s and, 320–1 ordination of as bishop, 248 pallium and, 255 n. 11 relationship with Alcuin, 237–8, 243 resignation of, 305, 339 sources of patronage for, 242

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trips to Rome and Frankia, 160 n. 92, 243, 244, 245 Ælfflæd, abbess of Whitby, 108, 295 Ælfwald, king of Northumbria, 131 n. 12, 133 n. 17, 140, 141, 319, 320 n. 215, 333, 339, 395, 396 n. 198, 399 Ælfweard, abbot of Glastonbury, 84 letter to Archbishop Sigeric, 94 n. 232 Ælfwine, sub-king of Deira, 143 n. 48 Ælthelgar, archbishop of Canterbury, correspondence of, 95 Aeneas, in Vergil’s Aeneid, 439 Æthelbald, king of Mercia, 161–2 epistola admonitoria of Pope Gregory to, 295 n. 134 Æthelbald, abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow, Alcuin letter to, 315, 396 Æthelberht, archbishop of York: see Ælberht of York Æthelberht, bishop of Whithorn, bishop of Hexham, 162, 249 n. 357, 399 n. 212 Alcuin correspondence to, 133 Æthelberht, king of Kent, 153 letter to from Pope Gregory, 296 Æthelburga (al. Eugenia), abbess, daughter of King Offa, sister-in-law of King Æthelred of Northumbria Alcuin correspondence to, 59, 78 n. 186, 444–5, 466–7, 468 Ætheldrutha: see Æthelthryth Æthelfleda, queen of King Æthelred of Northumbria, 467 n. 112 Æthelheard, archbishop of Canterbury, 86, 87 n. 213, 401 Alcuin correspondence to, 78 n. 186, 85, 86, 99, 312 n. 188, 352, 412, 415, 416, 417 n. 271 death of (A.D. 805), 87 gift of vestments for, 87 letter to from Charlemagne, 249 n. 358 Æthelred I, king of Northumbria, son of Æthelwald Moll, 96, 97, 139, 145, 243, 318, 332 n. 7, 334 n. 10, 354 n. 76, 395, 410 n. 250, 411 n. 251, 463, 466 Alcuin correspondence to, 60 n. 142, 87, 88, 389 n. 183, 395, 399, 400, 418, 442 Alcuin’s support for, 337, 340, 346, 396 assassination of (A.D. 796), 465, 466, 467 and n. 113 deposition and exile of, 319

reputation of, 319, 398, 399, 400 restoration of, 397 Æthelred, king of Mercia, abbot of Bardney, 242 n. 337 Æthelthryth, queen and abbess, 148 n. 65, 150 Alcuin correspondence to, 48, 49, 144 n. 51, 187, 466, 467–8 Æthelthryth, queen, Bede’s hymn on, 322 n. 222 Æthelwald Moll, king of Northumbria, 35 n. 76, 129 n. 8, 141, 152, 238–9, 240, 243, 276, 318, 332, 395 coinage of, 159 widow of, Alcuin correspondence to, 332–3 n. 7 Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester, 84 correspondence of, 96 Æthelwulf, De Abbatibus, 105 n. 262, 137, 138 n. 29, 163 n. 102, 172 n. 126, 179, 203 n. 222, 217, 311 n. 187, 328 Agilbert, bishop of the West Saxons, bishop of Paris, 205 n. 227 Agroecius, grammarian, 282 n. 93 Aidan, St., bishop of Lindisfarne, 132, 414 Aileran, Interpretatio . . . Progenitorum Domini Iesu Christi, 274–5 Al(d)berht, abbot of Ripon, 339 Alemannia, 468 Alan of Farfa, homiliary of, 31 n. 69 Alberic of Utrecht, 316 Albinus Credulus, poem, 177 n. 140 Alchfrith, anchorite letter to Higlac, 88, 91, 99, 179, 313 n. 191, 328–300 prayers associated with in the ‘Book of Cerne’, 179, 210 n. 241, 328 sources for, 329–30 Alchmund, bishop of Hexham, 247 Alchmund, Mercian dux, 247 n. 354 Alchmund, son of King Alchred of Northumbria, 247 n. 354 Alchred [Alhred], king of Northumbria, 240, 241, 243, 247, 249, 318, 327, 364 n. 106, 395 coinage of, 159 correspondence with Lul of Mainz, 160 n. 93, 161 n. 96, 243 legatine visits to (A.D. 773), 316 n. 199, 318 n. 210 letter written in the name of, 296 overthrow of, 305

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  Alchuinus, subdeacon of Verona, 352–3 n. 71 Alcimus Avitus, cited in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 277 Alcuin: see Index on Alcuin Alcuin, lay courtier, 305–6 Aldfrith, king of Lindsey Aldfrith, king of Northumbria coinage of, 149, 159 n. 90 Aldhelm, 175, 187 n. 174, 298 n. 144 carmina of, 280 De virginitate, 105 n. 262, 146 n. 57 on Easter cycles, 219 n. 270 on the ‘Seven Liberal Arts’, 253–4 Carmen de virginitate, 221 n. 275 De virginitate (prose), 315 n. 197 knowledge of at York, 268, 278 letters of, 39 n. 86, 141 n. 38 ad Ehfridum [Heahfrith], 338 n. 20 ad Gerontium, on computus cycles, 219 n. 270 writings of, 397 n. 205, 406 on grammar, 221 use of alma, 321 and n. 222 use of clerus, 168 n. 115 writing style of, 229 writings of, SOURCES knowledge of Augustine’s De civitate Dei, 263 of Isidore’s Etymologiae, 272 of Jerome’s epistolae, 265 n. 39 of Prosper’s Epigrammata, 221 Aldred, duke, 466 Aldulf, bishop at Mayo, 163 n. 101, 339 n. 24 Aldulf, bishop of Lindsey, 249 Alexander of Macedonia, 379 n. 148 letters (pseudo-) to King Dindimus of the Brahmans, 378–9 Alexandria, 246 Alfred, king, 178 n. 143 ‘devotional’ libellus or enchiridion of, 178 n. 142 Alhfrith, sub-king of Deira, 150 All Saints feast of, 210 n. 239, 217, 250, 321 n. 219 sermon for, 72 n. 171 Alma Sophia (York), church, 155, 156 n. 82, 320–6 consecration of on 30 October A.D. 780, 334, 336 alma, use of in Latin writings, 321–2 Alps, 334

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Altercatio Hadriani Augusti et Epictiti philosophi, 41 Altfrid [Aldfrith], bishop, Vita s. Liudgeri, 161 n. 97, 305 Aluberht, Northumbrian cleric, ordination as corepiscopus in York, 248, 249, 305 Aluuini, dux, in the ‘Lindisfarne’ Liber Vitae, 164 Amalarius of Metz, 19–20, 32–3 n. 72 correspondence of, 71 letter to Hilduin, 20 n. 43 Liber Officialis, 20, 32 n. 72, 197 n. 205, 309 n. 180 on inconsistencies of Roman antiphonaries, 199 Amand, St., tomb of, 278 Ambrose, St., 227 Apologia prophetae David, 266 n. 41 De incarnationis Dominicae sacramento, 424 n. 293 De officiis ministrorum, use of amicitia in, 112 hymns attributed to, 168 n. 117, 200, 202, 375 n. 136, 381 n. 157, 423, 444 n. 40 knowledge of at York, 261 writings of on silent reading, 223 on slavery, 139 n. 34 use of alma, 321 n. 222 use of ius/iura, 300 n. 147 Ambrosius Autpertus Sermo ad Assumptione sanctae Mariae, 121 amicitia biblical uses of, 110–11 Classical Latin uses of, 111 Carolingian usages of, 111 and sexual relationships, 111 n. 277 as distinct from caritas, 112 importance of prayer in, 112, 116 and see amicitia in Index on Alcuin Anastasius, emperor, 416 anchorites, 152, 313, 322, 323 n. 226, 328, 330 Andrew, St., 202 oratory dedicated to, 146 Angers, manuscripts, 68 n. 163 Angilbert, abbot of St.-Riquier (at Centula), 38 n. 83, 122, 244, 344–5, 367, 441, 448, 454 and n. 70, 455 Alcuin correspondence with, 42 n. 95, 45, 51, 59, 116, 184, 375 n. 138 in the king’s name, 379 n. 152, 436 as legate to the Frankish mission to

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Rome (A.D. 796), 14, 438, 439, 448, 449, 451, 452, 457, 461, 462, 469 carmina of, 437, 439 carmen of (possibly written by Alcuin), in the king’s name, to Peter of Pisa, Pope Hadrian and Paul the Deacon, 282 correspondence with Charlemagne, 245 n. 348 Institutio, 197 letter-poems of, 358 n. 85 of 790/91 to Peter of Pisa (carm. no. xlii, in ‘Pauli et Petri Carmina’, MGH Poet. 1, 75), 363 n. 99 of (?796), 345 relations with Alcuin, 363 n. 99, 371, 462 Angilram, archbishop of Metz, 341 n. 30, 358, 362, 363 n. 99 as Court chaplain, 358, 365 as the first recipient of the Epistola de litteris colendis, 385 in Italy in A.D. 786, 362 regulations of, 173 n. 127 relations with Alcuin, 365, 385 relations with Paul the Deacon, 358 Anna, biblical, 115 annals Chronicon Laurissense breve, 18 n. 36, 19 Chronicon Moissacense, 364 n. 106, 392 n. 191 Chronicon Paschale, 347 n. 50 S. Columbae Senonensis, 320 n. 218 ‘Continuation of Bede’s HE ’, 130 n. 10, 133 nn. 16, 18, 229, 239, 249 n. 357 Frankish Easter Courts from A.D. 782–787, 15 Iuvavenses maiores, 15 n. 31 Laureshamenses, 14, 352 n. 71, 357 n. 84, 365 n. 107, 419 n. 276, 439 n. 23, 445, 446 n. 43, 447 n. 46, 457 n. 79, 458, 466 n. 109 Lindisfarnenses et Dunelmenses: 16 n. 32 Maximiniani, 17, 439 n. 23 Metz, 15, 393 n. 193, 447 n. 46, 448 n. 51 Nazariani, 357 n. 84 ‘Northumbrian’ (‘York’), as transmitted in Byrhtferth of Ramsey’s Historia regum, 16 and n. 32, 17, 16 n. 32, 130 n. 10, 133 nn. 16, 17, 18, 140–1, 142 n. 34, 144 n. 52, 145 n. 55, 149 n. 68, 156, 162, 163

n. 101, 168 n. 115, 229 and n. 303, 239, 241, 247, 248, 249, 276, 277 n. 77, 293, 313, 392 n. 191, 399, 402 n. 224, 410 n. 250, 459, 466 on Alcuin’s trip to Rome for the pallium, 333, 336 on King Ælfwald of Northumbria, 319 on Sicga, 396 n. 198 on the conspiracy behind King Ælfwald of Northumbria, 395–6 n. 198 on the election of Archbishop Eanbald II of York, 445 on the legatine council (at Corbridge?) in A.D. 786, 339 n. 24 on the liber synodalis of A.D. 792, 402 on the murder of King Cynwulf of Wessex, 338 n. 23 on the sack of Lindisfarne, 410 n. 250, 411 n. 251, 414 n. 260 Whithorn material in, 249 n. 357 ‘Ramsey’, 16 n. 32 regni Francorum, 14–15, 17 n. 35, 18, 139, 352 n. 71, 357 n. 84, 358 n. 85, 362 n. 96, 379 n. 149, 390 n. 186, 391 n. 187, 392 n. 191, 414 n. 260, 419 n. 277, 439 n. 23, 445, 446 n. 43, 447 n. 46 Revised Version, 14 n. 28, 15, 357 n. 84, 362 n. 96, 390 n. 186, 419 n. 276, 447 n. 46, 448 n. 51 St.-Amand, 239 n. 331, 393 n. 193, 394 n. 193 St.-Bertin, 335 n. 13 Tigernach, 240 n. 333 Ulster, 16, 163 n. 101, 239 n. 331, 277, 340, 465 n. 107 and see Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Historia post Bedam Annan, river, 130 n. 10 Anselm of Bec and Canterbury letter collection of, 37, 114 vita of by Eadmer, 25 Anspert, abbot, 452 n. 65 Anthia, St: see Eleutherius antiphonaries, 194 n. 195, 197 n. 205, 198, 235 n. 321 Bangor, see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Milan, Bibl. Ambrosiana C. 5 inf. Compiègne, 190 n. 182 in Book IV of Alcuin’s De laude Dei

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  (i.e., De antiphonario), 194–9, 211, 216, 250, 251, and see Index on Alcuin under liturgy Metz Tonary, 190 n. 182 antiphons, 189, 190 n. 182, 196, 197, 250 ‘O’ or ‘Great’, for Advent, 195 Apennines, 334 Apollinaris, St, 425 Apuleius knowledge of in the Carolingian Court, 269 n. 48 Peri Hermeneias, 404 Aquileia, bishops of, 364 n. 105 Aquitaine, 110 n. 273, 341, 414 n. 260 Arator cited in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 277 archbishops elections of, 433, 445 ordinations, 248 n. 357 responsibilities of, 311–12, 415–16, 417–18 arch-chaplains, 341 n. 29 Ardbert, Mercian ealdorman, Alcuin letter to, 145 n. 53, 243 n. 341 Ardo of Aniane, 19 vita of Benedict of Aniane, 22 n. 48, 38 Aristotle citation of in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 286 De interpretatione (Peri ermenias), 272, 404 knowledge of in the Carolingian Court, 269 n. 48 on the Categories, 376, 377–8 Arithmetic, 254 Arles, 423 n. 292 council of in A.D. 813, 352 Arn of Salzburg, abbot of St.-Amand and bishop of Salzburg, 35 n. 77, 36, 44, 49, 50 n. 113, 278, 294 n. 129 Alcuin correspondence with, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46 n. 103, 49, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 66, 67, 71, 72, 77, 79 and n. 189, 86 and n. 211, 88, 90, 93, 100, 104, 108 n. 270, 113, 155 n. 80, 170 n. 122, 181 n. 151, 190, 265 n. 38, 309 n. 182, 310, 311 n. 187, 362, 366, 367, 371, 381 n. 157, 387 and n. 176, 398, 438 n. 20, 446 and n. 45, 451, 454 n. 70, 468–9 Alcuin’s manualis libellus sent to, 181–2 and the Alcuin letter collection, 102

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as leader of the mission to the Avars, 468 at St.-Amand, 268 n. 47, 362 correspondence of, 50–1, 93 and n. 230, 98 n. 244 De processione Sancti Spiritus, 5 Notitia Arnonis, 52 relations with Alcuin, 362, 367 travels of, 50–1, 53 n. 121 Arnulf of Flanders, correspondence of, 96 Ars Bernensis, 9 n. 15 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 16 n. 32, 394 n. 193, 465 n. 107 ‘D’, 16 n. 32, 140, 150 n. 68, 156 n. 83, 247 n. 353, 249 n. 357, 293 n. 127, 319, 333, 399 n. 212 ‘E’, 16 n. 32, 140, 141 n. 39, 150 n. 68, 249 n. 357, 293 n. 127, 399 n. 212, 410 n. 250 on Ecgfrith, king of Mercia, 348 n. 56 on King Ælfwald of Northumbria, 319 on the death of Æthelberht (Ælberht) of York, 333 on the killing of the high-reeves at the order of King Æthelred of Northumbria 319 on the sack of Lindisfarne, 410 n. 250 Ascension, 197 liturgical texts for, 197, 202 Asser, Vita Alfredi, 178 n. 142 astronomy, 207, 219, 254, 284, and see computus Asturias (Spain), 14 Athanasius De Fide (Ad Trasimundum), 267 mention of in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 267 Athelheard, dux, 141 athleta, 105 Aubin, St., bishop of Angers, 28 n. 62 Augustine, archbishop of Canterbury, 33 n. 72, 368 n. 116 Alcuin’s epithet for, 307 mission to Anglo-Saxon England, 185–6 Augustine, St., 192, 268 n. 45, 378, 459, 464 as a source text for Alcuin: see Index of Alcuin under sources knowledge of at York, 261–6 on adolescentia, 105 n. 264 on hymns, 200 on memoria, 247 n. 352

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on the Resurrection, 383 n. 161 on the soul, 366 on the Trinity, 376 on the use of rector, 381 n. 157 writings of Confessiones, 261–2 De civitate Dei, 139 n. 34, 262–3, 273 De doctrina Christiana, 263 De Trinitate, 246, 262, 385, 425, 428 Enarrationes, 180 n. 151 Enchiridion ad Laurentium, 425, 426 letter collection of, 37, 39 n. 86, 264: ep. no. 147: 265 n. 39; ep. no. 167, 264 n. 37, 265 n. 39; ep. no. 205 (ad Cosentium): 95, 265 n. 39 letters to Jerome, 264, 265 n. 39, esp. De origine animae hominis, 264 oratio attributed to, 272 n. 59 Quaestiones in Heptateuchum, 139 n. 34, 192, 263 Retractiones, 264 sententiae of, 221 Sermones, 191, 221 n. 276, 265, 350, 354, 424; sermo 8: 265 and n. 40; sermo 194: 265 n. 40; sermo 369: 265 n. 40 Soliloquies, 262–3 Tractatus in Iohannem, 71, 397 n. 205 translation of Aristotle’s work on the Categories, 377 Augustine, St., pseudoAlcuin writings attributed to, 10 De computo Dialogus, 252 Sermones, 31 n. 69, 184 n. 161, 354, 355; sermo 254, 234 n. 319, 389 n. 181 Augustinians, 23 n. 51 ‘Augustinus Hibernicus’, De mirabilibus Sanctae Scripturae knowledge of by Alcuin, 274 aula, use of by early medieval writers, 149 n. 66 Ausonius, Eclogue, 220 Austerfield (W. Yorks), 132 Austin Friars, of York, 75 n. 178 Austrasia, 361 Austria, 361 n. 92 Autbert, priest of York, uncle of Sigwulf of York, 328 autograph clauses, in early-medieval letters, 43 Autun, manuscripts, 121 Auxerre, manuscripts, 15 n. 31, 288 n. 109

Avars, xviii, 14, 16, 190, 390, 438, 445–6, 447 and n. 46, 448 n. 51, 449, 465, 468–9 Ba(l)dwulf of Whithorn, 399 n. 212 baiuli, letter carriers, 41 n. 91, 358 n. 86 Baldo of Salzburg, magister, 45 n. 101, 47 and n. 105, 48 n. 107, 49 n. 110, 309 n. 180, 387 n. 175 Gesta Hrodberti, 123 Baldred, patricius of Wessex, 141 n. 38 Balearic Islands, 14 Balthere, anchorite (‘Baldred of the Bass’), 29 n. 64, 130, 313 Bamberg, manuscripts, 20 Bamburgh, 129, 132, 153, 153 n. 76 Bangor, liturgical texts associated with, 193 n. 193 baptism, 45, 47, 48 n. 106, 61 n. 144, 175, 208, 312, 387 n. 175, 453 baptism cathedral font and, 213–14 early English practices for, 213–14, 214 n. 253 episcopal imposition of hands, 213–14 fideiussores and, 352 importance of sponsors in, 212 in Italy, Gaul and Francia, 213 Lenten-scrutinia for, 213 liturgy associated with, 198, 212 pre-Easter, 429 preparation for, and the role of deacons, 307–8 rituals of exorcism associated with, 213 baptisterium, 235 n. 321 Bardney (Lincs.), monastery of, 130 n. 11 tomb of St. Oswald at, 242, 309 benefactions to from King Offa, 242 Bardowick, 445, 446 n. 43 Barking, 150 n. 68 Basel, 23 n. 51 Basil Hexaemeron, 267 mention of in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 267 Basil, pseudoAdmonitio ad filium spiritalem, 78, 267 Basilius, doctor to King Charlemagne, 390 n. 184 Bass Rock, 130, 313 Bassin, bishop of Speyer, 316 Baturich, bishop of Regengsburg, 67, 429 Baugulf, abbot of Fulda, 357 n. 84, 384 Bavaria, 52, 362 n. 97, 367, 390, 419, 468

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  manuscripts, 354, 387, 388 n. 178 texts associated with, 17 n. 35 Bearn (Beorn), patricius of King Ælfwald, 140, 319 Beatus, abbot of Liébana, 67 Adversus Elipandum, 426 n. 300 Alcuin letter to, 36, 80 Bede, 92, 268 n. 45 Alcuin on, 227 n. 298 as teacher of Egberht of York, 229 biblical exegesis of, 225–6 books available to, 273, 274 cited in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 268 contributions to Latin Christian education, 227, 228, 229 cult of, 216 death of, 289 n. 111 account of by Guthbert [Cuthbert], 197 n. 205, 198 n. 207, 228, 289 n. 111, 230 n. 305 education of, 225 familiarity with the works of Athanasius, 267 Augustine’s De civitate Dei, 263 Augustine’s sermons, 265 Cassiodorus, 257, 260, 270 Gildas, 271 Isidore, 271, 272, 273, 274 Jerome’s epistolae, 226 n. 291, 265 Prosper of Aquitaine, 221, 277, 278 n. 78 Basil’s Hexaemeron, Latin translation of, 267 knowledge of at York, 278 monastery in Feppingum associated with, 242 n. 338 place-names recorded by, 92 n. 226 recitation of Ascension Day antiphon on his death-bed, 197 type of Psalter used by, 181, 185 use of by Carolingian writers, 267 writing style of, 244 n. 343 writings of, on specific topics on Bamburgh, 153 on baptism, 212, 213, 214 n. 253 on biblical study, 225 on Canterbury, 153, 153 n. 76, 154 n. 77 on Cuthbert’s and Egberht’s fasting before Christmas, 194 n. 196 on grammar, 221 on Gregory the Great, 185 n. 168 on letter-writing, 103 on parochial worship, 310

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on pastoral work in the diocese, 312–13 on reading aloud, 224 on the cantica romana, 186 n. 169 on the epitaph of Wilfrid of York, 134 n. 19 on the learning of biblical commentaries, 225 on the Mass-liturgy, 207 on the Mayo community, 163 n. 101 on the rustici, 309 n. 182 on the urbs regia, 153–4 on the use of the chrism oil, 311 n. 186 use of alma, 321, 322 n. 222 use of amicitia, 111 use of villa, 310 n. 183 Bede, writings of, 228 calendar/computus material associated with, 250, 287–8, 289, 292, and see De temporum ratione Capitula lectionum, 228 n. 301 Chronica maiora (= Chronicle), 153, 283 Collectio ex opusculis S. Augustini in epistolas Pauli apostoli, 261 De arte metrica, 202, 221 n. 276, 268 De natura rerum, 218, 283 n. 98, 284 n. 99 De orthographia, 132, 282 n. 93; use of by Alcuin, 279, 280 n. 84 De schematibus et tropis, 397 n. 204 De tabernaculo, 208, 409 n. 246 De templo, 228 De temporibus, 218 De temporum ratione, 31 n. 69, 218, 220 n. 273, 290, 292 n. 113, 360 n. 91 as a teaching text, 218 Bede’s annalis libellus in, 218 calendar and astronomical entries associated with, 284–5 interpretation of Easter in, 218–19 sources for, 285 n. 101, 361 n. 92 use of the vernacular in, 302 Expositio Actuum apostolorum, 294 Expositio in canticum Abacuc, 186, 187 Historia abbatum, 323 n. 226, 315 n. 196 Historia ecclesiastica 105 n. 262, 128 n. 4, 133, 135, 143, 163, 401, 413 n. 259 knowledge of in Mercia, 162 manuscript copies of, 34–5 n. 75, 303 n. 160; at the Frankish Court, 303, 359, and see Index of Manuscripts Cited under

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Cambridge, University Library, Kk.5.16 on Abbess Ælfflæd of Whitby, 295 n. 133 on Acca, 167, 170 on Bede’s list of his own writings, 228 n. 301 on Bishop John of York, 216 and n. 261 on Boniface the Roman archdeacon, 351 n. 66 on Bosa, 167 on Coldingham, 224 n. 284 on Dryhthelm’s vision, 29 n. 64, 146, 147 n. 61, 354 n. 76, 460 on Egberht of York, 230 on Gregory the Great, 402 n. 224; and Gregory’s responses to Augustine of Canterbury, 368 n. 116 on Herebald, 213 n. 250 on Litora, 316 n. 202 on members of the paterfamilias, 146 on poverty, 138 n. 29 on prayers for the unrepentent dead, 354 n. 76 on Saxony, 391 n. 187 on St. Oswald, king and martyr, 241, 334 n. 11 on the account of the York deacon James, 307–8 n. 176 on the Cædmon story, 138 n. 30 on the conversion of Edwin, 351 n. 66 on the death of Boniface, 216 n. 260 on the Germanic invasions, 370 n. 122 on the letters of Pope Gregory the Great, 296 on the letter of other popes, 294, 296 n. 137 on the story of Imma, 137 on Wilfrid II and John of Beverley, 334 n. 9 texts associated with, 303 use of Gildas in, 271 use of ius/iura, 300 n. 147 use of Orosius and Eutropius in, 283 Homiliae, 30, 31 n. 69, 208, 224 n. 283, 225, 228 n. 301, 229 n. 301, 238 n. 327, 370 n. 122, 460–1 n. 91 In Cantica Canticorum, 8, 311 n. 186

In epist. VII catholicas, 309 n. 181, 311 n. 186 In Ezram et Neemiam, 208 n. 235 In Genesim, dedicatory letter, 225 In Lucam, 103 n. 257, 310 n. 183, 311 n. 186, 371 n. 123 In Marcum, 208 n. 235, 310 In Proverbia Salomonis, 226, 364 n. 103 In Samuhelem, 213 n. 250, 311 n. 186, 349 n. 56, 368 n. 116 letters of, 37, 294, 295 preface to Bishop Acca of Hexham, 103 to Archbishop Ecgbert of York, 32 n. 72, 160 n. 92, 166 n. 108, 168, 214 n. 253, 229–30, 235 n. 322, 312–13 to Helmuualdum, 219 n. 268 to Pleguinam, on Bishop Wilfrid I, 220 to Uuichtedum, 288 nn. 109, 110 Liber Hymnorum (now lost), 201–2 use of by Alcuin, 201–2 hymn on Queen Athelthryth, 322 n. 222 Penitential (Continental-origin) attributed to, 235 Retractio in Actus apostolorum, 208 tituli psalmorum associated with, 350 n. 62 titulus on Bishop Cyneberht of Lindsey, 130–1 n. 11 Vita Cuthberti, 150, 398 n. 207, 408 n. 242 prose, 132 n. 14, 138 n. 30, 148 n. 65, 150 n. 69, 181 n. 153, 214 n. 253, 309 n. 182, 310 n. 183, 312 n. 188 verse, 255, 256, 310 Bede, pseudopenitentials of, 135 n. 22 bees, in early medieval law-codes, 232 bellipotens, 304 n. 162 Benedict, St., 315 and n. 197 on anchorites, 313 Regula of, 166, 166–7 n. 111, 168 n. 117, 169 n. 119, 203 n. 222, 302, 303, 367 n. 111, 397 n. 205, 413 n. 256, 432 n. 1 Benedict of Aniane, 8, 19, 19–20 n. 42, 22, 166, 342 n. 31 Alcuin correspondence of, 40 n. 88, 42 n. 95, 77

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  Munimenta fidei, 18, 403 n. 227 vita of by Ardo, 22 n. 48, 38 Benedict, ‘Brother’, letter messenger for Alcuin, 340 Benedict Biscop Codex Cosmographiorum, 285 n. 101 cult of, 216 founder and abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow, 227 Benedictines, 6, 92, 165, 203 n. 222 Benedictio fontis, consecration prayer on Easter Eve, 189 benedictionals, 233 n. 318 benedictions, super synodum, 339 n. 25 Benedictus Levita, Capitulary collection of, 21 Benedictus, canticle, 186 Benediktbeuern, manuscripts, 74 n. 175 Benevento, 321 manuscripts, 36 n. 79 Beorhtric, king of Wessex, 394 n. 193 Beornred (al. Samuel), abbot of Echternach, bishop of Sens, 117, 224, 317, 327 n. 240 Beornwine, priest Alcuin letter to, 59 n. 135, 443 Beorthfri¶, ealdorman, 141 n. 39 Beorthric, king of Wessex, 338 Beowulf, 75 n. 178, 114, 158 n. 88, 303 Berctfrid, praefectus, 141 n. 39 Berdic, York legate to Rome, 402 n. 222 Bernald, bishop of Strasbourg, 327 n. 241 Bernicia, kingdom of, 129 and n. 8, 136, 143, 153, 240 Berta [Bertha], daughter of Charlemagne, 344 n. 38, 371, 448 Alcuin correspondence to, 367–8 Berthfrith, princeps, 141 n. 39 Bertila, vita of, 369 n. 119 bestiality, 138 Bible exegesis of, 224–7, 254, 356 New Testament, 147, 187–91, 226 Old Testament, 61 n. 145 types in Alcuin’s De laude Dei, 180 non-standard, 348, 349 n. 57, 353 Vetus Latina, 186, 188, 329, 384 n. 163, 405 n. 233, 413 n. 257 Vulgate, 147, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 426, 449 and see Psalters

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use of by Alcuin, 181–93, 374 n. 135 Bibles, individual Alcuin, 240 n. 334, 289 n. 111, and see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Bamberg, Stadtbibl., Msc. Bibl. 1 Codex Amiatinus: see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Amiatino 1 Theodulf, 368 n. 117 Tours, 106, 107, 181 n. 153, 189, 222 n. 277, 259 n. 24, 329, 353, 406, 408, 409 Wearmouth-Jarrow, 132, 180 n. 149, 408, 409 biography, in the Middle Ages, 25–6, and see hagiography Bischofshofen (Austria, dioc. Salzburg), cross of, 158 n. 88 bishops, 173, 174, 175, 198 n. 209, 415–16, 417–18 Blathmacc, fosterling of Colcu, abbot of Inishboffin, 277 boats, on the Rhine, 316 Bobbio glossary-collection from, 9 manuscripts, 9, 200, 201 n. 216, 272 n. 60 Boethius commentary on Aristotle’s De interpretatione (Peri Hermeneias), 404 Consolatio philosophiae, 269, 449 n. 55 in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 268–70 knowledge of in the Carolingian Court, 269 n. 48 Opuscula sacra, 269 translations of Aristotle, 286, and see Aristotle Boniface, archbishop of Mainz, St., 248, 464 n. 104 Bible version used by, 186 books which accompanied him to the Continent, 359 cantica romana and, 186 n. 169 collection of Pope Gregory’s letters sent to York by, 231 and n. 308, 294 cult of, 210 n. 239, 216, 299 n. 146 vita of by Willibald, 225 n. 287, 359 n. 88 knowledge of Cassiodorus, 270 n. 54 letter collection of, 37, 39 n. 86, 151 n. 72, 160, 162, 186 n. 172, 238, 297, 399 n. 211, 412 n. 254

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letters to Archbishop Egbert, 176 n. 138, 228, 229 n. 301, 231 and n. 308, 295 letters to Lul, 297, 298 n. 144, 301 n. 151 liturgical books associated with, 206 papal correspondence to, 140 n. 36 reference to in Alcuin’s letters, 299 request for books by Bede, 228, 229 n. 301 script associated with, 259 n. 23 writing style of, 229, 243 n. 341 Boniface, Roman archdeacon, 351 n. 66 Bonosus, 403 book-covers, 159, 449 Boretius, 379 n. 149 Bosa, (arch)bishop of York, 155, 156, 167 chant-texts from Rome and, 195, 196 n. 199 feast day of at York, 215 Boswell, John, 29, 114 Bourges, manuscripts, 122 bowl, from Ormside, 158 n. 88 Brecon (Wales), manuscripts from, 82 n. 200 Bremen, 364, 390 breviaries, 23 Portiforium of Saint Wulfstan, 190 n. 182, 329 Britons, 139 n. 34 in Strathclyde, 163 Brittany, manuscripts, 122, 187 Broninis (?corr. Bromis), 151 n. 71 brooches, 158 Brorda, a Mercian letter to from Alcuin, 85 Burchard of Worms, Decretum, 232 Burgundy, 122 burials, 136–7, 144, 149, 151 n. 70, 153 Bury St. Edmunds, manuscripts, 68, 101 n. 254 Byland, 101 n. 254 Byrhtferth of Ramsey, 16, 269 n. 49 Historia Regum, 16 n. 32 knowledge of at Carolingian Court, 269 n. 49 on Pliny the Elder, 284 n. 99 on lunar eclipses, 293 n. 127 on the killing of the high-reeves at the order of King Æthelred of Northumbria, 319 on King Ælfwald of Northumbria, 319

received text of the ‘Northumbrian Annals’ incorporated into: see annals: ‘Northumbrian’ Byzantium, on iconoclasm, 448 Cædmon, hymn of, 301 Caesar, use of in letters, 378 n. 147 Caesarius of Arles, 234, 349 on baptism, 212 Sermones, 192, 329–30 (no. 207), 350 n. 62 calendars, 33, 156, 205, 207 n. 234, 216, 250, 315 n. 196, 323 n. 228, 334, 345 n. 44, 360 astronomical entries associated with, 284–5 computus material associated with, 292 Dionysian calculations of, 219 liturgical, 217, 302 and see martyrologies individual Alcuin’s at York, 302 Ambrosiana, see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Milan, Bibl. Ambr. M. 12 sup Bede’s, 250 Berlin-Regensburg fragments, 206 Philocalus’s, 285 n. 101 ‘Prüm’ (or ‘Phillips 1869’): see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Berlin, Phillips 1869 St. Willibrord’s, 30, 31 n. 69, 206–7, 239, 250, 271 n. 58, 292, 313 n. 190, 322 n. 226 Munich fragments (from Northumbria), 215, 322 n. 226 families English, 208 n. 235, 210 n. 239 Northumbrian, 207, 209, 215, 216 Roman, 292, 302 Calvinus, monk and priest of York Alcuin letter to, 87, 324 cancellarii, 341 n. 29 Candida Casa bishops of, consecration of, 248 community of, Alcuin letter to, 88 and see Whithorn Candidus-Wizo 19 n. 39 Alcuin letter to, 50 n. 113, 51, 80 mission to Britain, 470 Canisius, 11 n. 18, 62 n. 146 Canon, of the Mass, 210 n. 240

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  canon-law, 162 n. 100, 231, 347, 415, 429 collections, 100, 416 Collecti canonum in V libris, 37 n. 79 Collectio canonum Hibernensis, 350 Collectio Coloniensis, 423 n. 292 collectio Sanblasiana, 231 Dionysio-Hadriana collection, 347, 381 English, 350 Italian, 231 Northumbrian, 231 Symmachan forgeries, 352 and see Egberht’s Dialogus and Theodore’s Canones (Northumbrian Disciple’s version) language associated with, 385 summaries of in the Admonitio generalis, 380 canon-tables, 256 n. 15 Canterbury, 153, 335 n. 13 Alcuin correspondence to, 320 n. 216, 351 Alcuin letter collection at, 87, 94–5, 458 n. 84 Frankish annals and, 15 n. 31 archbishops of, 96, 249 n. 358, 464 archiepiscopal ordinations at, 248 n. 357 hymnary used at, 204 manuscripts, 9 n. 15, 38, 78 n. 188, 202 prayers associated with, 179 n. 144 subdeacons at, 175 n. 137 under the control of Mercia, 338 visitation by papal legates, 338 Canterbury, Christ Church, 86, 167 n. 113 manuscripts, 81, 87 n. 213, 97 n. 239, 98, 209 n. 237 scribal activity of, 97 n. 239 Canterbury, St. Augustine’s, 22 n. 50 manuscripts, 80 n. 192 canticles, 186, 383, 449 Canticum trium puerorum, canticle, 186 cantor, 172, 175 cantus, 220 at York, 170 and see music capellani, at the Frankish Court, 365–6 Caper, grammarian, 106, 108, 282 n. 93 De orthographia, 391 n. 189 knowledge of by Bede and Alcuin, 282 n. 93 capitularies Aachen (A.D. ?802), 235 n. 321, 383 n. 162

529

Admonitio generalis of A.D. 789, xvii, 191, 363, 415, 418, 427 n. 304 address-clause, 381 Alcuin as major contributor, 379–84, 385, 430 n. 314, and see Index of Alcuin’s Writings concluding section, on heresies, 383–4 dating-clause, 379 last chapter including a credal statement, 383 on bishops, 381 on kingship, 381–2 on law, 382 prologue, 381 recourse to Biblical precepts and direct quotation in, 381–2 Basel, 235 n. 321 Benedictus Levita, collection of, 21 Capitulare Aquitanicum of A.D. 768: 128 n. 4 Capitulare missorum, 435 n. 9 Capitulare Saxonicum, 435 n. 9 De villis, 379 n. 153 Duplex capitulare missorum, 379 n. 149 episcopal, 352 Epistola de litteris colendis, 384–6 Alcuin as principle contributor, 385, and see Index of Alcuin’s Writings Archbishop Angilram as first recipient, 385 contents of, 385 manuscript transmission of, 385–6 memorandum on prohibition of participation of monks at secular courts attached to, 384 purpose of, 385–6 form of address-clauses, 380 and n. 152, 381 dating clauses, 379 and n. 149 exordium, 380 prologue, 381 Frankish royal, 122, 233 n. 317, 357 n. 84, 435, 464 n. 104, 465 n. 105 Liège (A.D. 802/9), 235 n. 321 mixed secular and ecclesiastical nature of, 230 Capua liturgy associated with, 205, 206 saints associated with, 206 caritas, 112 Carloman, king of the Franks, 249, 341 n. 29

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Carmen de conversione Saxonum, by ?Paulinus of Nola, 317 n. 205 carmina figurata, 373 carnalis, use of by early medieval authors, 176 Carolingian Empire books available to, 255–6 computus collections associated with, 252 court of, xii diplomas associated with, 362 grammatical texts available to, 221 hagiography of, 27 introduction of Marian feasts, 251 learning revival of, 173, 386, 435 libelli precum associated with, 266 liturgical reforms of, 12–13, 207 n. 234 liturgy associated with, 34 n. 75, and see Francia manuscripts, 263 n. 34 reforms in computus/calendar studies, 360 school texts used in, 278 carrata, 341 n. 30 Carrick, 131 Carthage, 246 Cassander, Georg, Hymni Ecclesiastici, 201–2 Cassian Conlationes, 113, 180–1, 181 n. 152 use of amicitia in, 112 on prayer, 113 n. 281 De incarnatione Domini, 112 n. 281 on the virtues and vices, 330 Cassiodorus, 448 n. 48 as a source for Alcuin, 270–1 cited in Alcuin’s ‘York poem’, 260 De orthographia, 132 n. 14, 270, 279 Expositio Psalmorum, 182, 185 n. 165, 188 n. 176, 189 n. 180, 256–8, 270, 327 n. 239 ‘Durham epitome’ of, 257, and see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Durham, Cathedral Library, B.II.30 other epitome-texts, 257 n. 21 Historia tripartita, 270 Institutiones, 253, 267 n. 45, 270, 271, 272 n. 61, 372 nn. 127, 129 translation from the Greek of Chrysostom’s homilies, 260 vocabulary used by, 224 n. 284 Castorus, St.: see Nicostratus

Cathwulf, letter to Charlemagne, on the Unjust King, 178 n. 142, 240, 368 and n. 118 Catterick (N. Yorks), Northumbrian villa, 149 and n. 68 cattus, use of in penitentials, 235 n. 321 Cava, manuscripts, 36 n. 79 Ceastre, 333 cellae, 342, 343 at York, 326–7 Celsus, 450 n. 58 cemeteries, 151 n. 70 Cenwulf, king, 443 n. 37 Ceolfrith, abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow, 92, 227, 315 n. 197, 323 n. 226 Alcuin on, 227 n. 298 books available to, 273 cult of, 216 anonymous Life of [Historia abbatum anon. ], 26, 315 n. 196, 335 n. 13 translation of relics of to Northumbria, 315 translation of relics to Glastonbury, 323 n. 226 journey to Rome, 335 and n. 14 letter to from Pope Sergius I, 88 type of Bible available to, 180 Ceolmund, minister of King Offa, 145 Ceolwulf, bishop of Lindsey, 130, 131 n. 11, 249 letter to from Charlemagne, 249 n. 358 Ceolwulf, king of Northumbria, 150, 154, 249 n. 357 ceorl/ceorlas (OE), 142, 147 cespes, use of in epitaphs, 327 n. 241 Chalôn, council of, A.D. 647/53, 312 n. 188 Channel, 139, 183, 189, 412, 417, 426 crossing of, 334, 350, 351, 353, 428 chants, liturgical, 172, 189 n. 179, 193, 325, 328 and see music Charisius, grammarian, 139 n. 34, 282 n. 93 Charlemagne, xviii, 4, 12, 13, 25, 61 n., 63, 76, 78, 107 n. 270, 341 n. 29, 409 n. 249, 419 Admonitio generalis of (A.D. 798) written by Alcuin, on pastoral work, 312, 313 and see Index of Alcuin’s Writings Adoptionism controversy, position against, 17, 402, 420–1, and see Adoptionism

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  Alcuin correspondence with, 29, 36 n. 79, 42 nn. 94, 95, 46–7, 59, 61, 62 n. 147, 70, 77, 87, 90, 95, 55 and n. 125, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62 n. 147, 63, 64, 76, 81, 87, 90, 184, 200 n. 214, 249 n. 358, 286, 296 n. 137, 345, 379 n. 152, 469, 470 on Ælberht of York, 254 on Alcuin’s journey to Rome, 244 on explanations of ‘Septuagesima’, etc., 244, 298 n. 144 on fasting, 245 on swords in the Gospel Passion narrative, 301 on praedicatores and the use of the vernacular, 301, 303 on the calculation of epacts, 220 on the defense of preaching by deacons, 307 on encouraging learning in the Court, 227 requests from Alcuin for a computus handbook, 360 Alcuin’s Commentary on Genesis dedicated to in the ?780s, 356 anger towards Northumbrian king in A.D. 796, 318 n. 210 at Parma on 15 March 781, 331, 332 baptism of his sons in Rome, 332 campaigns in Frisia and Saxony (A.D. 789), 390 n. 186, 391 campaigns in Italy (A.D. 786), 317, 362, 364 campaigns in Saxony (A.D. 794, 795 and 796), 411 n. 253, 432, 434, 435, 411 n. 253, 445, 446, 466 n. 109, 468 capitulary collections of, 21, 233 n. 317, 352 conquest of Thuringia, 357 coronation, date of, 393–4 n. 193 Court of, 6, 19, 22, 44, 435; and see Frankish Court depictions of, 222 n. 278 Dionysio-Hadriana and, 380–1 grants to religious houses, 342 n. 31 invitation to Alcuin to come to the Frankish Court, 331, 336; date of, 336 issue of grants as rewards to royal advisers and officials, 340–1 kingship, concept of, 410

531

Latin learning of, 21, 22 letter from Abbot Eanwulf, 296, 314 letter from Cathwulf, 178 n. 142, 240 letter from Dungal, 289 n. 113 letter to Angilbert, 245 n. 348 letter to Elipand of Toledo, A.D. 794 (of Alcuin authorship), 189 n. 181 letter to his wife, Queen Fastrada, 369 letter to King Offa, 81 n. 193, 82, 100 letters from Pope Hadrian, 456 n. 77 on accusations made against King Offa, 337, 338 n. 20 letters of, in the king’s name written by Alcuin, 55 n. 125, 58, 60, 63, 81, 82, 85, 101, 379 n. 152, 386, 448 n. 51, 454, 455–6, 465 by Dungal, 76 marriage to Hildegard, 172 n. 125 meeting with Alcuin in Parma, 331 on alms-giving, 393 and n. 193 on the death of Pope Hadrian, 456 papal gifts of books to, 260 n. 27 poetry written in the name of, composed by Alcuin or Angilbert, 282, 343, 344 relations with Alcuin, xvii, 13, 19, 29 n. 65, 46–7, 246, 352, 361, 368, 377 Mercia, 249 n. 358, 392, 393 n. 193, 394, 395 n. 196 Northumbria, 160 n. 93, 466 Offa of Mercia, 366, 464, 466 Pope Leo III, 455 Spain, 392 the western Slavs, 391 n. 187 royal succession of, 249 royal tractoria associated with, 123 vita of by Einhard, 21, 22 Charles, son of Charlemagne, 439, 466 n. 109 charters, 443 n. 37 individual [taken from Birch’s Cartularium Saxonicum or from Sawyer’s Anglo-Saxon Charters]: Birch, CS, nos. 312: 130 n. 11; 430: 134 n. 20 S 66: 135 n. 21; 106: 249 n. 358; 108: 249 n. 358; 109: 130 n. 11, 131 n. 11; 110: 131 n. 11; 111: 131 n. 11; 114: 130 n. 11; 116: 130 n. 11; 121: 443 n. 37; 123:

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130 n. 11; 128: 145 n. 52; 133: 394 n. 194; 155: 443 n. 37; 161: 143 n. 46; 192: 134 n. 20; 1183: 131 n. 11; 1259: 173 n. 130; 1265: 173 n. 130; 1475: 167 n. 113; 1482: 173 n. 130 and see diplomata Chartres, manuscripts, 19 n. 42 Chelles, royal nunnery, 15 manuscripts, 385 Chelsea, council of (A.D. 816), 99, 138 n. 33, 139 n. 34, 142 n. 35 Chester-le-Street, 333 chrism, holy: see oil Christ Alcuin’s exegesis of as the Redemptor of mankind, 257 cycle of the life of, prayers for, 210 prayer epithets for, 147 n. 59 Presentation in the Temple (2 Feb.), 30–1, 33, 216, 251 Christmas, liturgy associated with, 195, 196, 202, 206, 265 n. 40 Christology, 419, 425, 426 Chrodegang of Metz, 168–9, 169 n. 119, 325, 328 Regula canonicorum, 167 n. 113, 169 and n. 119, 237 Chrysostom, writings of, 378, 469 n. 121 De compunctione cordis, 260 Church Close (Hartlepool, Cleveland), 136 n. 24 church, and kingship, 134; and see kingship Ciaranus of Cluain, St., vita of, 171 n. 124 Cicero knowledge of by Alcuin, 286 writings of De inventione, 286, 371 n. 123, 382 n. 158 De oratore, 286, 295 n. 132 Laelius de Amicitia, 111, 112, 113 letters of, 40 n. 87 Topica, 286 Cicero, pseudo-, Ad Herennium, 286 circumire, 312, 379 n. 152 Claudian, writings of, 366 n. 108 Claudius of Turin, letters of, 309 n. 182 Claudius, St: see Nicostratus clerics, 169 n. 119, 173 and n. 130, 174–5 monastic vs. secular, 165–8, 173 n. 130, 350 and see deacon, monasticism Clichy, council of (A.D. 626/7), 368 n. 116

Clonmacnois, 277 Clonmelsh (co. Carlow), 163 Clothar II, king, 368 n. 116 Clovesho, council of (A.D. 747), 32 n. 72, 34 n. 75, 149 n. 67, 170, 181, 199, 212, 216 Codex Carolinus, 117, 368 n. 116, 453 n. 67 epistulae nos. 8: 192 n. 191; 9: 192 n. 191; 49: 298 n. 144; 51: 338 n. 20; 62: 457 n. 79; 63: 447 n. 47; 67: 448 n. 49; 76: 140 n. 56, 338 n. 21; 79: 456 n. 77; 81: 453 n. 67; 82: 453 n. 67; 89: 358 n. 86; 92: 337 n. 20; 94: 338 n. 20, 453 n. 67, 455 n. 73; 95–7: 338 n. 21; 95: 420 n. 280 Codex Cosmographiorum, of Benedict Biscop, 285 n. 101 Coena: see Ælberht of York Coenwulf, king of Mercia, 338 n. 22, 381 n. 157, 453 n. 67 coinage, 161 from Jarrow, 159 Northumbrian, 158 n. 88, 159, 396 of Æthelwald Moll, 159 of Alchred, 159 of Aldfrith, 149, 159 n. 90 of Eadberht, 159 of Egberht, 159 of York, 159, 396 Colcu the ‘Scot’, presbyter and magister Alcuin correspondence to, 176, 276–7, 310, 343 n. 34, 391, 392, 394, 396 n. 203 Colcu ua Duinechda (of Clonmacnois), ?author of Scuap Chrábaid (or ‘Broom of Devotion’), 277 n. 77 Colcu, abbot of Inishboffin, 277 Coldingham, 224 n. 284 collects, 198 n. 209, 252, 422 Colman, bishop of Lindisfarne, 162 Cologne cathedral, 322 n. 224 Collectio of, 423 Columba, St., 128, 163, 277 vita of by Adomnán, 29 n. 65 Columbanus, St., of Bobbio, 24, 128, 300, 460 n. 89, 463 n. 98 vita of by Jonas, 24, 26 n. 59 writings of, 330 De homine misero, 330 De vii vitiis, 330 Instructiones, 329, 330 Paenitentiale, 234 and n. 319, 388

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  Columella, 334 n. 9 combs, 158 comes, 143–4, 145, 146, 217 n. 263, 305 and the comitatus, 143–4, 147 Cominianus, grammarian, cited in Alcuin’s ‘York poem’, 282 knowledge of Probus, 282 Commacchio, 332 n. 4 Common of Martyrs, liturgical texts for, 202 commutation, 369 n. 118 Compiègne, council of in A.D. 757, 347 Compline, 169 n. 120 computus, 8, 15 n. 31, 235 n. 321, 255 n. 14, 285 n. 101, 359–60 associated with Northumbria, 207 Carolingian, 8, 252 ‘3-book Court’, 361 n. 92 ‘of 793’, 360–1 in Troyes BM 1165, 57, 59 development of, 217–18 Alcuin and, 219–20, 287–9 as explained by Isidore, 217–18 based on the liturgical calendar, 217 Bede and, 218–19, 287–8 Irish interest in, 218 texts used for teaching and private study of, 291–2 items of, 284–5, 287–8, 290 19-year luni-solar cycle, 218, 220 84-year cycle, 219 n. 270 Argumenta de bissexto, 291 calculation of epacts, 220 De saltu lunae, 291 dies aegyptici, 288 Dionysian argumenta, 288 Dionysian Paschal table, 218, 219 eclipses, 292–3 Pachomian verses, 220 pseudo-Dionysian argumenta, 288 Confessio Fidei, 7 confession, xvii, 48, 58, 116–17, 176 n. 139, 353, 354, 361, 387–8 medical metaphors, use of in treatises of, 388–90 penitential tears, 389 reconciliation and, liturgy associated with, 211 use of by early medieval authors, 176 and see Index on Alcuin under his thought confirmation, 212, 308, 312 Coniscliffe, 142 n. 33 consecrations, of archbishops/bishops, 412 and n. 254

533

consiliarius, 351 n. 66 consortium, definition of, 430 Constance: see Konstanz Constantine, emperor, 373 epithets of, 375 and n. 139 Constitutum Constantini [Donation of Constantine], 375 and n. 138 Constantinople, 153, 154 n. 77, 196 n. 199, 321, 325 emperor of, 76 image controversy and, 17 legates from to the Frankish Court, 14 Constantius Chlorus, epitaph for, 343 n. 36, 344 n. 38 Constitutio de Hispanis: see diplomata conversions, 353, 390, 391, 392 n. 191 Coppergate, helmet associated with, 257 Corbie, 243 n. 343, 357 n. 82, 367 Alcuin letter collection and, 76, 77 Carolingian library of, 378 n. 146 manuscripts, 76, 198 n. 210, 263 n. 34, 268 n. 47, 281, 347 nn. 50, 52, 425 n. 295 Corbridge (Northumbria), xvii, 156 n. 83 council ?at in A.D. 786, xvii, 339, 340, 356 and see Northumbria’s legatine visitation in A.D. 786 Corméry, 14 n. 27 coronation imperial (A.D. 800), 418 ritual for, 394 n. 193 corrections, in manuscripts (biblical commentaries), 226 Cottam and Cowlam, parish of, 136 n. 24 Cotton, Sir Robert, 101 n. 254 councils/synods, 103, 130 n. 11, 319 Aachen (A.D. 799), 430 Arles (A.D. 813), 352 Austerfield (W. Yorks) (A.D. ?703), 132 Chalôn (A.D. 647/53), 312 n. 188 Chelsea (A.D. 816), 99, 138 n. 33, 139 n. 34, 142 n. 35, 347 n. 49 Clichy (A.D. 626/27), 368 n. 116 Clovesho (A.D. 747), 32 n. 72, 34 n. 75, 149 n. 67, 170, 181, 199, 212 Compiègne (A.D. 757), 347 Corbridge? (A.D. 786), xvii, 339, 340, 356 Ephesus, 196 nn. 199, 200 Frankfurt (A.D. 794), 67, 173 n. 130, 261, 266 n. 41, 403 n. 227, 411 n. 253, 419, 420, 433, 449, 452, 458

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Frankish (A.D. ?743 and ?744), 347 n. 50 Friuli (A.D. 796/7), 41 n. 92 Hatfield (A.D. ?679), 427 Lateran (A.D. 649), 196 n. 199 Mercia (A.D. 786): see Mercia Nicene II (A.D. 787), 402, 404 Northumbria, in the time of King Alchred, 327 Northumbria (A.D. 786): see Northumbria Northumbrian Wincanheale, 240 Papal election decree (A.D. 769), 308 n. 178 Regensburg (A.D. 792), 332 Rome (A.D. 680), 196 n. 199 Rome (A.D. ?799), 428 n. 208 Sixth Oecumenical (A.D. 680/81), 362 n. 97 southern England (A.D. 816), 324 Toledo, 23 n. 51, 428 Wales (A.D. 786), 339 Country Priest’s Book, 194 n. 195 Court: see Aachen, Francia Coxwold (Yorks), monastery at, 152 Cracow, manuscripts, 113 n. 282 Crayke (Yorks), 150, 217 creeds, 193, 194 n. 194, 312, 425, 449 Alcuinian, 420, 421 Apostles, 383 n. 162 Athanasius, 383 and n. 161 Damasus, 194 n. 194, 428 n. 208 Expositio fidei catholicae sancti Hieronimi (associated with the Opus Caroli regis), 403, 428 in the capitulary of A.D. 789, 427 n. 304 in the Frankfurt synodal acta of A.D. 794, 420, 421, 426, 427–9 in the Stowe missal, 428 Niceno-Constantinopolitan, 193, 383 and n. 162, 427, 428, 429 Quicumque, 428 n. 307 Roman conciliar (A.D. 680), 422 n. 285 Toledan, 383, 427 criminals, sanctuary for, 352 Crispin and Crispinian, SS, 323 n. 227 Cross, Holy, 246 n. 350, 257, 374 dedications to, 155 feasts of, Exaltation, 31–2 n. 71, 250 mass-sets for, 374 crosses, from Bischofshofen, 158 n. 88 crosses, Ruthwell, 276 n. 76 Cucha Yalda, 152 n. 73

Cucualt, 152 n. 73 Cuculus English register-collection of the Alcuin letters, and, 93–4 letter from Archbishop Arn, 93 and n. 230 Cultram, Holme, 101 n. 254 Cumbria, 129 n. 8, 132 Cummian (or Lathcen), knowledge of by Alcuin, 274 Cummian, Penitential of (Excarpsus), 144 n. 49, 233, 234, 235 n. 321, 388, 389, 393 Cuthbert, abbot of Jarrow: see Guthbert Cuthbert, St., 56 n. 128, 132, 228 n. 299, 300, 414 church dedicated to, 319 community of, land-holdings of, 131 cult of, 216, 410 anonymous vita of, 56 n. 128, 132 n. 14, 146, 148 n. 65, 181, 214, 310 n. 183, 312 n. 188 Bede’s vitae of: see Bede miracles of, 132, 143, 146, 150 n. 68 fasting before Christmas, 194 n. 196 grants to, 135 n. 21 on Farne Island, 313 n. 191 on the blessing of the Northumbrian rustici, 309 n. 181 Cuthswith(a), book associated with, 266 n. 41 Cuthuuin, 228 n. 299 Cyneberht, bishop of Lindsey, 130–1 n. 11 Cynethrith, queen, 443 Cynewulf, bishop of Lindisfarne, 132, 133 n. 16, 333 Cynewulf, king of Wessex, 145 n. 55 visitation of by papal legates in A.D. 786, 338 Cyprianus Gallus, Heptateuchos, 278 Cyprian, pseudo-, 300, 349 n. 57, 417 n. 268 De duodecim abusivis, 275–6 Cyril of Alexandria, 424 Cyril, pseudo-, Greek-Latin dictionary of, 117 n. 293 Dagulf, royal chaplain(?) and scribe, 391 Alcuin letter to, 64 n. 153, 91, 365, 366 n. 108 Dagobert, king, 140 n. 36 Dalriada, relations with Frankia, 465

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  Damoetas: see Riculf of Mainz Danube, river, 394 n. 193 David, Biblical name use of by Alcuin, 368 literary references to, 368 n. 116 De benedictionibus patriarcharum, 7 n. 8 De categoriis decem: see Index of Alcuin’s Writings under carm. lxxiii De causis quibus nomina acceperunt duodecim signa, 290 n. 115 De consanguinitate, 359 De dignitate conditionis humanae, exposition of the mass, 6 De dignitate conditionis humanae: see Index of Alcuin’s Writings under pseudo-Alcuin De duodecim abusivis, 134 n. 19, 240, 349, 351 n. 66, 416 De epystolis, 298 n. 145 De imagine Dei: see Index of Alcuin’s Writings under pseudo-Alcuin De martirologio, 266 De processione, 6 n. 7 De psalmorum usu, 7 De ratione conputandi, 252 deacons, 30, 103, 160, 166, 169 n. 119, 173, 174, 228 n. 299, 306–8 archidiaconi, 167 n. 113 ordination of, 31–2, 32 n. 71, 32 n. 72 subdeacons, 169 n. 119, 173 n. 130, 174, 175 Dead, liturgies for, 34 n. 75, 208, 214, 389 n. 183, 464 deans (decani ), 167 debitum, 309 n. 181 dedications, of churches, 320, 321, 323–4, 324 n. 230 Defensor of Ligugé, Liber scintillarum, 350 n. 62, 354, 355 Deira, kingdom of, 129, 132, 136, 143 and n. 48, 165, 240 Denis, St., Miracula of by Hincmar, 22 n. 49, 121 Denmark, 303 Deus qui in hodierna die Unigenitus tuus . . . praesentatus, collect, 31 n. 69 Dialogus ecclesiasticae institutionis: see York dies aegyptiaci, 284, 285 n. 101 dilectio, 112 Dinant, 459 Dindimus, king of the Brahmans, letters of (pseudo-) to Alexander, 378–9

535

Dionysius, computus material associated with: see computus diplomata Constitutio de Hispanis, 464 n. 104 individual: DK 1, nos. 181: 300 n. 147; 192: 14 n. 27; 195: 14 n. 27; 240a: 14 n. 27; 240b: 14 n. 27; 254: 14 n. 27; 259: 14 n. 27; 266: 14 n. 27; 303: 14 n. 27 Frankish, 13–14, 300 n. 147, 332, 333, 362, 435 n. 9, 459, 464 n. 104 and see charters Disticha Catonis, 221 doctores/ductores, 108 Dodo, of ?York Alcuin correspondence with, and the registering of the letter collection, 93–4, 98, 328 dom, OE, 304 n. 161 domini/hlafordas, 148 Dominicans, 71 Dominus vobiscum, exposition of the mass, 6 n. 7 Don, river, 129 Donaemutha, monastery, 152 Doncaster, 239 Doon Hill (Dunbar), 149 n. 66 doorkeeper, clerical grades, 174 Dore, 129, 130 n. 9 dormitory, 224 Dracontius, De laudibus Dei, 277 Dracontius, poetry of, 255, 270 n. 52 Drau, river, 468 Driffield (E. Yorks), Northumbrian villa, 149, 150 n. 68 Dryhthelm, vision of, 29 n. 64, 146, 147 n. 61, 354 n. 76, 460 duces, ‘high reeves’, 140, 141–2, 143, 319 Duchesne, André, 11, 18, 21 n. 47, 121, 290 n. 116, 291 dulcedo, 110 Dümmler, Ernst, 11–12, 24 n. 54, 43 n. 97, 61, 124 Dunbar (East Lothian), Northumbrian villa, 149, 150 n. 68, 151 n. 71 Dunbarton, 130 n. 10 Dungal, 261 n. 27, 373 n. 131 letter collection of, 76, 289 n. 113 Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury, 84 correspondence of and related material in Cotton Tiberius A. xv, 95, 96 n. 238, and see Index of Manuscripts Cited under London,

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536

 

BL, Cotton Tiberius A., xv letter from Abbot Wido, 100 Düren (Eifel), 318 Durham annals of, 16 n. 32 history of: see Symeon of Durham manuscripts, 230 n. 305 Durstede, merchant from, 316 E(c)ghard, abbot, 339 Eada presbiter, 62 n. 146 Eadberht, bishop of Lindisfarne, 322 n. 226 Eadberht, king of Kent, 464 Eadberht, king of Northumbria, 130 n. 10, 132, 133 n. 16, 134 and n. 19, 154, 162, 238, 240, 249, 276 coinage of, 159 exchange of gifts with King Pippin, 245 letter to from Pope Paul I, 88, 152 Eadmer, 29 Vita Anselmi, 25 ealdorman (OE), 140, 147 Eanbald I, archbishop of York, xvii, 116–17, 128, 150, 170, 308, 327, 333, 339, 346, 399 n. 212, 412 n. 254, 445, 454 accession of and obtainment of the pallium in A.D. 780, 333 Alcuin correspondence with, 48, 49, 59 n. 135, 65, 86 n. 208, 432–3 at the Frankish Court, 301 new building at York in the late 770s and, 320, 326 resignation of, 433 sent Alcuin to Rome to obtain the pallium, 331 Eanbald II, archbishop of York, 86, 143 n. 48, 168, 170, 204, 249 n. 357, 311, 328, 340, 445 Alcuin correspondence with, 77 n. 186, 79 n. 189, 87, 94 Eanbald, priest, 432 Eanbald, York cleric, 85 Eanfrigith/Eanfrith, associated with St.-Josse, 343 n. 35 Eanwine, father of King Alhred of Northumbria, 240 Eanwulf, ?Northumbrian abbot letters to Charlemagne and Lul of Mainz, 296, 314 Eanwulf, cousin of King Æthelbald of Mercia, 241

Eanwulf, priest-abbot Alcuin letter to, 314, 316 n. 200 Eardwulf, king of Northumbria, 79, 141, 239 n. 329, 399 Alcuin letter to, 77, 399, 463 East Anglia, and North Sea trade, 161 n. 97 Easter baptism and, 332 calculation of, 217, 254 importance of in computistical treatises, 218 Roman Dionysian dating of, 219 canticum composed for, 317 n. 205 liturgical texts for, 200, 203 Paschal candle and, 200, 201 n. 216 services in Holy Week, 310 Maunday Thursday, 311 n. 186 Holy Saturday, 208 Easter Eve, 189, 208 Eata, 150 Ebo, archbishop of Rheims, 95 Ecgbeorht of Wessex, 394 n. 193 Ecgberht of Rathmelsigi (Clonmelsh, co. Carlow) and Iona, 163 Ecgfrid [Ecgfrith], king of Northumbria, 150 Ecgfrith, son of Offa, king of Mercia, 91, 143 n. 48, 242 n. 338, 322 n. 226, 348 n. 56 Alcuin letter to, 349 n. 58, 443 charter of, 135 n. 21 Ecgred, bishop of Lindisfarne letter to Archbishop Wulfsige of York, 89, 91 Ecgwulf, presbiter, 29 n. 65 Echa, the anchorite, 241, 313 Echternach, 317, 318 n. 207, 364 n. 106 Hieronymian martyrology associated with, 206 manuscripts, 107, 160, 206, 231 texts associated with, 107 n. 269, 282 and n. 94 eclipses, 292–3 Eddius Stephanus: see Stephen of Ripon Edgar, king, correspondence of, 95 Edilu, 100 n. 250 Edward III, 101 n. 254 Edwin, king of Deira, 313 n. 191 conversion of, 351 n. 66 murder of, 269 St. Peter’s (York) and, 155 Egberht, archbishop of York, 134, 164,

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  169, 170, 172, 230, 292, 306 n. 169, 397 n. 205 coinage of, 159 correspondence with Boniface, 160, 295 death of, 159 Dialogus, 135, 138, 142, 145 n. 55, 148 n. 64, 160 n. 92, 173 n. 130, 185 n. 168, 199 n. 212, 230, 342–3 concluding interrogatio de ieiunio Quatuor Temporum, 230 dating of, 231 interrogatio xvi, 199 n. 212 on antiphonals, 194 n. 195 on sacramentaries, 204 sources for, 231 letter from Bede, 32 n. 72, 37, 160 n. 92, 166 n. 108, 168, 230 letter from Boniface, 176 n. 138, 231 requesting books by Bede, 228, 229 n. 301 letter from Pope Paul I, 88, 152 letters to, 235 n. 322 on fasting before Christmas, 194 n. 196 ordination as deacon in Rome, 160 taught by Bede, 229 Egberht, archbishop of York, pseudo-, Paenitentiale, 135 n. 22, 137, 142 n. 33, 174, 232, 388, 393 authorship rejected, 234–5 Frankish lexica in, 235 n. 321 on antiphonals, 194 n. 195 Prologue of, 233–4 relationship with Alcuin and York rejected, 236 relationship with other early penitentials, 234–5 textual relations with Theodore of Canterbury’s Canones (Northumbrian Disciple’s version), 232–3 Egberht, bishop of Lindisfarne, 249 n. 357 Egino, bishop of Konstanz, Alcuin letter to, 451 Eigil, Vita Sturmi, 341 n. 30, 392 n. 191 Einhard, 440 letter from Lupus of Ferrières, 22 n. 49 on Alcuin’s teaching at the Frankish Court, 361 use of the term amicitia, 111 Vita Karoli, 21, 22, 391 n. 187 Elbe, river, 390 n. 186, 434 Elegius, Frankish bishop Alcuin letter to, 39 n. 85, 80 Eleutherius and his mother Anthia, SS, vita of, 28 n. 62

537

Elipand of Toledo, archbishop Alcuin letters to, 184, 422 on Adoptionism, 420, 423–4, 426 and see Adoptionism Elvet (nr Durham), 162, 249 n. 357 Ember Days, 32, 32 n. 71, 32–3 n. 72, 160 n. 92, 195, 248 Emma, of Normandy, 97 Enchiridion, 263 n. 35 England Court of, 97 letters from, 42 n. 95 liturgy of, 32, 32 n. 72, 33 n. 72, 196, 199 Northumbria and the cult of the Virgin Mary, 250–1 ordination rituals of, 248 relations with the Papacy, 337–8 English Channel: see Channel Ennodius, 448 n. 48 use of alma, 321 n. 222 Eosterwine, 323 n. 226 Ephesus, council of, 196 nn. 199, 200 epigraphy, 327 n. 241 associated with York, 325 n. 235 Epiphany, liturgical texts for, 196 epistiunculae, 40 epistola commendatoria, 96 epitaphs, 243 n. 342, 308–9 n. 180, 327 n. 241, 461 n. 92 Papal, 460, and see Index of Alcuin’s Writings under epitaph for Pope Hadrian Eraclius, writings of, 378 Ercanbald, 440 Eric, duke of Friuli, 78, 371 n. 123, 447 Alcuin letter to, 452 estates, Frankish, 109 Eucharist, doctrine of, 7 Eucherius of Lyons, 397 n. 205 Eufrosina, St., Life of, 121 Eugenia: see Æthelburg Eugenius of Toledo, Bible-poem of, 407 Euphemia, St., 209 Eusebius, St., vita of, 430 n. 316 Eusebius-Rufinus, De historia ecclesiastica, 261, 266 Eutropius, 110 n. 273 Breviarium, knowledge of by Alcuin and Bede, 283 exorcism in Bede, 213 n. 250 in the baptismal rite, 213 in the Old Gelasian, 213 n. 250

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538

 

exorcists, 174, 175 Expositio orationis Dominicae, 5 n. 6 expositiones missae, 5–6, 172 De dignitate conditionis humanae, 6 Dominus vobiscum, 6 n. 7 Igitur converso primum omnium dicere debemus, quando devota mente convertitur, 5–6 and n. 7 Primum in ordine, 6 and n. 7 Exultet, 200, 201 n. 216 Ezra/Esdra, orthographic variants, 406 n. 236, 408 fabrics/textiles, 158 n. 88, 161 n. 96 Falstone, monument, inscription on, 144 Farfa, monastery of, 452 manuscripts, 37 n. 79 Farne Island, 313 n. 191 fasting, 349, 369 n. 118 Fastrada, queen of Charlemagne, 362, 369, 432, 434 n. 7 letter from Charlemagne, 369 n. 118 Faustus of Riez, De Spiritu sancto, 425 Felix of Urgel, 14 n. 28, 420, 421 n. 283, 423, 428 n. 308 Alcuin correspondence with, 49, 67, 184 n. 162, 403, 422, 424 recantation of his support for Adoptionism, 403 n. 228, and see Adoptionism Felix, Vita s. Guthlaci, 147 n. 59, 213 n. 251 Ferrières, monastery, 30, 342 anonymous author of Vita Alcuini possibly from, 18, and see Index on Alcuin under his life manuscripts, 37 n. 80 Festus, Breviarium, 55 n. 126 feudalism, 111 fideiussores, baptismal sponsors, 212, 352 Filioque, debate of, 5 fish, 155 and nn. 80, 81, 160 Fladbury, abbess of, 444 n. 39 flagrantia, 105 Flavigny, manuscripts, 5 n. 6 Fleury florilegia associated with, 108 n. 270, 330 manuscripts, 15 n. 31, 221 n. 276, 330 Flodoard, chronicler, 37 Florence, English visits to, 318 n. 209 florilegia early Carolingian, 178 n. 141, 179–80 of Fleury, 108 n. 270, 330

Florus of Lyons, florilegium, 122 Foliot, Gilbert, Expositio in canticum canticorum, 11 n. 18 Fontanelle, chronicle of, 393 n. 193 Fordrad, presbyter, Alcuin letter to, 123 formulary letters, 143 n. 48 formulary-books, 52, 74 of Salzburg, 52 of St.-Martin’s (Tours), 65 n. 155 Forster, Froben, 4, 10 n. 16, 11, 12, 33, 58 n. 134, 74 n. 175, 75 n. 178, 79 n. 190, 82, 182, 290 n. 116, 291, 406, 450 n. 58 Forth of Firth, 130, 132 Forthred, abbot, 152, 160 n. 92 Fortunatus Carmina, 39, 255, 368 n. 116 Vita s. Martini, 253 n. 4, 408 n. 242 Foss, river, 157 Four Crowned Martyrs, 323 fragantia, 105 Francia administration of, 109 archbishops of, 248 embassy to Rome (A.D. 796) headed by Angilbert, 454, 458, and see Angilbert kingdom of, 129, 146, 331 political unity of, 134–5 relations with Ireland/Dalriada, 465 relations with Mercia, 249 n. 358, 464 relations with Northumbria, 316–18, esp. 318 n. 210, 466 royal capitularies of, 230 and see Carolingian Empire, Frankish Court Frankish Court, 6, 13, 14, 22, 44, 68 n. 163, 80, 92, 109 n. 273, 122, 301, 303, 331, 336, 359, 360, 361, 365–6, 396 n. 200, 411, 412, 432, 435, 469 Adoptionism and, 67, and see Adoptionism Alcuin’s visit there pre-780, xvii, 316–18, 335, 344 at Aachen, 44, 76, 77 n. 183, 107 n. 270, 127, 342, 352 n. 67, 379 n. 149, 406, 409, 435–6, 437, 438, 439 at Frankfurt, 419, 432 at Regensburg, 420 at Worms, 357, 362 book-list of, 359 n. 87, and see Index

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  of Manuscripts Cited under Berlin, Diez B. 66 carmina figurata of, 373–6 composers of royal letters at, 456 and n. 75 computus material available at, 287 creeds known to, 403 Easter annals from 782–787, 15 English visitors for Alcuin at, 301 handbook of secular letters connected with, 372–6 issue of grants as rewards to royal advisers and officials, 340–1 itinerant, 317 n. 205, 318 knowledge of Cassiodorus at, 271 legates to from Constantinople, 14; from Rome, 14 library of, 264, 423, 425 n. 295 magistri of, 308 manuscripts associated with, 244 n. 345, 360 pre-Aachen years, 360–1, 423 production of letters in the king’s name, 385, and see Charlemagne production of psalters at, 403 n. 227 relations with Alcuin, 363–7, 372–9 Royal Annals of: see annals scholars associated with, 343–4, 345–6, 357–8, 362, 363 script associated with, 13 texts associated with, 283, 285, 303 texts available to, 259, 260, 268, 280, 287, 317 n. 206, 347, 351, 359, 361, 384 and n. 164, 403 n. 227, 404 visitors to, 244 n. 344 writing-office of, 385 Frankfurt, 432 n. 1, 451 council of (A.D. 794), 67, 173 n. 130, 261, 403 n. 227, 411 n. 253, 419, 420, 421, 426, 427–9, 430, 433, 449, 452, 458 palace at, 419 n. 277 Frankish Royal Annals: see annals Freising (S. Germany), 237, 367 n. 113 manuscripts, 19 n. 42, 180 n. 148, 355 n. 79, 429 Friducinus, English abbot/bishop, 79 Fridugis, abbot of St.-Martin (Tours), 36 n. 78, 57, 61, 63 n. 150, 107, 185 n. 166 Alcuin letter to, 80 Friduin, abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow Alcuin letter to, 396 n. 203

539

Fridulo, builder of a church in Lucca, 332 friendship, Alcuin’s concept of: see amicitia Frisia, 303, 390 n. 186, 391, 392 n. 191 relations with Northumbria, 161 and n. 97, 305 sceattas associated with, 161 n. 97 Frithowald, bishop of Whithorn, 249 n. 357 Friuli, council at (A.D. 796/7), 41 n. 92 Froben: see Forster Fronclond, 394 n. 193 Frotgoneg, associated with Uurmec, 343 n. 35 Fulda, 20, 22 n. 49, 31 n. 71, 32 n. 71, 73 and n. 174, 274 n. 67, 385 n. 168 Alcuin correspondence to, 171 n. 123 annalistic versions associated with, 18 n. 36, 19 n. 40 language used in religious communities at, 301 manuscripts, 20, 246 n. 351, 256 n. 15, 266 n. 41, 379 n. 150, 407 n. 238 Fulrad, abbot of St.-Denis, 341 n. 29, 344 as Court chaplain to Charlemagne, 317, 358 Alcuin’s epitaph for (carm. xcii/2), 169 n. 119 in Alsace, 317 tomb of, 344 n. 38 funerals, liturgy for, 127, 389 n. 183 Gale, Thomas, 81, 123 Galicia (Spain), 14 Gallican, liturgy, 147 n. 59, 193 n. 193, 194, 195 n. 196, 197, 199, 248, 250, 324; and see Psalters Garalt (OE. Garuuald?), bishop of Mayo (Ireland), 163 Gaul councils of, 235 n. 321 hagiography of, 26–7 liturgical reforms of, 175 texts associated with, 376 Gelasius I, pope on the division of temporal and spiritual power, 416 and n. 268 genealogies associated with Mercia, 242 royal ‘northern’ collection, 241, 242

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540

 

Gennadius of Marseilles Liber sive Definitio ecclesiasticorum dogmatum, 266 n. 41 Dogmata [al. expositio] catholicae fidei, 425 Genoels-Elderen (Belgium), ivory book-covers from, 159 geometry, 254 George, bishop of Ostia and Amiens, 367 legatine report of from Northumbria (A.D. 786), 337, 338 n. 20, 339, 346, 347, 357 Germanus, St., vita of, 386 Gerold, comes and Baioariae praefectus, brother of Queen Hildegard, 327 n. 241, 371, 394, 400 n. 218 Alcuin letter to, 407 Gerona, 392 n. 191 Gerward, Court librarian, books to Lorsch, 259, 260 n. 25 gesith/gesithas (OE), 138 n. 29, 142, 143 Gesta sanctorum patrum Fontanellensi coenobii, 15 n. 29, 393 n. 193 Ghaerbald of Liège, 204 n. 224 Gildas De excidio, 271–2, 370 n. 122, 415, 416 orthography of name of, 271 n. 58 Gisla, abbess of Chelles, sister of King Charles, 352 n. 71 Alcuin correspondence with, 78–9, 86 n. 211, 184–5, 225 n. 289, 227 n. 295, 367 n. 115, 369 and n. 121, 389 n. 182, 405, 437, 443 n. 37 glass artefacts, 157 n. 85 Glastonbury, 96 relics of Ceolfrith and, 323 n. 226 texts associated with, 94 n. 232, 95, 97 n. 239 Gloria in excelsis Deo, 193, 194 n. 194 glossaries, 168 n. 115, 175 Abavus, 55 Bobbio, 9 Corpus, 146 n. 57 Épinal, see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Épinal, BM, 72 glosses, 268 n. 46, 286 Northumbrian and Irish 276 Old English 347 n. 49 Gloucestershire, 92 Godescalc, 346 Gorze, 169 n. 118, 325 gospel-books Book of Kells, 189 n. 180

Book of Mulling, 188 Lindisfarne Gospels, 187 Maeseyck, 256 n. 15 Rushworth Gospels, 189 n. 180 Gothia, 47, 48 n. 107 Alcuin correspondence to, 183 Gottschalk, on the spelling adulescens, 106, 108 Gradual Psalms, 182, 258 graduals, 195 grammatica, 122, 254 cantus-grammatica-computus triad of medieval education, 224–5 exercises in, 222–3 in a religious community’s scola, 236 Spanish texts associated with, 221 spiritual knowledge, as a means to, 236 teaching of, 220–4, 462 and see reading, writing grave-covers, 153 n. 74 grave-stelae, 157 Great St. Bernard, Alpine pass, 243 Greece Second Council of Nicaea and, 404 liturgy associated with, 196, 325 and n. 234 language of manuscripts signatures in, 256 n. 17 texts translated into Latin from, 347 n. 50 use of in month-names, 302 Green Shiel (Northumberland), 136 n. 24 Gregory III, pope letters of (nos. 43, 45), 140 n. 36 Gregory of Nazianzen, bishop as a source for Alcuin, 196 n. 200 De luminibus, sermon, 389 letters of, 196 n. 199 Gregory of Tours Historia Francorum, 413 n. 259 Vitae Patrum, 171 n. 124 Gregory the Great, pope cult of, 216 Whitby vita of, 147 n. 61, 157 mass book associated with, 204 mention of in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 267 mission to Anglo-Saxon England and, 185–6 orationes associated with, 183 n. 158, 329 use of by Alcuin, 192, 266–7 writings of, 119, 300

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  Dialogi, 312 n. 188 Homiliae in Ezechielem, 266 letters of, 187 n. 174, 189 nn. 180, 182, 223 n. 281, 294, 296, 297, 358 n. 86, 399 n. 211, 412 n. 254, 453 n. 67; as a possible source for Egberht’s Dialogus, 231; as a source for Alcuin, 192 Libellus Synodicus, 307 Moralia in Iob, 274 n. 67, 299 n. 147, 300 nn. 148, 149, 330, 364 n. 103, 417 n. 268 Regula pastoralis, 266, 300 n. 148; as a possible source for Egberht’s Dialogus, 231 n. 308 Responsiones, 33 n. 72, 167 n. 112 use of flagella, 300 use of rector, 381 n. 157 Gregory the Great, pope, ?pseudoConcordia testimoniorum, 379 Gregory, abbot of Utrecht, 248, 305 Grimalt [Grimold], abbot of St. Gallen, library of, 61 n. 145 Guarnerius, ‘favoured son’ of Benedict of Aniane, 18 Gundrada (al. Eulalia), sister of Abbot Adalhard of Corbie, cousin of King Charles, 76–7, 441 Guthbert [Cuthbert], deacon, abbot of Jarrow Epistula de obitu Bedae, 197 n. 205, 198 n. 207, 228, 289 n. 111, 230 n. 305 Lul correspondence of, 228 and n. 299, 295, 297 Guthlac, St., 143 n. 48 Habbakuk, 113 canticle associated with, 186 Hackness, 228 Hadrian I, pope, 307 n. 175, 308, 345, 352 n. 71, 366 n. 108, 425, 447 n. 47, 448 n. 52, 454, 457 n. 79, 460 n. 90, 464, 465 Alcuin correspondence with, 116, 445 n. 42, 448, 449 n. 55, 452–4, 460 n. 89, 461 Capitulare adversus synodum, 41 n. 92 death of, 16, 455 epitaphs for by Alcuin, 246, 439 n. 24, 442 n. 34, 457 n. 97, 459–60 by Theodulf, 460

541

Frankish embassy to, 448 legates to from King Offa over Lichfield as archbishopric, 401 letters of, 117, 140 n. 36, 298 n. 144, 453 and see the Codex Carolinus to King Charles, 456 n. 77 to King Charles, on accusations made against King Offa of Mercia, 337 and n. 20 to King Charles, on Frankish success against the Saxons and the dispatch of Roman legates in A.D. 786, 338 to King Charles, visitations of a Roman legate to Canterbury and to the Mercian Court, 338 meeting with Alcuin in A.D. 781 on the Adoptionist doctrines, 420 n. 280 poem to (carm. xxxv, in ‘Pauli et Petri Carmina’, MGH Poet. 1, 69–70) written in the name of Charlemagne, by Alcuin or Angilbert, 282 rumoured accusations against, 338 n. 20 tomb of in St. Peter’s, 461 Haduuin, bishop of Mayo (Ireland), 163 Hagia Sophia (Constantinople), 321 Hagia Sophia (York): see Alma Sophia hagiography, genre of, 25–7, 30 Haimo of Auxerre, 176 n. 139 Haito of Basel, 204 n. 224 Halitgar, bishop of Cambrai, 95 Hatfield, council of (A.D. ?679), 427 Hearne, Thomas, 11 n. 18 Hebrew, language of, use of in month-names, 302 Heiric of Auxerre, 31 n. 71, 32 n. 71 Helathirnum, 142 n. 33 Helbert: see Ælbert of York Helisachar, chancellor, 19 preface for the Supplement to ?Alcuin’s Comes/lectionary, 19, 20 n. 42 letter to Nebridius (MGH, Epp. V, pp. 307–9), 19 n. 42 helmets, Coppergate, 158 Hemma, comes, 143 Herefordshire, 92 Heribald, cleric, 143 n. 48 Hesse, 140 n. 36 Hewalds, SS, cult of, 216

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Hexham, 99 n. 246, 150, 162, 167 Alcuin correspondence to, 107 bishops of, 133 n. 18, 333 burial of King Ælfwald at, 319 diocese of, 133 place-name of, 92 n. 227 regio of, 149 n. 67 Hezekiah, biblical, annihilation of the Assyrians, 414 hidage, 135 n. 22 Higbald, bishop of Lindisfarne, 339 n. 24 Alcuin correspondence to, 93, 315, 333, 397 n. 205, 410, 411, 412 n. 253, 415, 433, 437 Higham, North, 129 n. 8 Higlac, lector et presbiter in Northumbria Alchfrid letter to, 88, 179, 328–300 Hilary of Poitiers, St., 227, 424 knowledge of at York, 261 Hild, abbot of Whitby, 295 n. 133 Hildebald, archbishop of Cologne, Court chaplain, 231 n. 309, 423 n. 292, 430 n. 314, 440 and n. 28, 449, 453 Hildegard, queen of Charlemagne, 172 n. 125, 344, 371 epitaph for by Paul the Deacon, 461 n. 92 Hildesheim, manuscripts, 337 n. 19 Hilduin, abbot of St.-Denis, 67 Hilduin Gesta Dagoberti, 121 letter to from Amalarius of Metz, 20 n. 43 Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, 10, 21, 58, 67, 116, 120, 276 n. 74, 286, 387, 396 n. 201, 429 correspondence with Remigius, 120 letter collection of, 37 Miracula S. Dionysii, Prologue to, 22 n. 49 on Marian devotion, 121 Historia post Bedam, 16 n. 32, 17 Hitto of Freising, 355 n. 79 Hoddahelm, Mercian monastery, 401 n. 219 Holy Innocents, 202 Holy Saturday, 47 Holy Week, liturgical texts for, 196, 197 homiliaries, 23, 235 n. 321, 387 Carolingian, 354–5 Rochester, 23 n. 51 homilies, 23 n. 51

homosexuality, medieval, 114 n. 285, 115–16 Honorius I, pope, letters of, 401 Horace, writings of, 413 n. 259 horses, and the military, 143 n. 48 Hrabanus Maurus, 19, 31 n. 71, 32 n. 71 Alcuin letters to, 60 hymns of, 444 n. 40 In honorem sanctae crucis (De laudibus sanctae crucis), 19, 20 poetic intercession in (inc. Sancte Dei, presul, meritis in saecula vivens), 18 knowledge of Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana, 263 n. 35 letters of, 27: 297 n. 141; 28: 338 n. 20 Hroethberht, 144 Hrothgar, 113 Hruringaham, 150 n. 68 Humber, river, 129, 131, 146, 152, 159, 160, 161 n. 96, 165, 335 n. 13 Hundrada, of Mercia Alcuin letter to, 369 n. 121, 443 Huns, 446 n. 44 Hwætberht, 323 n. 226 Hygbald of Lindisfarne: see Higbald hymnaries Irish, 193 n. 193, 276 ‘New Hymnary’, 202–3 ‘Old Hymnary’, 202, 203–4 and n. 222 hymns, 77, 203, 374–5 n. 136, 417, 423, 426 Ambrosian, 168 n. 117, and see Ambrose in Book IV (De hymnis) of Alcuin’s De laude Dei, 201 use of in public and private liturgy, and for teaching, 203 individual citations: A solis ortus cardine, hymn, 202 Aeterna Christi munera, 202 Aeterne rerum conditor, 168 n. 117 Ambulemus in prosperis, 201 n. 217 Apostolorum gloriam, 202, 203 n. 221 De opere sex dierum primordialium, 202 n. 219 Hymnos canamus gloriae, hymn, 202 Ignis creator igneus, hymn, 200 n. 216 In pace Christi dormiam, hymn, 201 n. 217 Intende qui regis Israel, Ambrosian hymn, 202, 423 n. 291 Laetare, caelum, desuper, hymn, 203

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  Praecursor altus[-ti] luminis, hymn, 202, 203 n. 221 Urbs beata Hierusalem, hymn, 417 n. 272 Veni redemptor gentium, hymn, 203 and see Æthelthryth, Augustine, Bede, Cædmon, Canterbury, Cassander, Hrabanus Maurus, Ireland, Isidore, Italy, Ninian, Sedulius, Wearmouth-Jarrow, York iconoclasm, 419, 448 Ida, king, 240, 319 Idithun, member of the Frankish Court, 440 n. 28 Igitur converso primum omnium dicere debemus, quando devota mente convertitur, exposition of the mass, 5–6 and n. 7 Imma, iuvenis, 138 n. 29, 143 n. 48 Incipiunt quaedam epistolae de quorundam nobilium doctorum libris excerptae, 54 n. 123 Ingeld, reference to in Alcuin’s letter to Bishop Speratus, 302, and see Index of Alcuin’s writings under ep. no. 124 Ingelheim, Frankish Court at, 435 Inishboffin (Ireland), 162, 277 Innocent I, pope, letters of, 347 n. 51 inscriptions, 144, 257, 278, 325, 327 n. 241, 375 associated with York, 157 and n. 85, 159 influence of on Alcuin’s writings, 278 on the Coppergate helmet, 257 Pope Hadrian’s epitaph, 459–60, and see Hadrian and see epitaphs introits, 34 n. 75, 195 Iona, 465 relations with Northumbria, 163 Ionas, abbot of Kaiserwerth, 316 Ireland, 128, 210, 218, 225, 253, 314, 340, 362, 399, 465 and n. 107 annals of, on Æthelwald Moll, 240 computus material associated with, 219 n. 270, 252, 291, 361 n. 92 context of Gildas in, 271 n. 58 glosses associated with, 276 law-codes associated with, 349–50 liturgy associated with, 193 n. 193, 200–1, 217, 429 Bible versions associated with, 187, 189 n. 180 biblical exegesis associated with, 5 n. 6, 46 n. 103, 276

543

feast of All Saints celebrated in, 217 n. 263 hymns associated with, 276 liturgical books associated with, 193 prayers associated with, 181 n. 154, 183 n. 158, 210, 329 Psalter, type of used by, 181 textual relationship with prayers in the Book of Cerne, 210 manuscripts associated with, 188 names associated with, 316 n. 202 pseudo-Alcuin works associated with, 10 n. 16 relations with English religious communities, 276 relations with Frankia, 465 relations with Mercia, 16 n. 32 relations with Northumbria, 162–3 scholars associated with, 348 n. 55 texts associated with, 16, 89 n. 218, 134 n. 19, 153 n. 101, 218 texts which influenced Alcuin, 274–7 Viking attacks of, 414 n. 260 and see Mayo Irish Sea, 129, 130 n. 9, 133 Isaac, biblical, 115 Isanbert, monk-scribe, manuscript-group associated with, 9 n. 15, 10 n. 16, 71, 72 n. 169, 73 Isidore, 52 n. 120, 271, 356, 404 n. 230, 416 De ecclesiasticis officiis, 174 nn. 132, 134, 354 n. 76, 389 n. 182; on the clerical grades, 169 n. 119, 174 De natura rerum, 168 n. 117, 273–4 Differentiae, 253 Etymologiae, 138 n. 30, 174 nn. 132, 134, 200 n. 214, 224 n. 284, 225 n. 289, 254, 268 n. 45, 272, 274 n. 67, 376, 397 n. 205, 413 n. 258, 425 on adolescentia, 106 n. 264 on the clerical grades, 174 on the concept of Time and the computus, 217–18 on the diaconate, 307 on the ‘Seven Liberal Arts’, 253 Sententiae, 261, 273, 299, 330, 349, 353, 355 n. 79, 354 n. 76, 417 n. 268 Synonyma, 177 n. 140, 184 n. 163, 273, 354 n. 76 use of by Alcuin, 271–3

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use of by Carolingian writers, 267 Versus in bibliotheca, 273 writings of, general on hymns, 200 on penitence, 355 on prayers for the unrepentent dead, 354 n. 76 use of flagella, 300 Isidore, pseudo-, Testimoniae divinae scripturae et satrum, 354 n. 76 Istria, 447 n. 47 Italy, xi, 28, 44, 50, 109, 117 n. 293, 122, 145 n. 53, 154 n. 77, 167 n. 113, 2–3, 244, 263 n. 54, 316 n. 200, 332, 333 n. 7, 341 n. 30, 344, 345, 358 and n. 86, 362 and n. 98, 364, 367, 368, 390, 407 n. 238, 439 and n. 23, 450, 451 and n. 63, 454, 461, 462, 466, 467 n. 112, 468, 469 Alcuin visits to, xvii, 333 hymnaries associated with, 203 manuscripts, 23 n. 51, 36, 37 n. 79 references to magistri, 237 texts associated with, 231 Itherius, abbot, 386 n. 174 Iudicii signum sudavit rupada tellus, anonymous verse-prophecy, 263 n. 32 iudicium, 304 n. 161 iuramentum, term used in Frankish capitularies, 233 n. 317 Iustus et Pastor, SS, 192 n. 187 Iuvencus cited in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 277 Evangelia, 139 n. 34 ivories, 449 book-covers, from Genoels-Elderen (Belgium), 159 Ivrea, 66 n. 160, 244 n. 344, 317 n. 205 Jacob, Italian notary, 362 Jaenberht, archbishop of Canterbury, 248 n. 357, 309 n. 181, 338, 399 n. 212, 401 James, deacon of York, 307 n. 176 Jarrow, monastery, 295 abbot of, 239 n. 331 Alcuin letters to, 465 n. 105 coinage from, 159 language used in religious communities at, 301 Jerome, St., 9 n. 15, 176 n. 139, 189 n. 179, 367, 470 creed attributed to, 403 dedicating his works to women, 225 n. 289, 226

knowledge of at York, 261 use of by Alcuin, 261, 263–6, 424 writings of, general, 118, 397 n. 205 on biblical study, 226 on Origen, 225 n. 289 on slavery, 139 n. 34 on the Resurrection, 383 n. 161 prayers associated with, 201, 273 n. 63 writings of Chronicle version of, 261 Comm. in Ecclesiasten, 226, 266 Comm. in epist. ad Galatas, 104 n. 259 Comm. in epist. ad Titum, 151 n. 72, 424 Comm. in epist. Paulinas, 139 n. 34, 409 Comm. in euangelium Matthaei, 266 Comm. in Isaiam, 397 n. 205 Epistolae, 6 n. 7, 37, 39 n. 86, 103 n. 257, 104, 226, 264–5, 309 n. 180, 398 n. 209, 444; 3 (ad Rufinum): 264–5 and nn. 38, 39; 6: 110 n. 273 (pseudo-); 22: 265 n. 39; 50: 138 n. 30; 53: 265 n. 39; 64: 265 n. 39; 71: 265 n. 39; 107: 265 n. 39; 108: 252 n. 2, 265 n. 39; 112: 265 n. 39 Hebraicae Quaestiones in Genesim, 266 Liber Interpretationis hebraicorum nominum, 266 Jerome, St., pseudocreed associated with, 194 n. 194 Libellus fidei: see Pelagius Jerusalem, 14, 80 n. 192, 245 Jesse, bishop of Amiens, 440 John Chrysostom, in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 260 John II, pope, letters of, 216 n. 259, 298 n. 144 John III/IV, subdeacon, then pope, translation from the Greek of the Verba Seniorum, 266 John VI, pope, 216 n. 259 John VII, pope, epitaph for, 278 John XIV, pope, 96 n. 237 John XV, pope, 96 n. 237 John of Beverley, bishop of York, 143 and n. 48, 167, 322 n. 226, 334 n. 9, 349 n. 58 cult of, 216 depositio of, 215 John of Fécamp, Confessio Fidei, 7

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  John of Gorze, on reading, 224 n. 285 John of Salerno, Vita of Odo of Cluny, 28 n. 62 John of Worcester, Chronicle of, 412 n. 254 on saints venerated at York, 215 John the Baptist, St., 202, 321 decollatio/passio of, 207, 209 Bede’s hymn for, 322 n. 222 John the Deacon, letter ad Senarium, 175 John the evangelist, St. ante portam Latinam, 322–3 n. 226 John, precentor of St. Peter’s (Rome), 195 Jonas of Orléans, 386–7 Jonas of Bobbio Vita Columbani, 24, 26 n. 59 Vitae sanctorum, 388 Joscelyn, John, 83, 48 n. 109, 329 Joseph, Irish pupil of Colcu and Alcuin, 277 n. 77, 306, 343, 362 Alcuin correspondence to, 395, 397–8, 402 n. 222 poem of, 373 Josephus, 267 n. 45 Jouarre, manuscripts, 385 Julius Victor, Ars rhetorica, 295 n. 132, 298 Justinus, epitome of Pompeius’s History, 259 and n. 25, 283 Juvenal, 413 n. 258 Kaiserwerth, 316 Kent, 309 n. 181, 352 charters associated with, 143 n. 46, 173 n. 130 manuscripts associated with, 209 North Sea trade and, 161 n. 97 relations with Mercia, 401 Kentings, Alcuin letter to, 55 n. 127, 142 n. 33, 415 n. 262 killings, penance for, 145 n. 55 kingship, 348–9 and n. 56, 351 and n. 66 authority over the Christian world, 47 Christian authority, as proposed in the Opus Caroli, 405 church and, 134, 348 n. 56 Frankish relations with the papacy, 457 inauguration rituals for, 239 n. 329 on the pious king and the sinful king, 414–15, 418 philosopher-kings, 378 protective authority of, 464 n. 104 spiritual and secular power, 410, 416–17

545

Koaena: see Ælberht of York Konstanz, 451 Kyle, 130 n. 10, 131 Labbé, Sacrosancta concilia, 301 n. 150 Lactantius, 371 n. 123 Lammermuir Hills, 131 landownership, 148 Lanfranc of Bec and Canterbury, 368 n. 115 Langres, 315, 335 n. 13 Lantfrid, 31 n. 71 Lantfrith, Miracula s. Swithuni, 96 Laon cathedral of, 278 manuscripts, 5 Lastingham, 151 n. 70, 228 Latin, language importance of liturgy to, 176 use of, 301, 312 laudes, Italian, 155 Lauds, Office of, 186 Lavariano, (nr. Udine, Italy), 317 n. 205 law-codes, 162 n. 100, 370 n. 123 Frankish, 122 Lex Baiuuariorum, 371 n. 123 Lex Romana, 349 Northumbrian, 135 of A.D. 786, 347–8 and see canon-law Le Fèvre, Nicholas, 5 lectionaries, 23 n. 51, 193, 195 n. 196, 235 n. 321, 265 n. 40, 384 n. 163 associated with Alcuin (the Comes), 8, 19, 20 n. 42, 191, 193 n. 192, 250, 251 epistle-, 250, 251 Gallican, 207 Luxeuil, 208 n. 235, 384 n. 163 mass-, 409 Neapolitan, 207 Roman, 147 n. 60, 188, 191, 208 Spanish, 191 Toledo Liber Comicus, 192 n. 187 Würzburg, 193 n. 192 lections, 239 n. 329 lector, 174, 175–6 Legatine report of A.D. 786: see papacy Legimus in ecclesiasticus historiis, sermon, 72 n. 171 Lehmann, Paul, 4 n. 4, 13 n. 24 Leicester, bishop of, 42 n. 94 Leidrad, bishop of Lyon, 56, 367, 377 n. 144, 403 n. 227

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Leipzig, University of, 23 Leland, John, 10–11 Lent baptismal scrutinia during, 213 fasting in, 245 n. 346 liturgy associated with, 196, 206, 389 n. 181 observances for, 309 n. 182 Leo I, pope, 117 epitaph for, 278 sermons of, 453 and n. 67 Leo III, pope, 80 n. 192, 451 nn. 61, 62, 455, 466 Alcuin letters to, 460 n. 89, 461 Alcuin letters to in the name of King Charles, 436, 445 n. 42, 448 and n. 52, 456 n. 77, 457 n. 79, 460 n. 89 letter to King Coenwulf of Mercia, 338 n. 22 letters of, 192 n. 191, 245 n. 348, 453 n. 67 mention of in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 267 Leo, bishop of Trevi, as papal legate, 96 Leodegarius, bishop of Murbach, 244 n. 343 Lérins, island and monastery of, 47 n. 106 Letbert of Lille, abbot of St.-Ruf, Commentarius in LXXV Psalmos, 5 letter-carriers (missi ), 40 letters autographs, of Alcuin, 400 circular, 40, 42 n. 95 fair copies of, 103, 104 form of address-clause, 83, 84, 85, 86 n. 208, 90, 102, 365 n. 108, 366, 388, 390 n. 186 dating-clause, 314 n. 195 endorsements, 102 final salutations, 296, 297; head-notes (lemma), 83, 84, 85, 90, 91–2, 102 Interrogatio-Responsio form, 74 introductory sentences, 297, 298 and n. 144, 363 n. 100 formulary language in, 54 n. 123, 55, 62, 64 formulary letter-book, 65, 100, 102 from Salzburg, 298 n. 144 genre of, 38, 39–1 business, 66

consolation, 467 epistola admonitoria, 299–300 friendship, 298 n. 144 in Old English, 75 n. 178 of the Church Fathers, 103 oral transmission of, 40 and see Index on Alcuin under Letters, and Index of Alcuin’s Writings under Epistolae Leutfred, bishop of Mayo (Ireland), pope, 38 n. 83, 163 Alcuin letter to, 340 Levison, Wilhelm, 3, 17 n. 35 libelli precum: see prayerbooks Libellus sacrosyllabus, of the Italian bishops, 420, 421 Liber comicus, of Toledo, 208 n. 235 Liber diurnus, 192, 193 n. 191, 455 Liber pontificalis, 152 n. 73, 153, 394 n. 193, 448 n. 51, 451 n. 62 Liber secundus, 135 n. 22 Liber synodalis (A.D. 792) with Alcuin’s anti-Adoptionist letter, 402–3 Liberatus of Carthage, Breviarium, 424, 425 n. 295 Libri Carolini: see Opus Caroli Regis libri vitae, 140 n. 37, 215 ‘Lindisfarne’, 100 n. 250, 140, 164, 173, 179, 238 n. 328, 247 n. 354, 313 n. 191, 314 n. 195, 315 n. 196, 327, 343 n. 35 of Whitby, 295 n. 133 Lichfield, archbishopric of, 249 n. 358, 401 Liège bishop of, 453 manuscripts, 221 n. 276, 278 Lincoln, 130 n. 11 Lindisfarne, 56 n. 128, 124, 148 n. 65, 154, 162, 276 n. 75, 389 n. 182, 396 n. 198 Aidan and, 132, and see Aidan Alcuin correspondence to, 245, 246, 315 annals of, 16 n. 32 anonymous author of the Vita Cuthberti from: see Cuthbert bishops of, consecration of, 248 Cuthbert and, 132, and see Cuthbert diocese of, 130, 132, 133 Liber Vitae of: see libri vitae manuscripts, 231, 257 royal gifts to, 150

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  sack of ( June A.D. 793), xviii, 15 n. 29, 16, 55, 139, 140, 141 n. 40, 238 n. 327, 245, 267, 271, 300, 301, 313, 395, 399 n. 211, 402 n. 224, 410, 466; Alcuin’s response to, 410–14, 416, 418 type of Psalter used by, 181 Lindsey, 129, 130 and n. 11, 249 bishops of, 321 litanies, 178 n. 143, 197, 369 n. 118 Irish, 163 n. 101 maiores, 198 n. 210 literacy, lay, 173 liturgy influence of on Alcuin: see Index on Alcuin under liturgy of the Dead, 127, 127–8 n. 2 private, 203, 217 and see Carolingia, England, Francia, Gallican, Ireland, Rome, Spain, Visigothic Liudger, a Frisian, deacon, 299 n. 146 companion of Northumbrian Aluberht to York, 248, 249 ordination of at York, 305 education of at York by Alcuin, 305 possibly taking books from York, 260 foundation of Werden, 257 vita of by Bishop Altfrid [Altfrith], 161, 248, 305 Liuphramm, archbishop, 54 n. 123 Liutgarda, queen of King Charles, 35 n. 77, 90 n. 221, 441, 452 Alcuin letter to, 434, 437 death of, 58 gifts to Peter of Milan, 450 Loire, river, 122, 123, 155 n. 80, 224 n. 283, 436 lower region, manuscripts from, 35, 68 n. 163, 80 and n. 192 Lombardy, kingdom of, 129, 154 n. 77, 244, 245, 358 n. 86, 375 London, 335 n. 13 Lord’s Prayer, 312, 379 n. 150 Lorica of Laedcenn, 210 n. 241, 239 n. 330 Loriquet, 120, 121 Lorsch, abbey, 63 n. 149, 169 n. 118, 334, 345 annals of, 18 n. 36, 352 n. 71, 357 n. 84 Carolingian library of, 63, 378 n. 146 manuscripts, 115 n. 289, 207 n. 234, 259, 263 n. 34, 268, 282 n. 93, 287, 359, 400

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Lothar II, king, 335 Louis the Pious, king and emperor, son of Charlemagne, 19, 464 n. 104, 466 n. 109 Louth (Lindsey), 401 Löwe, C.A., 12 n. 23, 17 n. 35 Lucca (Italy) cathedral of, 327 n. 239 church ownership by Anglo-Saxons, 332 magister associated with, 237 Luchaire, A., 120, 121 Lul of Mainz, 442 n. 33 death of (A.D. 786), 362 letter collection of, 160, 238, 296, 298 n. 144, 397 n. 205 letters to King Alchred, 160 n. 93, 161 n. 96, 243 Abbot Eanwulf, 296, 314 Abbot Guthbert, 228 and n. 299, 295, 297 Ælberht of York, 235 n. 322, 236, 243, 255, 296, 297–9, 368 n. 117, 417 Boniface, 297, 298 n. 144, 301 n. 151 writing style of, 243 n. 341 possible associations with compilation of the ‘Egberht Penitential’, 235 profession of faith of, 403 n. 227 Lupulus, St., 205 n. 228 Lupus of Ferrières, 272 n. 60, 286, 287 n. 106, 342 letter collection of, 37, 294 to Einhard, 22 n. 49 no. 70: 138 n. 30 Lupus, bishop of Sens, vita of, 324 n. 229 Luxeuil, lectionary of, 208 n. 235 Lyon, manuscripts, 57, 215 n. 258, 221 n. 274, 285 n. 101 Mabillon, 7, 13, 21 n. 47, 27 n. 62, 121, 165 De re Diplomatica, 120 Macarius of Alexandria, 345 n. 44 Macarius of Egypt, 345 n. 44 Magdeburg Centuriator, 353 n. 72 Maginarius, abbot of St.-Denis, 341 n. 29, 394, 395 n. 195 magistri, 170, 208, 237 Magnifcat, canticle, 186, 195 Magnus, Rufus, and Priscus, SS, 205

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Main, region of, 135 n. 22, 235 Mainz, 160, 432 Lul letter collection at, 235 n. 322, 296 manuscripts, 177, 287, 295 n. 133, 372, 377 n. 144, 407 n. 238 malaria, 245 n. 349 Malasti, in Aquitaine: see Montolieu Manitius, 9 n. 15, 106 Mann, Sir Horace, 318 n. 209 manumission, 464 n. 104 marble, for inscriptions, 459 Marcellinus, 267 n. 45 Marcellus-Moengal, 348 n. 55 Marculfi, Formulae, 294 n. 130 marginalia, 103 Marianus Scotus, Chronicon, 362 n. 96 Marina, St., vita of, 28 n. 62 maritus, 147 Marius Victorinus Ars Grammatica, 268 in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 268 Mark, St., cult of, 209–10 n. 239 Marmoutier (Tours) Bibles written at, 107 manuscripts, 107 scripts associated with, 20 marriage, 349 n. 59 Martin I, pope, letters of, 188 n. 178 Martin, St. miracles of, 27 Vigil of, 250 martyrologies, 235 n. 321, 323 n. 228, 345 n. 44 Echternach (Hieronymian), 206 pre-Echternach, 209 Hieronymian, 206, 209, 216 n. 260 ‘Metrical Calendar [Martyrology] of York’, 30, 31 n. 69, 208–9, 210 n. 239, 215–16, 217, 241 n. 336, 251, 255, 292, 315 n. 196, 325 n. 235, 334 n. 11 metrical, 8 ‘northern English’ recension, 271 n. 58 Oengus, 217 n. 263 Old English, 206 Tallaght, 313 n. 191 and see calendars Martyrs, dedications to, 155 Marx, Karl, and the concept of ‘alienation’, 119 Mass, 193 n. 193 liturgy for, 195, 196, 199, 348 prayers for ad complendum, 198 super populum, 326

votive masses, 306, 326 and see expositiones missae, lectionaries Massay, manuscripts, 361 n. 92 mathmatica, teaching of, 236 Maurdramnus, script associated with, 347 nn. 50, 52 Maurice, bishop of Histriensis, 447 n. 47 Mauricius, St., 210 n. 239 Mauroald, abbot of Farfa, 452 Maxim(in)us Victorinus, De ratione metrorum, 268 n. 47 Maximus, pseudo-, Epistulae, 110 n. 273 Mayo ‘of the Saxons’ (Ireland), 277, 339 n. 24 Alcuin correspondence to, 314 bishopric and community of, 162–3 consecration of bishops of, 248, 249 relationship with York, 277 n. 77 Mayo-Inishboffin, and the community of Colcu the Scot, 391 n. 187 medical texts, 390, 398 n. 207 Medilwong, 150 n. 68 Medlock, river, 129 n. 9 Meginfrid, chamberlain, 441 Mellitus, bishop of Canterbury, 292 Melrose, 146 Chronicle of, 16 n. 32 Mercia, xvii, 14, 59, 85, 143 n. 48, 401 Alcuin correspondence to, 87, 242, 370, 401, 434 n. 6, 436, 442–4 bishops of, 436, 465 capital of, 242 charters associated with, 131 n. 11, 249 n. 358 comes of, 145 commerce of, 350 control of Canterbury, 338 council/synod of (A.D. 786), 140, 302, 347 legatine visitation by Bishop Theophylact (A.D. 786), 339 Bishop George’s return to (from Northumbria) with Alcuin for the synod, 347, 356 and see Northumbria Court of, 466 Irish Courts and, 16 n. 32 kingdom of, 129, 130, 149 n. 66, 299 Latinity of, 141 manuscripts, 6, 178 n. 143, 209, 222, 241 n. 336, 273 monastery under the control of Alcuin in, 242 and n. 338 North Sea trade and, 161 n. 97

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  papal correspondence to, 245 n. 348 prayerbooks associated with, 178–9 relations with Alcuin, 241–2, 347 relations with Charlemagne, 249 n. 358, 392, 393 n. 193, 394, 395 n. 196 relations with Francia, 249 n. 358, 464 relations with Kent, 401 relations with Northumbria, 161–2, 241–2 royal genealogies and, 242 senatores of, 140 n. 36 and see Offa of Mercia Merovingian Empire, 26 kingship and, 368 n. 116 and see Gaul Mersey, river, 129, 129 n. 9 metalworks, 158 Methilwongtune, 150 n. 68 Metz, 328, 341 n. 30 annals of, 15 liturgical relationship with York, 197 manuscripts, 121, 169 n. 118, 379 n. 151, 384, 385 music at, 172 Meuse, river, 155 n. 80 Migne, J.-P., 5, 7 n. 8, 33 Milan liturgy associated with, 199 manuscripts, 5, 451 n. 61 milites, 144 ministri, 143 Misericors et miserata Dominus, prayer, 266 n. 42 missals, 198, 235 n. 321 New Minster, 209 n. 238 Roman, 12 Stowe, 193, 428, 429 missi: see letter-carriers missionaries, 458 activities of, 307 English, and hagiography, 26, 27 to the Continent, 327 to the Old Saxons, 248 Modoin (al. Naso), 463 n. 98 Moissac Chronicon of, 392 n. 191 manuscripts, 18 n. 38, 203 n. 221 Moll, patricius: see Æthelwald Moll monasteries, doubleat Chelles, 369 possibly at Hexham, 133 n. 17 at Salzburg, 133 n. 17

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monasticism monks vs. secular clerics, 165–8, 173 n. 130, 350; and see clerics on prohibiting participation of monks in secular courts [memorandum attached to the epistola de litteris colendis], 379, 384 Mondsee, 362 n. 97 Monn [OE, Monna], English priest, 79 Monotheletism, 195 Mons Iovis, 244 n. 344 Monte Cassino, manuscripts, 255 n. 14, 344, 454 Montolieu (Aquitaine), 341 Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 11 Moors, 14 Morecambe Bay, 129 n. 8 Moselle, region of, 278 n. 80 Moses, biblical, 370–1 n. 123, 407 Munipert, scribe, 73 n. 174 Murbach, monastery of, xvii, 112, 166, 244 and n. 343 Alcuin correspondence to, 192, 315 n. 197 manuscripts, 283 n. 95 murder, penalties for, 142–3 music, 254 at York, 170, 172–3 at Metz, 172 Nadelharius, monk of St.-Denis, 394, 395 n. 195 Nalgodus, vita of Odo of Cluny, 28 n. 62 Naples pericopes associated with, in England, 208 n. 235 Narni, cathedral of magister associated with, 237 Nazarius, St., relics of, 169 n. 118 Nennius, historical miscellany associated with, 242 n. 339 Nereus and Achilleus, SS, 209 n. 238 Nestorian, anti-, 424 neumes, 220 Neustria, 393 n. 193 Nibridius, letter to from Helisachar, 19 n. 42 Nicaea Second Council of (A.D. 787), 402, 404 Nicene (‘Constantinopolitan’) Creed, 193 and see creeds Nicephorus, Greek emperor, 63 Nicetius, bishop of Lyons, 171 n. 124

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Nicostratus, Claudius, Castorus, and Simphorianus, SS, 323 n. 228 night fears, 138 Ninian, St., bishop of Whithorn, 133 n. 17, 177 miracles and hymns of, 177 n. 140 nobilitas, promotion vs. inheritance, 142 n. 35 Nonae Aprilis norunt quinos, Pachomian verse, 220 North Sea, 133, 155 n. 81, 335 n. 14, 396 n. 199, 405, 410, 411 n. 251, 412 Northumbria, xvii, xviii, 14, 315 administrative ‘structures’ of, 132 Alcuin correspondence to, 48 n. 107, 65, 342–3, 351, 370, 400, 410 relations with Alcuin, 128–9 annals of as transmitted by Byrhtferth of Ramsey, 16 Frankish, relations with, 15 ‘Northumbrian Annals’, 130 and see annals boundaries and political conquests of, 129–31 canon-law texts associated with, 231 charters of, lack of early evidence, 135 church of, 331 bishop of, 465 cult of the Virgin Mary, 250–1 diocese of, 309–10 facilities for worship, 131, 136 metropolitan see of, 133 organization of, 132–3 parrochiae, religious life of, 309 pastoral work in, 309–14 coinage of, 159, 396 Columban church and, 277 commerce of, 350 community of Colcu the Scot in, 391 n. 187 computistical texts associated with, 207 councils/synods of, 240 council/synod (?Corbridge, A.D. 786), 31 n. 70, 41 n. 91, 140, 141, 273, 265 and n. 40, 302, 303, 339, 346, 347, 356, 401, 402 n. 222, 418 content of 349–50 English-vernacular translation of decrees of, 347 legatine visitation to by Bishop George and Abbot Wigbod (A.D. 786), 339, 346, 347

non-Vulgate forms in, 348, 353 role of Alcuin in formulating decrees of, arguments for and against, 347–56 sources for, 349–50, 354 economic environment of, 131 establishment of new settlements, 131 hagiography and, 25, 26 n. 59 kingdom of, 129, 331, 395, 396 kings of, chaos of mid-796, 442 letter-writing in, beginnings of, 294–7 liturgy associated with, 205–7 baptism, 213–14 Book of Cerne, 210, and see prayerbooks calendars, 207, 209, 216 devotional prayers/books, 179, 210, 211 liturgical books available to, 204–7, 265 n. 40, 308 n. 176 observances, 175 prayers of Alchfrith the anchorite, 179, 210 n. 241 sacramentaries, 33 n. 72 sanctoral, 207, 215–17 use of the ‘Old Gelasian’ sacramentary and transmission of to Francia, 204–6 and see Wearmouth-Jarrow, York cathedral community manuscripts associated with, 92 n. 227, 226, 260 n. 26, 268, 272 n. 60, 274 n. 67 orthography of, 56 n. 128 peregrini from, 237 political ‘unity’ of, 134–5 relations with Francia, 316–18, esp. 318 n. 210, 466 relations with Mercia, 161–2, 241–2 royal inauguration, practice of, 239 n. 329 senatores of, 140 n. 36 society of, 135–45 comes, 143–4, 146 comitatus, 143–4, 147 domini/hlafordas, 148 evidence through burials, 136–7 landownership, 148–53 lay invasions of church property, 152–3 milites and ministri, 144–5 patresfamilias, 146–7, 148, 165 patricii and duces, 140–3 sources for, 135 the optimates, 139–41, 165, 442

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  the rustici, 135–8, 309–10 villae, 149–50, and see villae below texts associated with, 228, 259 n. 23, 266 n. 41, 278, 283, 284, 307, 330, 350, 371 n. 123 under King Æthelred, 399, 400 vernacular dialect of, 301 n. 151, 304 victory on the Winwaed, 349 weather affecting in A.D. 763–5, 239–40 and see York notarii, 103, 104, 341 n. 29 Notitiae, 52 Notker of St. Gallen, 18 Gesta Karoli, 29, 196 Notre-Dame (Paris), cathedral, 327 n. 239 nuns, 369 n. 119 and see Chelles Nursling, 225 n. 287 Odberht, priest, Mercian exile, 464, 465 n. 105 Odo of Cluny, 27 n. 62, 28 n. 62 vitae of John of Salerno and Nalgodus, 28 n. 62 Oedilwald/Oediluuald, anchorite on Farne Island, 313 n. 191, 323 n. 226 Offa, king of Mercia, xviii, 14, 59, 130 n. 11, 133 n. 16, 162, 241, 247 n. 354, 348 n. 56, 394 n. 193 accusations against, 337, 338 n. 20 Alcuin correspondence to, 36, 40 n. 89, 60 n. 139, 80, 85, 90, 185 n. 168, 332, 437 n. 16, 442, 443–4, 463, 465 Alcuin correspondence to, in the name of King Charles, 82, 100, 379 n. 152, 436, 455 n. 72, 463–5 benefactions to St. Oswald’s tomb at Bardney, 242 charters associated with, witnesses to, 395 n. 195 daughter of, 85 death of, 16 gift of Wearmouth-Jarrow Bible to Worcester, 408 n. 245 law-codes associated with, 352 n. 68 queries to Alcuin on archiepiscopal consecrations, 296, 332 relations with Charlemagne, 366, 464, 466 relations with Kent, 401 relations with St.-Denis, 394

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request to Pope Hadrian over Lichfield as an archbishopric, 401 visitation of by papal legates (A.D. 786), 338 and see Mercia Offices/Divine Hours, liturgy for, 193 n. 193, 195, 199, 202, 203, 325 Officia per ferias, 7 oil, holy, 161; blessing and consecration of, 310–11, esp. 311 n. 186 oil, olive-, as gifts, 161 n. 96, 342 Old English, language, 231 n. 309 glosses in, 239 n. 330 letter characters peculiar to, 223 Old High German, language, 231 n. 309 Old Saxony, bishops for, 248 Olomundus, abbot of MalastiMontolieu, 342 n. 31 Ongendus, reference to by Alcuin, 303 optimates, 139–40 Opus Caroli regis (Libri Carolini, ‘Against Images’), 13 and n. 26, 189 n. 180, 267 n. 44, 269 n. 48, 384 n. 163, 402 and n. 225, 403–4, 411, 419, 420, 421, 427 n. 304, 457 n. 78, 458 n. 82, 460 n. 89 Theodulf ‘the Goth’ as author of, 386 n. 172 Alcuin’s involvement in, arguments for and against, 404–5 Book IV of, use of Aristotle’s De interpretatione and Apuleius’s Peri Hermeneias in, 404 creed associated with, 403 and n. 227, 428 late corrections to, 404 on the authority of the Frankish bishops and king, 404–5 use of Alcuin’s version of the De categoriis decem in, 377 use of Ambrose’s De fide in, 376 use of the De imagine Dei in, 376 orationes, 7, and see prayerbooks oratores, bellatores, laboratores, 139 n. 35 oratories, 146, 147, 152, 224 Ordinals of Christ, 307 ordinations, 116, 138, 160, 175 n. 137, 198 archiepiscopal, 247–9, 296, 332 English rituals of, 248 episcopal, 117, 198 n. 209, 247–9, 416 n. 265 Ordines Romani, 32 n. 72 ordo XI, on baptism, 212 n. 246, 213, 307, 308 n. 176

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relationship with the Old Gelasian, 212 n. 246 comparison with Alcuin letters, 213 n. 250 ordo XV, 169 n. 119, 193 n. 193, 194 n. 195, 245 n. 34, 309 n. 182 ordo XXIII, 246 n. 351 ordo XXXIV ‘ordo quomodo [episcopus] ordinatur’, 117 and n. 293, 172 n. 127, 175 n. 137 and see rituals Ordo de celebrando consilio, 339 n. 25 Orientius, Commonitorium, 413 n. 259 Origen, 226 homilies of, 225 n. 289 Orléans, manuscripts, 24, 75 Ormside, bowl, 158 n. 88 Orosius, 413 and n. 258 Historiae adversum paganos, 267–8 mention of in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 267 Osbald, king of Northumbria Alcuin letter to, 140, 442, 463 Osberht, dux Alcuin letter to, 140 Oshere, unidentified name on the Coppergate helmet, 144 n. 50 Oslac, king, 292 Osred [Osric], West Saxon ealdorman, 338 n. 23 Osred I, king of Northumbria, 141 n. 39 Osred II, king of Northumbria, 144 n. 52, 395, 399 Osric, bishop of York, 249 n. 357 Oswald, St., Northumbrian king, 138 n. 29, 145 n. 55, 146, 239, 276 n. 72, 334 n11 cult of, 241 church dedicated to, 319 relics of, 153 n. 76, 309 Oswine, ?patricius, 239 Oswiu, king of Bernicia, 133, 145 n. 55, 295 letter to from Pope Vitalian, 296 n. 137 Oswulf, king of Northumbria, 129 n. 8, 150 n. 68, 238, 242, 319 Otley, 151 n. 70 Ottonians, 407 n. 238 Ouse, river, 155, 157, 159 Ovid, 95, 462–3 Ars amatoria, 463 Pachomius, St, computistical verses of, 220, 288 n. 108

Pacificus, archdeacon of Verona, 308, 353 n. 71 annotations of, 289 n. 113 computus of, 252, 360 n. 91, 361 n. 92 epitaph of, 308–9 n. 180 manuscripts associated with, 263 n. 34 ?possible author of verses anno domini notantur, 290 n. 113 Pancras, St., 209 and n. 238 Pannonia, 53 n. 121, 439 n. 23 papacy authority of, 248 curia, 456 iconoclasm and, 448 legates/legations (papal or royal), 14, 17, 96, 305–6, 362, 401, 419, 445, 446, 466, 448 n. 49 legation (papal) to England (A.D. 773), 316 nn. 199, 200, 318 n. 210 legation (papal) to England (A.D. 786), 123, 131 n. 12, 140, 141, 176, 212, 240 n. 333, 273, 302, 315, 337, 338–9, 340, 346–56, 357, 402 n. 222 legation (royal) of Angilbert to Rome (A.D. 796), 14, 438, 439, 448, 449, 451, 452, 457, 461, 462, 469 writing office of, 455, 457 n. 79 and see canon-law, Liber Diurnus, Liber Pontificalis, Rome Parker, Matthew, archbishop, 83 Parma, xvii, 316, 331, 332, 334 Paschasius the deacon De Spiritu sancto, 425 Paschasius Radbertus, 113 n. 282, 121 Expositio in Matheo, 77 use of Alcuin’s writings, 77 vita of Adalhard of Corbie, 20–1, 38 passionaries, 120 pastoral care in Alcuin’s Northumbria, 309–14 pastoralism, 131–2 patresfamilias, 146–7, 148 patricii, 140, 141, 142, 143 patrocinium, 464 n. 104 Paul, St., apostle, 469 altar dedicated to in St. Peter’s (York), 155, 158 letters of, 40 n. 87 (pseudo-) to Seneca, 378–9 to Timothy, 27 and see Index of Biblical Citations

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  Paul I, pope, 308, 325 letters of, 100, 152 to Archbishop Egbert and King Eadberht, 88 to Pippin, 194 n. 195 Paul the Deacon, 255 n. 14, 341, 454 abstract of Festus’s De verborum significatione, 94–5 n. 233 epitaphs, 157 n. 86, 344 for Queen Hildegard, 172 n. 125, 461 n. 92 Gesta episcoporum Mettensium, on Chrodegang, 169 n. 118 Historia Langobardorum, 155 homiliary of, 31 n. 69 letter collection of, 294 n. 131 move to Francia (A.D. 782), 332, 336 poem to, written in the name of Charlemagne, by Alcuin or Angilbert, 282 poetry of, 343 and n. 36 relations with Alcuin, 344 relations with Angilram of Metz, 358 visit to Rome to request Gregorian Sacramentary from the Pope (A.D. 786), 358 writings of, 317 n. 206 Paulinus of Pella, Eucharisticon, 269 n. 49 Paulinus, bishop of Nola Carmina, 371 n. 123, 405 n. 232 as a source for Alcuin, 243 n. 342 use of alma in, 321 n. 222 cited in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 277 Paulinus, patriarch of Aquileia, 17, 21, 173 n. 130, 317, 341, 344, 421 n. 281, 428, 451 n. 61 Alcuin correspondence with, 41 and n. 92, 42 and n. 95, 60, 64 n. 153, 79 and n. 189, 90, 100, 102, 105 n. 263, 113 n. 284, 198 n. 209, 246 n. 351, 297 n. 139, 345, 363, 402 n. 224, 411, 438 n. 20, 446 and n. 45, 447, 448 n. 48, 449 and n. 55, 450, 451 n. 60, 452, 453, 457, 462, 463 n. 100, 469 Carmina, 317 n. 205 Libellus exhortationis, 78, 425 use of Alcuin’s letters as a source for, 78–9 relations with Alcuin, 344, 363 Paulinus, St., founding bishop of York, feast day of, 215 Pavia, xvii, 154 n. 77, 155, 244 Pe(c)htelm, bishop of Whithorn, 162

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Peak, 129 Pehtred, 89 Pehtwine, bishop of Whithorn, 162, 249 n. 357 Pelagius, pope creed attributed to, 403 Libellus fidei, 427 translation from the Greek of the Verba Seniorum, 266 penance, 116, 233, 353, 354, 361, 387–8, 405 baptismum lacrimarum and, 389 for drunkenness, 233 for (lay) fornication, 233 for consumption of polluted foodstuffs and liquid, 233 for killing, 145 n. 55 liturgy associated with, 211 texts associated with, 197 n. 203 and see Index on Alcuin under his thought on confession Penitential Psalms, Seven, 182, 257–8 penitentials, 95, 135, 138, 231 available at York, 355 development of in early England, 234 of Cummian, 233, 234 Remense, 235 and see canon-law, and penitentials of Columbanus, Egberht’s Dialogus and Theodore’s Canones Pennines, 131 Pentecost, 399 n. 212 liturgy for, 198–9, 208, 239 n. 329, 252 weeks after, as a time for ordinations, 248 and n. 357 peregrinatio, 128 Peregrinus, an Anglo-Saxon, 180 n. 148 pericopes, 188 and nn. 175, 176, 178, 189 n. 179, 191 and n. 186, 193 n. 192, 207–8 and n. 235, 225, 229 n. 301, 384 n. 163 periurium, term used in Frankish capitularies, 233 n. 317 Petau, P., 290 n. 116 Peter and Paul, SS, 202 Peter of Pisa, grammarian, 21, 244, 308, 317, 341, 358 n. 85, 454 at the Frankish Court, 346 n. 47 Ars grammatica, 344 De nomine dicit Donatus, 370 n. 122 letter-poem to, from Angilbert, 363 n. 99 poem to (carm. xxxv, in ‘Pauli et

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Petri Carmina’, MGH Poet. 1, 69–70), written in the name of Charlemagne, by Alcuin or Angilbert, 282 poems of, 343, 344 n. 36, 376 n. 140 relations with Alcuin, 344. 345 writings of, 317 n. 206 Peter, archbishop of Milan, 17, 451 n. 61 Alcuin correspondence to, 87, 441, 450, 451 Peter, St., apostle, church dedications to, 153 n. 76 Petwine: see Pehtwine Phocas, grammarian cited in Alcuin’s ‘York poem’, 282 grammar of, sent from York to Echternach, 317 Piacenza, 335 Picts, 131, 139 n. 34, 144 n. 50, 348 pigments, 398 n. 207 pins from York, 158 n. 88 from Witham, 158 n. 88 Pippin, king of the Franks, father of Charlemagne, 128 n. 4, 160, 245, 249, 341 n. 29 baptism of, 352 n. 71 letter from Pope Paul I, 194 n. 195 Pippin I, son of Charlemagne, king of Italy, 38 n. 83, 53 n. 121, 145 n. 52, 358 n. 86, 368 n. 116, 371, 439 and n. 23, 442 n. 34, 443, 454, 468 Alcuin correspondence to, 367, 368 epitaph of, 122 Pirmin, Scarapsus, 235 n. 321 Pithou, Pierre, 22 n. 47, 57 plagues, 268 n. 45 Pliny the Elder Naturalis historia, 207 n. 234, 260, 359 citation of in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 283 knowledge of by Bede and by Alcuin and at the Frankish Court, 283–4 excerpta Eboracensia, 283–4 used in Alcuin’s computus collection, 292 Pliny the Younger letters of, 280 Po, river, 335 Polemius Silvius, Laterculus, 285, 302 n. 155 calendar associated with, 292 Polycarp, martyr, prayer of, 261 n. 29

Pompeius (Augustan Pompeius Trogus), Roman historian, 259 commentary on Donatus, 282–3 History, epitome of by Justin cited in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 283 pontificals ‘Egberht’, 198 n. 209, 233 n. 318, 339 n. 25, 412 n. 254 Sherborne, 94, and see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Paris, BN, lat. 943 populus christianus, 457 n. 79, 458 Porfyrius, Publilius Optatianus, carmina figurata of, 373, 374 n. 133, 375, 378 n. 147 porticus, 157 pottery, 161 Powicke, Sir Maurice, 3 praedicatores definition of, 301, 303, 307 use of by Alcuin, 312 n. 188 use of by Bede, 312 praefecti: see reeves prayerbooks (libelli precum), 7, 7 n. 10, 113 n. 281, 178 n. 142, 179, 182 n. 155, 183 n. 158, 266 Alcuin’s De laude Dei, 177–80, and see under Index of Alcuin’s Writings associated with Tours, 201 Book of Cerne: see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Cambridge, Univ. Lib., Ll. 1. 10 Book of Nunnaminster: see Index of Manuscripts Cited under London, BL, Harley 2965 devotional prayers composed in northern England after Alcuin left for Francia, 211 early English, 183 nn. 158, 159, 197 n. 203, 201 Royal: see Index of Manuscripts Cited under London, BL, Royal 2. A. XX use of for private devotion, 224 prayer-fraternity, 452 prayers importance of, 127 collects for the mass, 195 n. 198 commemorative and reciprocal, 315 n. 198 mass-, 176 n. 139 ad complendum, 198 oraciones ad vesperos, 198

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  precium, 142 Presentation in the Temple, feast day of, 248 n. 357 priests, 173, 198 confession and, 116 ordination of, 32, 32 n. 72 Primo paganus catechumenus fit, ?pre-Alcuin baptismal tract, 47, 48 n. 106 Primum in ordine, exposition of the mass, 6 and n. 7 Priscian, grammarian cited in Alcuin’s ‘York poem’, 282 grammar of, sent from York to Echternach, 317 Institutio de nomine et pronomine et verbo, 252 n. 2, 282 Institutiones grammaticae, 282 Priscus, St., 206 and see Magnus privileges, 435 Proba, glosses of, 280 probationes, 222, 223 n. 280 Probus, grammarian cited in Alcuin’s ‘York poem’, 282 processions, liturgical, 197 professions of faith, 403 n. 227 Prosper of Aquitaine, 277 cited in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 277 Epigrammata, 221, 277–8 n. 78, 278 Poema coniugis ad uxorem, 277 n. 78 Provence (France), 47, 47 n. 106 Prudentius, 344 n. 36, 371 n. 123 cited in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 277 Prüfening, abbey, 24 n. 52 Prüm, manuscripts, 203 n. 221, 207, 292–3, 322 psalms commentaries on, 182 recitation of, 224 n. 285 and see Gradual Psalms, Penitential Psalms Psalter, 171–2 and n. 126, 176, 226, 235 n. 321, 437, 461 n. 92 Breviate Psalter, 181, 185 n. 167 commentaries on, 276 importance of in education, 171 importance of to Alcuin: see Index on Alcuin under liturgy tituli for, Bedan series, 350 n. 62 types of Gallicanum, 181, 182 and n. 158, 183 and n. 159, 184, 185 nn. 165, 167, 192, 258, 276, 350 n. 62, 353, 355, 382 n. 159, 422

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Hebraicum, 181, 183 n. 160, 184, 185 Romanum, 181, 182, 183 and nn. 159, 161, 184, 185–6 and n. 165, 258, 329, 350 n. 62, 353, 355, 382, 422 Vetus Latina, 186, 187 n. 172 Psalters, individual Corbie triple psalter, 181 n. 153 Dagulf: see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Vienna, Nationalbibliothek, 1861 Vespasian: see Index of Manuscripts Cited under London, BL, Cotton Vespasian A. i Puch, comes, 143 Pulcherrimo perpulchro divineque theorie, prose text, 95 pumice, 400 n. 216 Putul, deacon at York, 305 Pyrenees, 39, 122 Pyttel, lector, at the legatine council of A.D. 786 and leaving England with the papal legates and Alcuin, 176, 339, 356 Quadragesima, 147 n. 60 Quattuor necessaria sunt, 252 Quentin, St., 320 n. 219 querns, 158, 161 Quinquagesima, 244 Quintus and Sinotus, SS, 207 Quintus Serenus, Liber Medicinalis, 362 Quintus, St., 205 n. 228 Radbod, king of the Frisians, 303 Rado, ‘chancellor’, 358 n. 85 Rado, abbot of St.-Vaast, 62, 117, 189 n. 180, 341 n. 29 Alcuin letter to, 66 n. 158 Rather of Lobbes and Verona, letter collection of, 37, 117 Rathmelsigi (Clonmelsh, co. Carlow), 163 reading, public or private act of, 223–4 and see prayerbooks Rebecca, biblical, 115 reeves, 142 n. 33, 151 refrigerium, 127–8 n. 2 Regensburg (Bavaria), 14 n. 28, 369 n. 118, 394 n. 193, 403 n. 228, 411, 420 council at (A.D. 792), 332 manuscripts, 355 n. 79, 375 n. 137, 450 n. 58

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Regi regum semper laudes (anonymous, ?Paulinus of Aquileia), Eastercanticum, 317 n. 205 regiones, 149 Regnitz, 419 Regula Magistri, 168 n. 117, 169 n. 119 Reichenau, manuscripts, 10 n. 16, 23 n. 51, 403 n. 227, 189 n. 181 relics, 246, 328, 451, 462 deposition of, rituals for, 323–4 reliquary labels for, 323–4 n. 229 Remedius, bishop of Chur, 451 and n. 63 correspondence with Hincmar, 120 Remigius, bishop of Chur, vita of, 121 Renaissance, manuscripts, 280 requies, 127 n. 2 Respicis Apriles, verse, 220 n. 273 responsories, 195 Resurrection, 389 Rheims Alcuin letter collection at, 67 manuscripts, 21, 58, 60, 107, 116, 120–1, 122, 189 n. 179, 215 n. 258, 286, 290, 387, 450, 452–3, 459 n. 87 texts associated with, 24, 121 rhetoric, 254 Rhine, river, 160, 243, 244 n. 344, 316, 317 Ribble, river, 129 Richard, duke of Normandy, 96 Richbod (al. Macharius), abbot of Lorsch, archbishop of Trier, 345 Alcuin correspondence to, 54, 346, 363, 372, 399–400 and n. 216 relations with Alcuin, 346, 371 Richulf (al. Damoetas), archbishop of Mainz, 362, 363 n. 99 Alcuin letters to, 363, 375 n. 138, 469 as Court chaplain, 358 epitaph of, 358 n. 85 riddles, vernacular, 303, 400 n. 216 Ripoll, manuscripts, 392 n. 191 Ripon, 150, 153 n. 76, 214 n. 254, 313 n. 191, 399 rituals, 175 for ordination, 175 n. 137 for royal inauguration, 239 n. 329 for the dedication of a church, 320, 321, 323–4 for the deposition of relics, 323–4; Rochester, 86 n. 209 manuscripts, 11 n. 18, 209 n. 237

Rogation Days, liturgical texts for, 197 Roman Britain, 133 Rome, 403 n. 228 Alcuin visits to: see Index on Alcuin under his life bishops of, 248 chancery of, 96 councils (A.D. 680), 196 n. 199 (A.D. ?799), 428 n. 208 Lateran (A.D. 649), 196 n. 199 epigraphic verse-formulae associated with, 246 hagiography, 26 in Alcuin’s writings, 245 legatine visits to, 14 liturgy assciated with, 30, 32, 32 n. 72, 175, 194 n. 195, 195, 196 and n. 199, 197, 199, 204, 248, 250, 324, and see Psalters pilgrim itineraries round the city, 246 pilgrimage route to, 243–4, 295 royal baptism in, 352 n. 71 topographical texts of, 44, 45 n. 100 treatment of in Alcuin’s writings, 243–6 visits to, 48 from England, 30, 32 n. 72, 152, 160 and n. 92, 216 n. 259, 243, 244, 245, 317, 318 n. 209, 328, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335 and nn. 13, 14, 398, 402 n. 222, 464 from Francia, 50–1, 332, 358, 362 n. 97, 438, 452, 454–5, 458, 466 Rothbury, 133 n. 16 Rotruda, daughter of Charlemagne, 344 n. 38, 371 Alcuin correspondence to, 367–8 Rouen, 96 rubrication, of manuscripts (biblical commentaries), 226 Rufinus of Aquileia Historia monachorum, 328–9 translation of Eusebius’s Historia Ecclesiastica, 270 n. 54 translation of Gregory Nazianzen’s De luminibus, 389 n. 182 Rufinus of Aquileia, pseudo-, works of, 5 Rufus, St.: see St. Magnus ruminare, -atio, 224 n. 284 runes, 144, 302 rura, 150 rustici, 135–8 Ruthwell Cross, 276 n. 76

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  Sabina, St., 207 sacramentaries, 430 n. 316, 437 families Campanian/Capuan, 205, 206 Frankish Gelasians (8th-c.), 31, 33, 33 n. 73, 175, 176 n. 139, 194, 195 n. 198, 198, 206, 211, 248, 252, 311 n. 186, 389 n. 183, 412 n. 254 Gallican, 207, 210, 213 Gregorian of Trento, 204 n. 225, 208, 374 n. 135 Gregorian, 8, 31 n. 70, 33, 33 n. 73, 111 n. 276, 176 n. 139, 188–9 and n. 179, 194, 195 n. 198, 204 n. 225, 248 and n. 354, 251, 320, 326, 422 Hadrianum, 31, 174 n. 132, 198, 206, 204 n. 225, 207, 208, 209 and n. 238, 211, 216, 389 n. 181, 412 n. 254 Missale Gothicum, see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Vatican City, BAV, Reg. lat. 317 Northumbrian, 33 n. 72 Old Gelasian, 30, 31 n. 69, 32 n. 72, 33, 33 n. 73, 111 n. 276, 128 n. 2, 175, 188–9, 194, 198, 204, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215 n. 257, 239 n. 330, 247, 248 n. 354, 250, 251, 307, 308 n. 176, 311 n. 186, 320, 324, 374, 389 n. 181, 412 n. 254, 429, and see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Vatican City, BAV, Reg. lat. 316 and Paris, BN, lat. 7193 Paduan, 209 n. 238 pre-Hadrianum, 204 and n. 225 supplemented Gregorian, 8, 12, 19–20 n. 42, 198, 204 n. 224, 211, 248 individual Angoulême, 31 n. 69, 33 n. 73, 175 n. 137 Berlin-Regensburg fragments, 206 Echternach, 198 nn. 209, 210 Fulda, 198 n. 209, 209 n. 238, 248 n. 354 Gellone, 31 n. 69, 31 n. 70, 33 n. 73, 175 n. 137, 198 nn. 209, 210, 211 n. 244, 248 n. 354, 252 n. 1, 389 n. 181 St. Gall, 252 n. 1

557

Tours, 211 n. 244 Winchcombe, 209 n. 238, 252 n. 1 St.-Amand, 15, 53 n. 121, 55, 362 n. 97, 366 Alcuin letter collection at, 44–51, 56, 66, 67, 77, 90, 102, 113 clerics from, 46 community of, 50 n. 113, 51 manuscripts, 5, 6 n. 7, 15 n. 31, 19 n. 42, 20 n. 43, 44, 45 n. 100, 46 n. 103, 51, 52, 55 n. 126, 87, 263 n. 34, 268, 302, 406 St. Andrew (Hexham), 133 St. Andrew, oratory of, 146 St. Augustine (Canterbury): see Canterbury St.-Bertin annals of, 335 n. 13 manuscripts, 24, 115, 203 n. 221 St. Boniface (Fulda), 166 St.-Denis, 21, 44 n. 98, 109, 123, 317, 341 n. 29, 394, 442 n. 33 Alcuin letter collection at, 67, 75, 77 manuscripts, 5 n. 6, 75, 76 n. 180, 183 n. 159, 261 n. 27, 369 n. 118, 373 n. 131 St.-Emmeram (Regensburg), 11 manuscripts, 71, 72, 73, 79 n. 190 St. Gallen, 451 Alcuin letter collection at, 107 Confraternity Book, 61, 62 n. 146, 451, 452 n. 63 manuscripts, 61, 106, 108 n. 270, 263 n. 34, 285 ninth-century catalogues of, 61 n. 145 St.-Germain-des-Près, manuscripts, 378, 379 n. 148 St. John the Baptist (Montolieu), monastery Alcuin letter to, 341 St.-Josse (Quentovic), cella, 342 St.-Julien (Tours), necrology from, 27 n. 62 St. Justinian (Rome), church of, 321 n. 221 St. Lupus, monastery of, 109 St.-Martial (Limoges), manuscripts, 80 n. 192, 122 St.-Martin de Montauriol, manuscripts, 203 n. 221 St. Martin’s (Tours): see Tours St. Mary Bishophill Junior (York), 144 n. 50, 157 n. 86 St.-Maurice d’Agaune, 244 n. 344 St.-Maximin (Trier), 337

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558

 

St. Paul ( Jarrow), 295 St. Paul (Kärnten/Lavanttal), 283 n. 95 St. Paul’s (Rome), 245 St. Peter’s (Rome), 195, 245, 461 St. Peter’s (Wearmouth), monastery, 132, 315 St. Peter’s (York), 153, 155, 156, 157 St.-Petersburg, manuscripts, 181 n. 153 St.-Riquier, 215 n. 258, 322, 359 n. 87, 367 St. Stephen’s (York), 156 St.-Thierry, Index of, 175, and see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Rheims, BM, 8 St.-Vaast (Arras), 63 n. 149, 322, 341 n. 29 manuscripts, 62 SS Stephanus et Silvester (San Silvestro in Capite, Rome), monastery, 325 saints’ lives, 135, 143 Salisbury, manuscripts, 11 n. 18, 135 n. 22 Salomon, pupil of Notker, 18 Salzburg, 53, 133 n. 17 Alcuin letter collection at, 52–7, 60, 66, 67 and n. 161, 71–2, 73, 74, 77, 79, 85, 87 n. 212, 88, 90, 93 and n. 229, 102, 107, 113, 176 n. 139, 190, 316 n. 199, 367, 387, 410 and n. 251, 413 n. 256, 432 n. 1, 436 n. 15, 447 n. 45, 455, 461 n. 94 recipient’s copy of, 367, and see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Vienna, Nat. bibl., cod. 808 annals of, 15 n. 31 archbishopric of, 49, 52 archidiocesan synods of, 465 n. 105 community of, 55, 60, 67 Formulae Salisburgenses, 123 language used in religious communities at, 301 letter-formularies associated with, 298 n. 144 Liber Traditionum, 74 n. 175 magistri of, 309 n. 180 manuscripts, 6 n. 7, 9 n. 15, 15 n. 31, 24, 29 n. 64, 36 n. 78, 44, 45 n. 100, 46 n. 103, 49 n. 112, 51, 56 n. 128, 73, 79 n. 190, 107 n. 270, 109, 302, 361 n. 92, 368 n. 116, 406

notitia of, 396 Notitia Arnonis, 52 Breves Notitiae, 52 orthography associated with, 74 n. 175 papal letters to, 192 n. 191 pastoral work of, 311 n. 187 scripts associated with, 46 n. 103 S. Dalmatius (Lucca, Italy), church, 333 n. 7 S. Salvatore (Monte Amiata), 452 n. 65 S. Salvatore di Rieti (nr Rome), 365, 452 San Silvestro in Capite (Rome), monastery, 325 Sancta Sophia (Benevento), 321 Sancte sator suffragator, prayer, 210 n. 241 Sancton: see South Newbald Sanctoral and the Temporal, 205 associated with Northumbria, 207 sanctuary, for criminals, 352 Sant’Ambrogio (Milan), 451 n. 61 De Sapientia, votive mass, 326 Saracens, 14, 392 Saxony, 128, 140 n. 36, 246 n. 350, 335, 390, 391, 392 n. 191, 432, 434, 435, 445, 446, 439 n. 23, 469, 470 Carolingian campaigns against, 390 n. 186, 391, 411 n. 253, 432, 434, 435, 411 n. 253, 445, 446, 466 n. 109, 468 sceattas, coinage, 159 n. 90, 161 Frisian, 161 n. 97 schools, and school-books, 280 and n. 87, 373 Alcuin’s letter collections and, 102 school-rooms and, 224 and n. 284 texts used for, Christian and pre-Christian texts, 277–8 Scotland, 16 n. 32, 129 n. 8 Pictish kingdom in, 131, and see Picts script, 57, 345–6 Tironian notes, 57, 66, 104, 251, 358 n. 85 Visigothic, 221 n. 274, 237 capital script, 459 display-capitals, 69 insular majuscule, 144 rustic capitals, 19 n. 40 square capitals, 158 half-uncial, 259 n. 23 minuscule script Anglo-Saxon minuscule, 91, 223, 235, 256 n. 15, 274 n. 67, 281,

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  407; cursive, 259 n. 23; hybrid, 258; Phase I, 256; Phase II, 256; Phase II hybrid, 259 n. 23; set, 258 Caroline minuscule, 13, 69, 345–6 English Caroline, 98 English Square minuscule, 69 uncial, 91, 159, 373 n. 131 Sedulius Carmen Paschale, 263 n. 32, 278 cited in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 277 hymns attributed to, 202 poetry of, 255 Selsey, 86 n. 209 Seneca Agammemnon, 270 condiscipulus of York, 170 letters of, 40 n. 87, 378–9 (pseudo-) Tragedies, 270 n. 52 Senlis, 335 Septimania, 47 n. 106, 392 n. 191 Alcuin correspondence to, 211, 387 Septuagesima, 20, 147 n. 60, 244, 245, 298 n. 144, 386 Serenus: see Quintus Serenus Sergius I, pope letter to Abbot Ceolfrid, 88 liturgical introductions of, 250, 251 sermonaries: see homiliaries sermons, on penance and alms, 393, and see homilies servi, 136 n. 23, 143 Servius Commentary of, 172 n. 125 metrical writings of, 406 Sexagesima, 244, 386 sexuality, medieval, 113–14 Sheaf, river, 129 Sherborne Pontifical: see pontificals ships, 161 Sibald, abbot, 217 Sibba, comes, 143 Sibylline, prophecies, 262 Sicga, patricius to King Ælfwald of Northumbria, 141, 395, 396 n. 198 Sicily, 14 sickness, and plague, 239 and n. 330 sicli, money, 142, 143 n. 46 Sigebert of Gembloux, 22 Sigeric, archbishop of Canterbury, 84 correspondence of, 95, 96 to Bishop Wulfsige (III) of Sherborne, 94–5

559

journey to Rome, 335 Sigibert, pupil of Alcuin, 305 Sigibod, priest, companion to Northumbrian Aluberht to York, 248, 249 signatures, of early English scribes, 256 Sigwulf of Ferrières, disciple of Alcuin, custos of York, 29, 115, 168 n. 115, 170, 328, 365 Silvester, St., pope, 209 Actus Silvestri, 298 n. 144 Silvius: see Polimius Silvius simony, 117, 454, 455, 463 Simphorianus, St.: see Nicostratus Sinotus, St.: see St. Quintus sins, 117 Sirmond, collection of computistical texts associated with, 291, and see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Oxford, Bodl.Lib., Bodley 309 slavery, 137–9 and n. 34, 142 n. 35, 161 and see servi Slavs, 390, 445 Sochasburg, monastery of, 249 n. 357 society order of (oratores, bellatores, laboratores), 139 n. 35 nobilias, promotion vs. inheritance, 142 n. 35 Solway, estuary, 129 n. 8, 130, 131, 132, 133 Sophia, St., cult of, 324–5 and see Alma Sophia South Newbald, 143 n. 46, 159, 160 n. 91 Southumbria, prayerbooks associated with, 178 Spain Alcuin letter to, 403 Bible texts associated with, 184 n. 162 clerics from, 39 conciliar decrees from, 320 n. 218 grammatical texts associated with, 221 in Alcuin’s letters, 267 n. 45 liturgy associated with, 196, 197 n. 202, 199, 197 n. 203, 215 n. 257 Muslim and Christian, 14 pseudo-Alcuin works associated with, 10 n. 16 relations with Charlemagne, 392 relations with the Papacy, 338 and n. 21

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Speratus, bishop Alcuin letter to, 77, 302 Speyer, 316 spinning, 158 Statius knowledge of by Alcuin, 281–2, 454 n. 70 Achilleis, 281 Agrimensores, 282 Silvae, 281–2, 289 n. 111, 440 n. 24, 454 n. 70 Thebais, 281 Stephanus, Eddius: see Stephen of Ripon Stephen, St., protomartyr, 324, 397 n. 205 liturgical feasts for, 324 cella for at York, 324 relics of, 325 Stephen, St., pope, 325 and n. 235 Stephen III, pope, letters of, 297 n. 139 Stephen of Ripon, Vita Wilfridi, 25–6, 132, 141 n. 39, 150 nn. 68, 69, 151 n. 70, 153 n. 76, 242 n. 338, 351 n. 66, 397 n. 205 on baptism, 213–14 on Bosa, 167 n. 112 Stonegrave Holy Trinity (Yorks.), church of, 153 n. 74 earlier monastery at, 152 Strathclyde, 163 stylus, iron, 222 n. 279 Suidbert, 316 sulphur, 398 n. 207 Sulpicius Severus, Dialogi, 329 Syddense, civitas, 130 syllogae: see inscriptions Symeon of Durham Historia Dunelmensis ecclesiae, 160, 410 n. 250 Historia de sancto Cuthberto, 150 n. 69 Libellus, 249 n. 357 Symeon of Durham, pseudo-, Historia regum: see Byrhtferth Symmachus, pseudo-Symmachus canones, 39 n. 86 Symphosius, riddles of, 115 synods: see councils Tabernacle, of Jerusalem, 409 Tacitus, 114 Tamworth (Staffs.), 242, 443 n. 37 Tassilo, duke of Bavaria, 52, 140 n. 36, 371 Tatberht, 216 n. 260

Tatwine of Canterbury, Enigmata, 254 n. 7 Te Deum, 201, 203 Tees, river, 129 n. 8, 133, 159 Tegernsee, manuscripts, 122, 222 n. 278, 375 n. 137 Temporal, and the Sanctoral, 205 Terence, Adelphi, 110 n. 273 Tertullian, 371 n. 123, 383 n. 161 textiles, 161 Themistius, 377 n. 143 theodisce, 347 n. 49 Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury, 415 n. 262 Canones, 137, 138 n. 29, 142, 145 n. 55 Canones, Northumbrian Disciple’s version of, 135 n. 22, 137, 138 n. 30, 144, 145 n. 55, 148 n. 65, 185 n. 168, 350, 352 Anglo-Latin lexica in, 235 n. 321 contents of, 231–2 De missa defunctorum in, 214 medical metaphors in, 388 n. 180, 389 nature of the ‘Northumbrian Disciple’, 231 on (lay) fornication, 233 on baptism and confirmation, 212, 214 n. 253 Prologue of, 234 n. 319 relationship with Cologne MS 213, 232 relationship with Egberht’s Poenitentiale, 232–3 prayers attributed to, 210 n. 241 Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, letter of, 298 n. 144 Theodrada, sister of Gundrada, 77 Theodulf ‘the Goth’, 441 Bibles associated with, 368 n. 117 Carmina, 373, 375 n. 136, 380, 438, 439, 440, 448 n. 52 against Alcuin, 120 Bible-poems, 406, 407; 30: 342 n. 31; 41: 322 n. 224, 407 n. 239 epitaph for Pope Hadrian, 461 contributions to the Admonitio generalis (A.D. 789), 380 on art and precious materials, 461 n. 92 on dreams and visions, 28 n. 63 Opus Caroli, author of: see Opus Caroli

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  Theophylact, bishop of Todi, 337, 339, 356–7 Alcuin letter-poem to, 356–7 at Frankfurt (A.D. 794), 357 Theudemir, abbot, 309 Thiotfrid, Vita Willibrordi, 327 n. 240 Thomas, archbishop of Milan, 352 n. 71 Thuringia, 140 n. 36, 357 Tidferth, bishop of Hexham, 133 n. 17 Tidover (Kirkby Overblow), 214 n. 252 Tilberth, praesul, 339 n. 24 timber, 161 tithes, 349, 382, 469 tituli, 115, 278, 322 n. 222, 323, 325 n. 235 Tobias, biblical, 115 Toledo councils of, 428 Eleventh Council of, 23 n. 51 lectionaries associated with, 192 n. 187 Liber Comicus from, 208 n. 235 manuscripts from, 420 n. 280 toll-collectors, 451 n. 63 tonsure, 31, 31 n. 70, 31 n. 71 Torctmund [Torhtmund], dux, 145, 164 Torthelm, bishop in Mercia, letter of, 162, 296 n. 137 Tours, St. Martin’s, xvii, 13, 29, 36 n. 78, 50, 58, 73 n. 174, 79, 80, 107, 109, 113, 120, 166, 253, 352 n. 67 agricultural tenants of, 139 Alcuin as abbot, xviii, 29, 469 n. 120 Alcuin correspondence to, 183, 331 n. 1, 353, 354, 386–7 Alcuin’s letter collection at, 57–61, 71, 73, 74, 80, 86, 90, 102, 103, 107, 191, 290, 361, 365 n. 108, 403 n. 228, 410 and n. 251, 411 n. 253, 432, 436 n. 15, 442, 449, 455, 463 Alcuin’s verse epitaph at, 18 anti-Adoptionist tracts from, 67, 88 n. 215 astronomical texts associated with, 361 Bibles associated with, 106, 107, 181 n. 153, 182 n. 158, 188 nn. 176, 178, 189, 222 n. 277, 259 n. 24, 353, 406, 408, 409 bishop of, 18 chapel (now destroyed) dedicated to Alcuin, 27 n. 62 confraternity with St. Gallen, 61 English visitors for Alcuin at, 301 formula letter book at, 65 and n. 155

561

Gospel-books written at, 106 letter-service supplied at, 41 libellus precum associated with, 183 n. 158, 201, and see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Troyes, BM, 1742 manuscripts, 10 n. 16, 23 n. 51, 43, 72, 103, 105 n. 262, 106, 113 n. 282, 169 n. 118, 211 n. 244, 223 n. 281, 226 n. 291, 240 n. 334, 245 n. 346, 280 n. 87, 281, 282 n. 93, 286, 288 n. 109, 329, 379 n. 148, 403 n. 227 sack of by the Vikings, 27, 28 n. 62 sacramentaries associated with, 211 and n. 244 scripts associated with, 20, 57 type of Psalter available at, 185 and see Index on Alcuin under his life at Tours towns, the urbs regia, 153–4 and see York tractoriae, 123 trade, English, 463, 464 Traube, Ludwig, 12, 13 Trent, battle of (A.D. 679), 143 n. 48 Treviso, 317 n. 205 tribulatio, use of by early medieval authors, 176 Trier, 400 manuscripts, 288 n. 108 Trinitarianism, 22, 30, 67 Trinity Sunday, 23 n. 51 Trinity, 321, 376, 379 n. 150 Troyes, 109, 342 manuscripts, 21 Tully: see Cicero Tweed, river, 129 n. 8, 131 Tyne, river, 129, 131, 132, 138, 309 n. 182 Tyninghame, 131 Udine (Italy), 317 n. 205 Uilhaed (Willehad), priest of York, Vita of, 327 Uinter, royal medicus to King Charlemagne, 341 n. 30, 390 n. 184 Ulster, annals of, 16 Unuuona, bishop of Leicester, letter to from Alcuin, 77 Urbino, 280 urbs regia, 153–4 Ursus, patriarch of Aquileia, 364 n. 105 Ussher, 83, 88 n. 217

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Usuald, abbot Alcuin letter to, 452 usury, 350 Utrecht, 160, 248, 249, 305, 316, 335 n. 14 Uuinter: see Uinter Uurmec villa, 343 Val d’Aosta, 243 Vale of York: see York Valgius [Rufus], 272 n. 61 Vasco, abbot of St.-Avold (Metz), disciple of Angilram Alcuin correspondence to, 365 Venantius Fortunatus as a source for Alcuin, 243 n. 342 author-list of, 266 Carmina, 172 n. 125, 213 n. 251, 246 cited in Alcuin’s ‘York book-list’, 277 cross-poems of, 373, 374 n. 133 Vita S. Martini, 142, 405 n. 232 Venite . . . ab origine, letter- and sermon-ending (pre-Alcuin), 189 n. 181 Venite benedicti, Mass introit, 189 Verba seniorum, 266 Verden (Saxony), 357 Vergil, 372, 413 Aeneid, 134 n. 19, 279, 280 n. 84, 281, 282 n. 93, 293 n. 128, 334 n. 9, 400, 439, 440 Alcuin’s knowledge of, 278–80, 282 n. 93, 293 n. 128, 413 n. 258 Eclogues, 172 n. 125, 279, 293 n. 128, 392 n. 189 Georgics, 134 n. 19, 279, 280 vernacular in poetry, 303 texts translated from Latin into, 347 use of, 301–4, 312, 313 Verona, 353 n. 71, 359 n. 87, 454 computus collection from, 9 magistri of, 308 manuscripts, 9, 10 n. 16, 105 n. 262, 221 n. 274, 288 n. 108, 289 n. 113, 292, 360 scholastic events at, 360 and n. 91 texts associated with, 290 Vespers, Office of, 186, 195, 197, 202 Vettius Agorius Praetextus, 377 n. 143 Via Salaria, 452 vici, 143 Victor: see Julius Victor Victorinus: see Marius Victorinus, Maxim(in)us Victorinus

Vienne, 423 n. 292 Vikings, 27, 50, 141 n. 40, 150 n. 70, 156, 313 and see Lindisfarne, Tours villae regis, 142 n. 33 villae/vici, 142, 149–50 served by ‘multiple estates’, 148–9, 150 royal, 149 foci of associated regiones, 149 alienation of, 150 use of by early medieval writers, 149 n. 66 Vincent of Lérins Commonitorium, 384 n. 164 Excerpta, 424 n. 293, 425, 426 Vincent, St., 323 n. 228 vineyards, 341 n. 30 Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, 9 n. 15, 282 n. 93 Virgin Mary, cult of, 405, 468 n. 115 dedications to, 33 n. 73, 342 n. 31 feasts of adsumptio (18 Jan.), 250 Purification (2 Feb.), 30, 250 Annunciation (25 March), 216, 217, 250 Assumption (15 Aug.), 216, 217, 250 Nativity (8 Sept.), 216, 217, 250, 251 in Northumbria, 199, 250–1 in Alcuin’s De laude Dei, 199 Visigoths, 375 liturgy associated with, 34 n. 75, 339 n. 25, 383 n. 161 manuscripts, 36 script associated with, 221 n. 274 and see Spain Vitas patrum, 345 n. 44 vitae sanctorum, 121 Vitalian, pope, letter to King Oswiu, 296 n. 137 Vitruvius, De architectura libri X, 285–6 votive masses, 8 Wada, king, 466 Walahfrid Strabo, 72 n. 171 epitaph for Bishop Bernald of Strasbourg, 327 n. 241 Wales abbreviations associated with, 69 legatine visitation by Bishop Theophylact in A.D. 786, 339 manuscripts from, 82 n. 200 royal genealogies and, 242

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  Wallace-Hadrill, Michael, 3 Wallach, Luitpold, 4, 13 Walpole, Horace, 318 n. 209 Warkworth, 150 waxed tablets, 42, 42 n. 93, 222 Wearmouth burials at, 136 n. 25 and see Jarrow, St. Peter’s (Wearmouth) Wearmouth-Jarrow, 88, 92, 152 abbots of, 160, 315 n. 196, 322 Alcuin correspondence with, 55, 166, 301, 314–15, 389 n. 182, 418 Bible pandects of, 132, 180 n. 149, 408, 409 books available to, 266, 270, 273, 314 hymnary used at, 204 liturgy of, in the time of Bede, 207 manuscripts, 257, 329 prayer-register (album) of, 431 relations with Iona, 163 saints associated with, 215–16 scola associated with under Bede, 236 texts associated with, 228 type of Psalter used at, 185 weaving, 158 ‘weights and measures’, provision for, 350, 351 Weissenburg, manuscripts, 194 n. 195 Werden, manuscripts, 205, 256, 257, 260, 272 n. 60 wergeld, 142–3 and n. 46 Wessex, 145 n. 55 patricius of, 141 n. 38 relations with Northumbria, 162 Western Isles (Scotland), 16 n. 32 Wharram Percy, 136 n. 24 Whitby, 108, 147 n. 60, 167, 228 Whithorn (‘Candida Casa’), 16 n. 32, 130, 133 bishops of, 133 n. 18 ‘Northumbrian Annals’ and, 247 n. 353, 249 n. 357 relations with York, 162 Wichtedum, letter to from Bede, 288 nn. 109, 110 Wido, abbot of Blandinium, letter to Dunstan, 100 Wido, count, 78 n. 188 Widsith, 303 n. 157 Wigbod, Frankish priest and abbot (of St.-Maximin, Trier), 337, 339, 356 Wigford, 130 n. 11

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Wilberht, on his appeal to the dying Bede, 289 n. 111 Wilfrid I, St, bishop of York, 133, 149 nn. 66, 67, 150, 151 n. 71, 153, 167, 292 cult of Bede’s epitaph of, 134 n. 19, 219, 220 n. 271 feast day of, 215, 247 vita of by Stephen of Ripon, 25–6, 132, 141 n. 39, 153 n. 76, 242 n. 338, 351 n. 66 Wilfrid II, archbishop of York, 133, 155, 158, 162, 167, 216 n. 259, 334 n. 9, 397 n. 205 cult of, feast day of at York, 215 and n. 258 Wilgils, paterfamilias, father of Bishop Willibrord, 146, 147, 148, 165 Willehad, bishop of Bremen, 364, 390 n. 186; vita of, 364 n. 106 Willehad: see Uilhaed William of Malmesbury, 82, 88, 465 n. 107 De antiquitate Glastoniensis, 96 n. 237 edition of the Liber Pontificalis, 152 n. 73 Gesta Pontificum, preservation of Alcuin’s letters in, 97, 315 n. 196 Gesta Regum, preservation of Alcuin’s letters in, 96 nn. 237, 238, 97, 100 n. 251, 229 n. 303, 238 n. 327 William of St. Carilef, 216 n. 261 William Thorne of Canterbury, 22 Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, 225 n. 287, 359 n. 88 Willibrord, St., archbishop of Utrecht, 33, 146, 248 calendar associated with, 30, 31 n. 69, 206–7, 216 n. 260, 250, 271 n. 58, 313 n. 190, 322 n. 226 missionary activities in Frisia and Denmark, 302–3 vita of by Alcuin, 29 n. 64, 139, 140 n. 36, 160, 214 and n. 254, 225, and see Index of Alcuin’s Writings vita of by Thiotfrid, 327 n. 240 Wilmart, Dom André, 5, 7 n. 10, 8, 58 ‘Wilzi’ (or ‘Wends’), 390 Winchester, 86 n. 209, 96 bishop of, 41 n. 91 manuscripts, 468 n. 115 wine, 161 Winwaed, victory at, 349 n. 58

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Witham, pins from, 158 n. 88 Wolds, 143 n. 48 women, as owners of liturgical books, 178 n. 143 woollens, 161 Worcester, 147 n. 59 Alcuin letter collection and, 97, 97–8 n. 242, 101 bishop of, 134 n. 20 charters of, 167 n. 113 manuscripts, 78 n. 188, 97, 99, 152 n. 73, 178 n. 143, 322 n. 222, 408 scribes of, 100 Worcestershire, 92 Worms, 316, 318, 335, 364, 392, 397, 432 n. 1 Frankish Court at, 357, 362, 435 manuscripts, 194 n. 195 writing-office, royal Frankish, 459 n. 85, 464 Wulfhard, abbot Alcuin letter to, 92 Wulfhard, bishop of Hereford, 92 Wulfhelm, archbishop of Canterbury, letter, 91 Wulfhere, archbishop of York, 150 n. 70 Wulfhere, cathedral cleric of York, 327 Wulfred, archbishop of Canterbury, 87 n. 213 Wulfsig, abbot (of ?south-Yorkshire community), 203 n. 222 Wulfsige III, bishop of Sherborne, letter to from Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury, 94–5 Wulfsige, archbishop of York, letter from Bishop Ecgred of Lindisfarne, 89, 91 Wulfstan, archbishop of York, 48 n. 109, 172, 188 n. 178, 329 dedicatory poem of, 99 didactic collections of, 82, 83 n. 202, 95, 97 handwriting of, 100 letters of Alcuin and, 97, 98–9, 100–1 letters of, 100–1 Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester, Portiforium of, 329 Wulfstan, precentor of Winchester, Vita Æthelwoldi, 224 n. 283 Würzburg, 419 manuscripts, 191, 359 n. 89, 379 n. 151, 384 wyn(n), letter-form, 223 n. 281

Yeavering 149 n. 66 York Archaeological Trust, 154 n. 78, 156 York, 29, 75 n. 178, 124, 235 n. 322, 238, 239, 249 n. 357, 259, 319, 401, 431, 432 n. 1, 442 acquisition of relics for, 325 Alcuin letter collection and, 79 n. 189, 85, 88, 90, 101, 102, 103, 401 register copy of, 93 and see annals: ‘Northumbrian’ annals of, 16 archbishops of, 144–5 n. 52, 147 n. 62, 210 n. 239, 308, 463 consecrations of, 247–9 archiepiscopal status of, 133, 401–2 n. 222 as described in Alcuin’s carm. xxiii (‘O mea cella’), 155 n. 80 carm. lix, 161 n. 97 De laude Dei, 177, and see under Index of Alcuin’s Writings under De laude Dei as described in Alcuin’s ‘York poem’, 153 n. 76, 154–6, 158, 255, 260–1, 266, 268, 274, 277, 281, 282, 286, 425 n. 296 on York’s early Roman history, 155 on St. Peter’s, 155 on Alma Sophia, 155, 156 n. 82 on the altar dedicated to St. Paul, 155, 158 on gifts to St. Peter’s from Archbishops Wilfrid II, Egberht and Ælberht, 158 personal information of Alcuin’s community in, 164 on Bishop Bosa, 167 on Wilfrid II, 167 on the teaching of music, 172 on the clerical grades, 174–5 and see Index of Alcuin’s Writings under ‘York poem’ books available at, 98 n. 242, 259, 260, 261–6, 268–9, 270, 274 n. 67, 278, 279, 282 and n. 94, 283–4 and n. 99, 286, 289, 298 and n. 144, 306, 317, 325 n. 235, 355, 361 cathedral of, 132, 140 acquisition of relics for, 325 cella dedicated to St. Stephen in, 324

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  churches of, 153, 156, 157 Alma Sophia (Beneficent Wisdom), xvii, 155, 156 n. 82, 320–6, 334, 336 on Bishophill, 157 St. Peter’s, 153, 155, 156, 157 St. Stephen’s, 156 Dialogus ecclesiasticae institutionis, 32 n. 71, 32 n. 72 diocese of, 133 history of as the burial place for Northumbrian kings, 153 as the early home of Alcuin, ' 164–5 coinage, as the minting-place for, 159 Coppergate helmet, 158 development of, from the time of Bede to Alcuin, 153–7 early regio of, 149 emissary from in Francia, 342 estates of, 150 fire of April A.D. 741, 156 Fishergate, settlement on the west side of, 157–8, 160, 161 n. 97 maritime trade of in the North Sea, 160–1 modern excavations of, 154 n. 78, 156–7 pre-Viking period of, 154 n. 78 royal residence, existence of, 157, 316 inscriptions associated with, 157 language used in religious communities at, 301 letter-writing at, 65 n. 155, 295–6 manuscripts, 97, 101 and n. 254, 288 n. 109 palaeography, epigraphic, associated with, 257 n. 18 papal letter collections sent to, 294 relations with Boniface and Lul in Mainz, 160 Frisia, 161 Iona, 163 Ireland, 163 Mayo (Ireland), 162–3, 277 n. 77 Mercia, 161–2 Metz through Sigwulf, 365 Pippin of Frankia, 160 Rome, 160 Utrecht, 160 Wessex, 162 Whithorn, 162

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stone sculpture from, 327 Vale of, 131 Vikings and, 156 wax tablets and iron stylus from, 222 n. 279 York, cathedral community of, 165, 321 n. 229, 326, 327, 328, 326 Alcuin correspondence with, 87–8, 127–8, 391, 395, 432, 433–4, 444–5 as a centre of Latin Christian learning, 228–9 as depicted in the Ferrières life of Alcuin, 166, 168–9 associations with the ‘Book of Cerne’, 179, and see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Cambridge, University Library, MS Ll.1.10 cathedral lands of, 148 n. 64 cellae of, 324, 326–7 computus material available at, 220, 287, 291, 292–3 education at, 170–1, 225 n. 286 Egberht’s Penitential and: see Egberht’s Penitential ‘Gallican’ Advent, 194 hymnody associated with, 276 inheritance from Bede, 229 Irish texts, liturgical relations with, 200–1 library of, 326 liturgical calendars associated with, 334; and see Index of Manuscripts Cited under Berlin, Phillips 1869 additions to, 215, 216, and see Metrical Calendar of York under martyrologies liturgical education in, 176, 178 liturgy associated with, 276 members of departing for the Continent, 364 Metz, liturgical relations with, 172, 197 monastic or secular community, 165–9, 202 musical education at, 170, 172–3 Northumbrian Disciple (of Theodore’s Canones), connections with, 231 ‘Old Gelasian’ sacramentary and: see Northumbria’s liturgy relations with the archbishop, 433–4 scola puerorum of, 168, 170, 256, 258, 306, 321 n. 220, 326

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under Egberht and Ælberht, 236–7, 243, 253–5 script used at, 223 type of liturgy followed at, 193–217, esp. 194, 197, 199, 200, 202, 203, 204, 207, 209 type of Psalter/Bible used at, 181, 185, 186, 187 Virgin Mary, cult of and, 199, 250–1

Wearmouth-Jarrow, relationship with, 228 Yorkshire, economic environment of, 131, and see Northumbria Zacharias, pope, letters of, 140 n. 36, 297 n. 139 Zosimus, pope, letter on the clerical grades, 175