In Our Time - Alcuin

Episode Date: January 30, 2020

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Alcuin of York, c735-804AD, who promoted education as a goal in itself, and had a fundamental role in the renaissance at Charlemagne's court. He wrote poetry and many letters, hundreds of which survive and provide insight into his life and times. He was born in or near York and spent most of his life in Northumbria before accepting an invitation to Charlemagne's court in Aachen. To this he brought Anglo-Saxon humanism, encouraging a broad liberal education for itself and the better to understand Christian doctrine. He left to be abbot at Marmoutier, Tours, where the monks were developing the Carolingian script that influenced the Roman typeface. The image above is Alcuin’s portrait, found in a copy of the Bible made at his monastery in Tours during the rule of his successor Abbot Adalhard (834–843). Painted in red on gold leaf, it shows Alcuin with a tonsure and a halo, signifying respect for his memory at the monastery where he had died in 804. His name and rank are spelled out alongside: Alcvinvs abba, ‘Alcuin the abbot’. It is held at the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg -Kaiser-Heinrich-Bibliothek - Msc.Bibl.1,fol.5v (photo by Gerald Raab).With Joanna Story Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of LeicesterAndy Orchard Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Pembroke CollegeAnd Mary Garrison Lecturer in History at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of YorkProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, Alquin of York was one of the towering figures in the intellectual world of the 8th century, and he changed education for the better and for good. For 50 years, he learned and taught an exceptionally wide curriculum in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbria,

before Charlemagne brought him to the continent where Alquin gave new force to the celebration of knowledge that was the Carolingian Renaissance. Meanwhile, the Anglo-Saxon world Alquin knew was strained by rivalers and by the Vikings who looted books for the gold or jaws on them, not for the words inside. With me to discuss Alquin are Joanna Story,

Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Leicester, Andy Orchard, Rawlinson and Bosworth, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Pembroke College, and Mary Garrison, Lecturer in history at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York.

Mary Garrison, we've called him Alquin of York. We'll come to Alquin soon, but what was this significant about York as a place of learning? So York was the most remarkable centre of learning in the second two quarters of the 8th century. Most remarkable are you in England or everywhere? In Western Latin Christendom, really. So a teacher named Albert had made it his mission to

collect books and new subjects of study from across the continent, using his own private fortune to amass a remarkable library. And Albert saw wisdom as part of human godlikeness. He even dedicated a church to wisdom, which Alcun and his fellow student built. And then most significant of all, the curriculum at York concluded not just the seven liberal arts, which were not taught everywhere by any means, but also history and natural history. Elbert was really a scientist. And because York was a cathedral, not a monastery, like Bede's foundations, students could come even from abroad, from Ireland and Friesland, and then depart again with their learning. The fact that a cathedral school could attract students from everywhere meant that it had a

larger catchment area for bright pupils. The curriculum was exceptionally wide. Can you be more specific? about it? The seven liberal arts are often thought to be the basis of medieval education, grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. But in reality, learning in the Latin West, apart from Northumbria, had contracted to the narrow range of studies you needed to save your soul. So reading and writing, learning enough grammar to understand the Bible correctly, learning enough astronomy to calculate the date of Easter. So what stands out at York is a program of learning that went far beyond

what you needed to save your soul. And then Albert added a great deal to that. He was really a natural historian. And he had his studies on plants and on animals and so on. That's right. So Albert had a remarkable view that the sort of rationality of the universe had been implanted in it by God

in that the human ability to understand it was also implanted by God. So he said, humans were not the inventors of the liberal arts. They discovered them in things. And he believed that reason was a wondrous and beautiful thing. And he taught, Alcun wrote, he expounded the five zones of heaven, the seven planets, the regular motions of the stars, they're rising and setting, the movements of the air,

the tremors of earth and sea, the natures of men and livestock, of birds and wilds, beasts in the diverse forms and shapes of numbers. Did these pupils read classical literature as well as church literature? So at the School of York they did, and this is one of the remarkable features. Who would they read? So they read an epitome of Roman history. They read Pliny's natural history, probably the only place at the time where that was being studied.

Alcuin would bring Seneca's natural questions in Boethys' Consolation of Philosophy to the continent. So a range of works that you didn't need to know to save your soul, but that sort of allowed people to penetrate the idea that the universe and nature were orderly and comprehensible. So we're talking about the great Albert, a great teacher who became Archbishop Viorke, Alquin, his favorite and favorite and most splendid pupil. What was the purpose of learning? You mentioned it God to make, because of what was called God-like. The more you knew, the more you were like God. Yeah. So Alcuin, in sort of jesting remarks,

Alcuin would sometimes make jokes on someone's name, likening the letters to their numbers and arithmetical jokes. And then this all seems very sort of trivial. And then he would say, by using your intellect to solve this puzzle, you are sort of touching on the divine reason, the logos. And so there was a sense that learning for delight was part of human godlikeness. The human intellect was something sacred.

And York seems to be the first place in the West and spatristic times that developed a kind of wisdom theology. Thank you very much. Joanna Storajio, we've skipped over his early biographies, Alcoen. What do we know about that? Well, we know that he was born in Northumbria around about the year 740. We don't have a specific birth date for him.

So he's the generation after Bede. Bida died in 740. 35. So the vener will be the great scholar of Northumbria. History of English-speaking peoples and 30 other books. Exactly. He died in 804 in Francia, so he died when he was in his 60s. So he lived to be a good age for the 8th century. He was born in Northumbria to a family of moderate, lower social, lower noble rank, something of that order, that held land to the east of York, probably in the area of Holderness. and he came into the Archbishop's community as a boy

and as Mary's already said, very quickly became central to the and very close to the Archbishop Albert initially. He was clearly somebody who responded quickly and well to learning and became very central to the Albert's school in York. He travelled with Albert to the continent, we know that at least once probably in his 20s. under Elbert's successor he took over the running of the school

and as Mary said he became a very important teacher there attracting students from not only Northumbria but from abroad as well do we know that made him distinctively good his York years are harder to pin down because almost as we'll hear almost all of the evidence for Alcuin's life comes from his period of

the period of his life that he spent in Francia with Charlemagne. But he's clearly both an excellent teacher and communicator as well. And he is somebody who's used by the archbishops, not only in his capacity as an educator, but on diplomatic missions. So he is in 780 he's sent to Rome. He's already been to the continent at least once. He's met the elite of the Carolingian court and been to monasteries collecting books with Albert.

But in 780 he sent to Rome to collect the pallium, which is a kind of the badge of office for the new archbishop. And it's on his way back from Rome that he meets Charlemagne, who is travelling south to Rome, and he meets him at Palmer. And there's this important meeting and this important moment where Charlemagne asks him if he would join him and other scholars at the Carolingian Court.

Now, what did Charlemagne see in him? what sort of appointment did he give him? And Alquin was very well established in York, doing very well. If you can put it that way, well, he can't put it that way, doing very well indeed. So why would he go with Charlemagne? What was Charlemagne offering him? Well, Charlemagne was gathering the brightest and the best from across the known world. Bright and the best scholars.

Bright and the best scholars from across the known world at his court. And he was drawing on English scholarship as well. And so Alcuin clearly had this reputation as somebody who was amongst the most learning, people around at the time and Charlemagne wanted him close to him. So Charlemagne would know his reputation. Yeah, and he had already met Charlemagne once before. He had come to the continent with Albert collecting books.

So he's invited to join Charlemagne's court in 780, 781. It's often been thought that he went pretty, he went back to York to deliver the pallium and then returned to Francia straight away. But we're pretty sure now that he is not in Frankia until after 786. So there's a period of a few more years spent in York before he returns to Frankia. He's then in Frankia for a period a few years from 786 to about 790. In 790, we can place him back in Northumbria. He returns to Northumbria. The next time we can

pinpoint his movements, he is back in Frankia in 793. He's certainly in Frankian after news of the Viking raid on Lindisfarne, this important monastic site in Northumbria, comes through in 793. So can I just move on for a second? To go to Andy and Georgian. How did this relationship between Alquin and King Charles, as he then was, before he became the Great Orchalemagne,

how did it develop? And was there a stage at which Alquin became the preeminent scholar, as Mary has said in her notes, in that circle? He certainly was the preeminent scholar. I think there's several phases in terms of the development of Charlemagne's school. So he breaks out of Frankeur, conquers the Lombards. So the first stage is Italian scholars that he brings in first before Alquin comes along. Alquin at this point was the teacher in the school at York, as I like to think of it,

honing his educational skills, using very distinctly Anglo-Saxon techniques of learning from a vernacular perspective, moving them into the Latin. What were those distinctive angersection techniques? Comedy. He was very big on things like riddles, jokes, puns. Some puns we would think to be terrible. Mathematical puzzles. Well, yes.

But they stick in the mind of students. And so he had at least 14 years as a teacher before Charlemagne made him the offer. He comes to join a court that you have Paul the deacon, who's a Lombard, who's a historian, who's a little bit dry, but quite interesting. Peter of Pisa, who I always think is a bit of the sad one among the three, who's a grammarian, he's teaching Charlemagne Latin, and very dull stuff. And then Alquin, who has lots of, as it were, classroom experience,

comes in and starts bringing in some new techniques and liven sings up no end. What was it about King Charles that wanted him to do this? He was collecting the best and the brightest from all over the place. Why? He had an idea, I think, again, that he's called David, is one of his nicknames. And the idea of King David,

so you're a warrior, on the one hand, and he was very much a warrior, but also David, as a composer of the Psalms, in the next generation, Anjolbert, who's a Frank,

who's one of Alquin's students. I mean, Alquin had so many students that they all did something. But, I mean, he composes an absolutely terrible line of poetry when he, you know, he talks about, David, David.

David Amat Vartes, Vartoris, Gloria, David. David is the glory of, of poets and thereby incidentally screws up the genitive plural of the word for a poet which another poet then makes fun of. It was very much like a sort of college atmosphere

where you have these leading academics and they're all vying for Charlemagne detention and making fun of each other. I still like to pinpoint. We've got this great warrior with enormous power in armies and conquering stuff and that. Why did he

want also to kickstart what became an enormous and profound, important renaissance for the whole of Western Christendom and Western civilization. Is there a reason? There are two possible, or at least two possible reasons,

but one of them is this notion that to be a true hero, as it were, comes out of the classical tradition, comes out of Virgil, that it's not just, it's about Sapientia et fortitudo, it's about wisdom and might. So if you think about somebody like Achilles,

Achilles is just a fighting machine. The Vigilian hero has a bit of nouse about them. And we're moving exactly into the period where you get this third angle of thought and word and deed. And to be a complete person, particularly to be a complete warrior, you have to be able to not just do things, not just say things, but also to be able to think things. And he's honing these skills. And so a lot of the learning for learning sake, which is sort of the hallmark of what Alquin is doing, they don't have very obvious practical values. but it's like a modern-day humanities degree. And Charlemagne seems to enjoy and has a particular closeness for Alquin.

Alquin's biographer says that Alquin was via Undiqunque Doctissimo, the most learned of men, and that he was the one person who could criticise or suggest things to Charlemagne without Charlemagne getting upset. When did Charlemagne learn to read and write? Not to quite late in his life, and he was never particularly good at it. and we have his handwriting is execrable, I think that's fair to say. And we're told that his Latin was okay,

but he could understand Greek, but he didn't like to speak it, which always makes you me a bit suspicious when you hear that. Well, there's a story that Einhard tells, isn't there, where Charlemagne is sitting up in bed with his tablets trying to form the letters and never quite manages to do it, and in frustration sort of tells them across the room. The tablet's story may be part of royal humility, because just as today a grand personage will not write their own letters,

even though they can do it on the word processor. When Alquin arrived at the Court of King Charles, what markedly knew that he brought to this Assembly of Scholars? So I think there are two ways to see the major innovation. One is in terms of the content of learning and one is in terms of the sociability of the court. In terms of the content, Alcuin did two things that to us seem to be at odds.

He helped Charlemagne write official to crew. such as the Admonizio generalis, which included provisions saying that people should write correctly, punctuate their texts, not do silly japes when they were copying things. And this was a way to inform the most basic scriptural literacy that you needed to save your soul. But then, in the private seminar at court, Alcuin introduced this ideal of learning for its own sake. And he brought the love poetry of Tbilis and the consolation of philosophy. He introduced Latin translations of Aristotle's works on logic, a whole range of works that hadn't been studied for centuries, and he had a sort of collaborative dialogical approach

so we can find two Carolingian poets writing a beast fable or a small group of Alcuin and his student in Theodolf, experimenting with acrostic poetry. In this sort of spirit of dialogue that knowledge was an exchange and a discussion is evident in the teaching texts Alcuin wrote a work on rhetoric, the first work since classical antiquity that presented rhetoric in a dialogue form, and then lower-level question-and-answer texts about grammar. And he also included the women of the court in this intellectual life. Charlemagne famously wouldn't allow his daughters to marry,

and Alcun engaged them in correspondence, and they wrote to him with questions. Alcuin alone gave the daughter's nicknames. Alcun alone wrote a letter to the queen. So Alcun had this unique human familiarity and charm. And then his ability to marshal these new subjects meant that the Italians were soon redundant and went back home while Charlemagne studied astronomy and rhetoric and dialectic with Alcuin. So essentially, you could say he moved the level of studies from primary education to secondary education. And he made learning attractive and captivating. Can you take that up, Joe, and develop, and we've talked, it's been mentioned, the effect on people,

and what it affected them to do? I think it's important to take one step back a little with this, because Mary mentioned this document, the Adminiatorialis, which was this important framing of what Charlemagne was attempting to achieve in the late 780s. And one of the things within that is that he says that he wants there to be schools established, throughout Frankia. And so this idea of education at the court

is then also translated beyond that to the kingdom more generally. And he's expecting boys, noble boys, or bright boys, wherever they might be, to attend schools, which were to be located in cathedrals, just like the one that had been at York,

other cathedrals around the country, and in monasteries as well. So the emphasis on education under Charlemagne is, across the country, it's not just at the court itself, although the court is the sentry, a peatal force within that. What's also crucial here, and it hasn't been picked up so far,

is that we've been talking about learning for its own sake, but at this time people believe that for a kingdom to function, they need men who can fight, men who can pray, and men who can work, work in the fields. And so for a kingdom to be successful, It needs people who can pray and people who can communicate with God accurately. And there's a concern generally about the declining standards of Latin. And so as part of this Carolingian Renaissance, this Renovatio of learning that's happening,

is this renewed emphasis on accurate Latin and correct communication in order that the kingdom as a whole can pray successfully to God and God will stay on the side of the Franks in battle. Did Alquin take his great library of York? Did he take that across? No, not entirely, but we know that he is sending back to York for books. We know that books are being sent to the continent as well. So there are times when he is frustrated by the fact that he hasn't got books that he knows are in York,

and so he writes back and asks for them to be sent across. It's very important, isn't it? to get books out of England at that time. We talked about the Vikings coming in and Lindisfan and wrecking books and tearing the bits because they just want the jewels on them and they're going to come back again and again. So we have these destructive forces going on. They kept going on and there's no reason why people shouldn't think of the time they're going to keep going on. Absolutely.

Where does what Alquin's doing fit in to that? It fits in very nicely, but it's part of a wider programme. So there is a tradition before Alquin of Anglo-Saxons going up. abroad to convert the Germans who they saw as their Guamani and taking books from England over there. And then the Vikings, you know, shy, sensitive antique dealers sadly misunderstood, but they weren't big on books, let's be fair. What they were interested in, as you say, was the coverings of the books and the way that, and the stuff, the loot. So that what we have in the much later centuries after Alquin is books then being brought back from the continent

that had been, as it were, saved from the Viking. and then after King Alfred effectively, these same books are coming back. The library at York, we know in a great deal of detail, because Al Quinn tells us in his longest poem, 1685 line poem, he gives you a library catalogue towards the end of the poem. And it's a mark of how much he respected his teacher, Albert, that famously the Roman occupation of York is covered in 19 lines. Albert's death is 34 lines.

He loved his teacher. And part of the reason I think for him going is Charlemagne becomes the father figure that Albert was and replaces him in that sense. And in this we find Mary talked about some of the classical texts. But he's saying we read Lucan, we read Stacious, we read Virgil, he quotes bits of Ovid. This is extraordinary in a Christian context where these are pagan poets. You're not supposed to elevate these guys necessarily and love poetry. pagan love poetry. And you mentioned earlier that he's very fond of riddles

and you put some in your notes. Yeah, I mean he's got, the riddle technique is one that is, it's very Anglo-Saxon. We have about 700 riddles in the English-Axon tradition and it goes back to somebody who wasn't an English-Axon, but a guy called Symphosius

who was used as a teaching text and Symposius is like Plato's Symposium. It means drinking party animal and it's like, you know, I was at a drinking party and I had to recite some poems and here they are and here's some riddles. And they were used by a predecessor of bead, a man called Oldhelm, used them in Anglo-Saxe in England.

And so you would ask people to solve these riddles, for example, what is this creature that when you take away the head, it's taller? And the answer is a pillow. This has no practical value unless you're an insomniac, I suppose. But it's a way of can you think outside the box? Can you think outside the ideas? And the boat going across the river and backwards. Well, these are mathematical puzzles.

he does where he seems to be the first person to have the, you know, the idea of there are three guys and they've each got three sisters. They've each got a sister. They've each got a sister, sorry, three guys, three sisters, and they don't basically trust the blokes to be with their sister. They've got to get across a river, the boat only takes two people, how many trips, and the answer. Alquin says the answer is 11. A modern mathematician would tell you the answer is actually nine, but what's interesting is that Alquin is doing this before algebra. before number zero, and doing it with Roman numerals. So, you know, he has another one. There are seven carpenters.

They make seven wheels. How many carts can they make? And so we think of it seven times seven, four wheels. That will be, okay, 49, so that would be 12 carts and one left over. But if think of it in Alquin terms, it's VII times VII and so on. It's much more complicated, and you have to think outside the box. Mary, you want to come out. and then I want to ask you about the many of his letters that he made.

According to number 270 remain, and what did the reveal of him? Yeah, so I think I'll connect those two things. For the books to be able to bear fruit, they needed teachers who could expound them in an unbroken chain of a teacher, teaching a student who carried that knowledge on. And so the fatal interruption caused by the Viking invasions didn't just result in the almost complete wipeout

of Northumbrian culture to the point that the only earthenians Northumbrian books still in existence in Northumbria are less than half a dozen in Durham, but it also fatally interrupted that chain of teaching from teacher to student, student to teacher and so on. And it's on the continent that we see the first unbroken chains of discipleship. Even Bede wasn't able to pass his knowledge on for one generation. I'll move on to the letters now. So the letters are one of the most extraordinary documents because they let us see a man of colossal influence in learning, observing a world of headlong change, chronicling it to the point where there are events and persons who would be unknown without his letters, but they also show

Alcuin being changed himself by those things he observed, so we can get to know his inner life, his experiences of grief and friendship, his longing for Northumbria. We can also see that Alcuin was the gentleman with a horse who could tell you how to behave when you visited Charlemagne and even lend you a saddle in his own horse. He was the correspondent of gangster's malls and kings who murdered other kings in Northumbria. He wrote extraordinarily frequently to collectivities writing to all the men of Kent or all the men of Northumbria. This shows a remarkable sense of authority. Just as he was the only person who could contradict Charlemagne, he wrote letters of admonition to many people. And the letters are almost a historical event in their

own right, because they're the first letters that were collected and multiplied, because people wanted to read them since antiquity. Alcuin didn't imagine a posterity for his letters. As with his poems, he never put them together and gave them a preface and divided them into books, but contemporaries wanted the letters and made collections in his lifetime. There are over 50 manuscripts of the letters, very many from the 9th and 10th century with anywhere from 2 to 90 letters. Joe, John's story. He wrote to women as well as men as has been mentioned. What's significant about that? There are not so many letters surviving from the Middle Ages to women. Alcuin's letters to women are incredibly interesting because he writes frequently and regularly to the women of the Carolingian court, so the Frankish women, so Charlemagne's women. he also writes to the women in the Mercian court and also to Northumbria as well.

And he clearly understands that he knows these people, he knows them personally, he's met them. But he understands that if he wants to be able to influence the men at the court, talking to the women is one way of doing that. That was a technique that the Celtic monks used from the beginning, wasn't it? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Getting to the king through the queen. Well, it's a technique that people still use nowadays, isn't it? What do you believe it?

Yeah. Okay. So he writes to the women. He knows them personally. He communicates to them about scholarly matters, but also about personal things as well. They're exchanging gifts. These are real relationships.

And what I think is very important from this is that these are women who, they sort of flesh out the politics of the court in a way that we wouldn't otherwise have it. One of the key things about Alcuin's letter collection is that they cluster in date into basically the 790s. He died in 804. And there are 28,300 odd letters that we can attribute to Alcuin. And collectively, these make the 790s an incredibly well-documented,

one of the best documented decades of the post-Roman centuries. And it's because we have Alcuin's repeated correspondence with people. We don't have their replies coming. back, but we can infer what the correspondence is about. And so the women of the Frankish court, the Mercyon court and the Northumbrian court are regular correspondence of Alcuin. They were his pupils often, but it's through them that he's able to get messages through to the men who are ruling these kingdoms.

And these are people like Offer of Mercia. So a man of who considered himself Charlemagne's equal and a man. of very considerable danger, really, as well as the kings of his own people in Northumbria. Who developed a habit of killing each other. Who were, yeah, you know, homicidal maniacs at the time. That's a kind way of putting it. That's a kind way of putting it, yes.

Andy Orchard, he wrote poems as well, this amazing man, a public and private. Can you tell us a bit about the private poems? He churned it out I mean from the whole Coffered. If I quote some of it to you might think churning is exactly the right word.

Some churned, some crafters. Some were better than others. I mean the In total it's about 6,000 1,000 lines of poetry. That's a lot of poetry. From the whole of the Anglo-Saxon period, Anglo-Saxon poets, in Latin and in Old English

we've got between 50 and 60,000 lines. Alquin is more than 10% He's two Beowulfs worth, if you want to think of it like that. And he writes very long poems. This York poem, he writes a poem on the sack of Lindisfarne. He writes the life of Willa Broad. These are the very public ones. The private ones, I think, are much more interesting.

And so in the official tally of the poetry, there's 124 poems. There's another 25 or so, which are only in the letters. So at the end of letters, when he writes to his students. And he gives students nickname, so often bird nicknames. So he has a student called Cuckulus, the Cuckoo, who he says, you shouldn't be drinking so much, my lad. You were a much better poet when you didn't drink, and please don't do it.

And two of his deathless lines, which I couldn't possibly suggest that he turned out, but he says, Carmen Acid Coras, Cuculus, Cicchewanito, Echewinito, precoo, cacururus, Echewanito. Which means, if you care about poetry, Cuckoo, please come quickly. I'm telling you, please come quickly.

God, it'd be nice if you came quickly. I mean, this is not T.S. Eliot. his more public poetry is much more carefully crafted with lots of illusions you know in the in the York poem when he's talking about the conversion of the pagans to pagan priest covey he quotes Virgil he quotes Lucan he quotes Ovid he can do it when he wants to but I think he also is he's been called the poet laureate he did do poems to order right now you both want to get in so could you marry So I think his poems as well as his letters show that he knew how to write comil foe.

No one had been capable of writing a hexameter at the papal court nor at the Frankish court till Ikew came. He made it cool to write coterie poetry poetry and small, gracious poems to people. And then both his letters and his poems became models. And if we look at the circulation of his inscriptional verse, so a verse for the kitchen or the bookshelf or the library or the scriptorium or even the latrine. Those were copied. Everyone wanted that. So he set a new standard for a kind of gracious use of prestigious Latin. Was there any chance that he would go back to Northumbria or a Merceria or had too much change?

This is one of the most poignant, fascinating questions, and we can trace this in detail. He was pressured to return by the Archbishop of York, his former fellow student. student in 795, and he kept on saying he couldn't come. Clearly, the Archbishop wanted to retire and pass on the seat before he died. And then in 796, Alcuin called it the year of miseries and the death of king, so King Ethelred was murdered. His successor stayed in place for less than a month before he was expelled. Alcuin then must have decided not to return, and he wrote a letter saying, I have just been given the monastery of tour. And later on, he wrote to the community at York telling them he loved them.

He hoped he might be buried with them. They must make an honest election if he couldn't get there in time. It looks as if Charlemagne gave him tour as a sort of compensation for his estates in England. And indeed, not long after that is when Alcuin finally arranged to export the library. So this 796 was a catastrophic year. and Alcuin adopted sort of the expressions of an Old Testament prophet and he said times of tribulation are everywhere. Loyalty is declining.

The truth is silent. Malice is increasing. I was ready to return, but it seemed better to remain abroad, not knowing what I could accomplish among those, among whom nothing is safe and no good counsel can prevail. Joanna Joanne and Joe, when Charles became Emperor Charles, the great Charlemagne, in 800,

Where did Alquin stand in his scheme of things then? Charlemagne famously was made emperor in Rome on Christmas Day in the year 800. Alcuin, by that stage, as Mary has said, had become established at Toole in Western Francia, which was in many ways quite distant from Charlemagne's court, which by this stage was focused in Arkin predominantly. We have to point out that for the first time, early on with Alcun and King Charles's then was there, there wasn't a settled court. They tour together, two them all around the place.

Yeah, absolutely. So kingship in the early Middle Ages is essentially peripatetic. There is a very unusual aspect of Charlemagne's kingship in that in round about 795, he begins to start investing heavily in a palace complex at Arcan. And indeed, his chapel still survives, and it's one of the sort of treasures of European heritage. And so from the second half of the 790s, Charlemagne is increasingly centered around Arcan. And it's at this point, well, 796, that Alcuin moves away from the court to tour in western Francia near O'Leon. So when this crisis happens in Rome in 799, the Pope is attacked.

He flees northwards to Charlemagne and Charles agrees to have him escorted back into his. into Rome. This provides a political opening for what leads to the imperial coronation in 800. It's very, very significant that in early 800, after the Pope has returned to Rome with Charlemagne's assistance, Charlemagne tours his kingdom and goes to see Alcuin and clearly spends quite a considerable period of time with Alcuin there. So although Alcuin has left the court, he's retired to tour, This pivotal moment in Charlemagne's reign, he turns back to Alcuin to get his advice. And Alcuin decides not to go to Rome with Charles. Charles has decided he has to go to Rome to solve the Pope's problems and to try the people who had accused him.

Alcuin decides not to travel on grounds of his health, but it's important that Charlemagne had been to see him to get his advice. Andy Ochard Tour there's sort of a couple of views on it that this is a great hugely rich enormously rich and he was given other places

of all other Abbas so he was very rich and there he could do all sorts of things about his library there and at the same time it was a feeling that he was disliked and he felt lonely writes about

when he was a boy who chased the deer and now as an old man walking across the field with a stick and that sort of thing. What I would say is that, I mean, the lines of poetry that you were just quoting are in fact possibly some of his best lines, right?

So, you know, Nil Manitai Zaynum Nehlimutableri Veras. Nothing remains forever, nothing is truly immutable in the field where once people used to chase the deer as young boys now, an old man, no, Baku Lov, senes, an old man just resting on his stick. And he says, but this is very, the important thing about Tour.

Almost all of our information about Alquin comes from that period, right? 796 tour, he dies in 804, two-thirds of the letters that we have are from that period. Most of the poetry that we have is from that period. And there is a sense of longing, of exile, of, he talks in this no smitheree corte. We poor wretches, why do we love you, world,

when you're running away from us? You keep running away from us, and yet we still love you. And there's a sort of repetitious element. So, you know, his favorite word is semper, always, always, always. In his poetry, he uses the word always. It's sad that I noticed, 273 times. In the comparative corpus,

it's very repetitious and it is sad. And he writes the poems that he writes to his students. He almost always ends him saying, please send me a poem, please write to me. And his students became incredibly powerful and effective. And, you know, his, the line I would think of, Alquin, Sysma or Albinni, pot tempera longer magistrate, remember

Alquin, he was a teacher for a hell of a long time. And he's the teacher, is really his kind of, that's his big legacy. Mary, so he had, but he had plenty of resources at Tour, to get on with his central task that he set himself. Tour was vastly well resourced, and

it gave Alcuin a scripturium that had already been disciplined in decades before where he could have his letters multiple, for people who requested them. We don't actually have Turonian copies, but of course Tyronian copies were sent out. It gave him the chance to inaugurate the production of one-volume Pandects. And it also, Alkin was alluding to the students. When he was settled in tour,

that's when scholars like Rabanus Maurus were sent to study with him. And Rabanus is sort of the second father of expanse of capacious learning in Europe. And whether he really felt exiled or whether he was just, he had malaria, he had fevers, his eyesight was failing. He complained that Charlemagne kept writing to him and he said, your questions are like flies buzzing around the windows. To her he corresponded with Charlemagne about the retrograde motion of the planet Mars at greater length than any writer in the Latin West ever had done, and he was constantly fending off invitations to the court. So there's a poignance, but there's also a sense that this is the time of great intellectual fruition.

Joe, just a... For what was he most valued, Argon? Was he widely valued in this time? Yes, and for this sort of energy that he puts into the Carolingian Court and the Renaissance of Learning, he certainly valued during his own day. And it's this, what Mary alluded to there,

the editing of the Bible is something that he undertakes in Tour at Charlemagne's specific request. When manuscripts are copied out, errors are introduced, and there was this concern that the Bible text was becoming less pure. And so Charlemagne asked him to edit the Bible to make sure that it was the Old Testament and the New were accurate.

And he begins this process, which whereby Tours starts to produce, as Mary says, pandex, a bit complete copies of the Bible within one volume according to this newly revised text. And there's a connection there possibly with the Bible manuscripts that were produced back in Beads Library in Weirmouth and Jaro and the great Codex Amiatinus that so many of us saw in London a year ago where this tradition of producing complete copies of the Bible was very, very unusual, but there was a distinct Northumbrian heritage to that idea.

Is it possible for the three of you briefly to say what you most value about his legacy? Starting with you, Andy? I actually, despite what you might think, I quite like his poetry in a funny way, because you get at the sense of the man. It's intensely personal. It's as if you can know somebody from that period. Contemporaries and near contemporaries,

a much, much better poet, Theodore Favreauleon makes fun of Alquin. He calls him the porridge man. So he's the pasty-faced English guy. I assume he wore socks with his sandals. And then he says, make way, we need some spicy sausage. He's a Spaniard, so he's saying, now to the new man. But you can actually see him, his letters, his poems.

It's very personal. Not the liturgy, not the Bible, it's him. I think because the word renaissance has been so well domesticated in the English language, it's easy to think that every renaissance was inevitable. But before Alcuin, classical learning was hanging by a thread. Alcuin, not the rediscovery of Lucretius in early modern times, is the true swerve in Western culture, because if Alcuin hadn't rescued the harvest of Northumbrian learning from York,

this capacious program of studies, and brought it to the continent and brought the books to the continent before the Viking devastation of the British Isles, I think the literary and cultural and intellectual history of the West would look completely different. And finally, Jo. To reinforce that point, that Alcuin almost more than anybody else,

exemplifies the importance of Anglo-Saxon culture to the heritage of Europe in centuries after Rome. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks, Mary Garson, Joe Story and Andy Orchard. Next week, it's George Sohn, the woman who became the most popular French novelist in the 19th century, exploring how life might be improved for women and men. Thank you very much for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. And where you go? I'm going to sit back now. Can I say something about Hadrian? Pope Hadrian. We talked a little bit about Pope Leo, who is the Pope who is attacked in 799

and who Charlemagne reinstates on the throne, on the papal throne in 800, and is so important in Charlemagne's reputation. But prior to Leo, there had been another pope whose name was Hadrian, who had been a pope for 23, nearly 24, four years, the longest-lived Pope until the 18th century, in fact. And he had developed this

very robust friendship with and relationship with the Franks over the years. He died in 795, and this relationship, this between Hadrian and Charlemagne fractured because of his death. Alcuin is the

person who writes Hadrian's epitaph. We've talked about his, if you like, his frivolous poetry, but Hadrian's epitaph, a 40-line verse is Alcuin's poetry at its epic best and at its most political. What is particularly interesting about Hadrian's epitaph is that it still survives today in its Carolingian form in the portico of St Peter's Basilica in Rome. So the next time you go into St Peter's Basilica, through the main doors, look up on the left

and you can see the epitaph that was written in Frankia on Frankish stone by Alcuin is still there. He won it. He won the competition, basically. So there was other people were there. Some of the finest epigraphic letters. We haven't talked about Alcuin's interest in punctuation. Absolutely. And spelling.

And these sound very pedantic, but actually these are also of massive influence. So what Alcun did when he went to the continent would be much as if I went to the Netherlands as I did, and told everyone that they should no longer say Panakuka at the pancake stand but Pan en Kukin, he insisted on a hyper-correct pronunciation of Latin which was the way the English and the Irish scholars pronounced Latin. In doing that

meant that classical Latin would become accessible again because people would have to pull up their socks and learn the grammar and not skate by on the similarity between a spoken vernacular that was no longer classically correct and words that they recognize. So Alcuin in a way he turned the clock back on Latin.

But he also turned the clock forward in the sense of he makes some quite bad errors in his Latin poetry. But then the mistaken form that he popularizes is then the one that his students then use. So it's as if forget Virgil, forget Ovid. But Alquin is, you know, I can tell you how to scan start him incorrectly. By the way, but they can. Can I go back to some of the. paradoxes of this remarkable phenomenon of the knowable human being, not just someone who influences history, but who was influenced by it. And I like to say that our knowledge of him is a portrait

in Kiaroscuro, because there are areas that are well lit where we know a lot in their complete darkness. And so one of the questions is when he went to the continent. And most recently, there's been an argument that he knew Charlemagne very well, much earlier, in an attempt to redate his teaching text then. And as far as I can see the question of whether he first came to the continent in 781, in 786, or even had had some extended sojourns in the 770s, can't be resolved right now. And so we have this remarkable phenomenon of a person of influence across the centuries and incredible connectivity and charisma in his own time and authority, massive authority. and yet there are whole areas of his life that can't be reconstructed

according to sort of modern biographical standards. It's the Anglo-Saxon aspects that I think are particularly interesting because if you take Alquins' riddle, his use of riddle techniques, he uses the same riddle techniques that we only find in vernacular, old English riddles. Tell me the answer. Say what I am called. Tell me the answer. And he puts that into Latin and he uses it.

that's interesting. He writes Latin poetry using alliterative techniques that are found in old English but are not found in Latin. So he carries his Englishness very much with him, even down to the repetitious formulaic aspects of the poetry and to some extent the letters that he writes. Completely normal in old English poetry, completely foreign to Latin, and he somehow blends the two of them together. And then they became the language comial foe that everyone wanted to imitate.

So he, in Malcolm Gladwell's terms, was a maven, a connector and a persuader. He had this massive knowledge that he was able to make attractive and spread to people. And if you make a sort of genealogy of his students and their students, it's like a sun shining across Europe. And what one of Charlemagne's biographer said, there was not a single great abbot or bishop of the following generation who was not taught by Alcuin. So this is getting back to the idea that one person made an astonishing difference at a crucial moment in history and things would look very different if he hadn't been there.

Can you tell us something about the Karolingen miniscule? Yes. In the mid-eighth century, it was the forms of writing across Francia were essentially different in each monastery. One of the things that happens under Charlemagne with this process of correctio and attempting to spread correct Latin learning

is also a reform of script so that people are using a script that is mutually legible across his kingdom. And they come up with a minuscule script that evolves from a earlier Roman script. It's called Caroline minuscule and it essentially is the basis of the script that we use today.

So when you go to school, you are taught to write what is basically Caroline minuscule. So we used to call it copperplate. Yeah, kind of. It's the... Kind of copperplate. Yeah, it's...

Mine is kind of copperplate. Kind, yeah, without the linking bits together. But the reason for this is an important historical one. Mary and Andy have both talked about how the Caroline Genrescence is the sort of stepping stone for so much classical literature. So in the 15th century,

14th to 15th century, when humanist scholars were beginning to the invention of printing comes in. They are interested in classical texts. The manuscripts they find of Lucian or Cicero or whatever are in fact Carolingian copies. And so as they're looking at these manuscripts, they think they're looking at the earliest copies of the classics. And so they use the script that is the Caroline minuscule

for their early movable type. And that's because each letter is distinctly formed and separate one from another. So it's very easy to translate into print. And so this is why it essentially ends up as our Times new Roman. Our Roman script is essentially Caroline minuscule. And so that is why the script that we all learn to read and write is Caroline minuscule. When I'm teaching paleography to my students, I start them with Caroline Minuscule

because they can read it straight off. It gets harder before and after that. I mean, what's very interesting about it is because it's so regular, because it's so neat, because the letters are separated, a guy working for you at a moment, You can train a computer, like you can train a computer to scan and read type. You can train a computer to read Caroline minuscule manuscripts very easily. And, you know, we have about six, seven thousand of them left. Seven and a half thousand, seven and a half thousand manuscripts were surviving from Francia,

that were written in Frankia in the 9th century, in comparison to about 25 or 30 from Anglo-Saxon England at the same time. It's a massive difference. and that is Charlemagne's emphasis on education, education, education, the schools across the kingdom. And you can see that in the survival, the simple survival rate of manuscripts from Frankia in the 9th century. We haven't talked about whether we have any writing in Alcuin's own hand.

And it turns out that there are two letters written in the margin of a manuscript that Alcuin was instructing an assistant to excerpt for him. which are written in the contemporary Anglo-Saxon handwriting. We assume that their Alcuin is not an Emanuance, the letters D and S for to start writing and to leave off writing. So Alcun was promoting the standard of correctness and clarity and punctuation in an orderly page. He mentions that in several letters,

and it became, as imitation of his letters, became standard, It became the way to do things. Even though he was writing in a script that was insular. Sex and script, so in the Ansela Star. But he was, by the end of his life, probably most of his writing was done by people who took dictation and he wouldn't have been wielding the pen. Wield himself.

So any other startling, outstanding factor? I love that anecdote about, that's told about him in the Vita of him, about the people in tour who are complaining. about all of the English students who are buzzing like bees around the honeypot at Tour. There's this irritation of all of these English people who are studying

Erasmus-like in Tour. Then Alkeon ordered them all to have a drink and make it up. But we haven't talked so much about York as a city. In Alcuin's poem about York describes all the chief features that you can still see today.

He describes the walls and the towers and the riverbanks. And York then, of course, was a port. It no longer is as a magnet for people to come to. And it was also, I think, York as the seat of the Archbishop, but then enabled Alcuin to develop his incredible social agility and connections. He wasn't traveling to visit people. They would come to York and he would meet them there. So, although archaeologists still haven't found as much from Angley in York as we want, in a way, Alcuin's connections and network and competence show that being at York was like being a spider at the centre of a web where people came through and traders came.

I think it's also very interesting and important to think about the difference between somebody like Alcuin and somebody like Beed. Because Beed was a monk who lived a little further north than York. He lived in Weir, Mouth and Jarrow all his life. He may have travelled a little, but not so much. And his whole life was centred on the banks of the time, the banks of the Weir. Alcuin's world was very different to that. Alcuin's world attached to a cathedral is outward looking. The world comes to Alcuin, Alcuin goes to the world. There is much more mobility and connectivity around a cathedral than there is around a monastery.

Beed had visited nearby York. Beed also, Beed refused to call the liberal arts by their names. He was vastly learned, but it was as if he saw learning as so closely embanked. in the monastic life that he wasn't trying to expound the disciplines and perhaps I think of him as a sort of professor an institute for advanced studies

who exerts a chilling effect on his colleagues and students by his brilliant so Alcuin had this remarkable warmth while he was first at court he got all the commissions to write things it was only after he withdrew to tour that other people were invited to write I think the final word

for manly the producer is chumping at the bit just as an example of that the very first one of his mathematical puzzles he talks about the snail who's been invited to dinner by a swallow the swallow lives a league away and he says a league is 15,000 paces a pace is five feet

there are 12 inches in a foot the snail can travel one inch a day how long will it take him to get to dinner and the answer I'm not making this up is 246 years and 210 days we presume that dinner was cold that's comedy but that's also

So, I mean, that's such a teaching moment, isn't it? That should have been a puzzle for the Today program, don't you think? In your... You do it in the pubs in the puzzle every year in the festival of ideas, and we've had one of those pubs on the radio. Puzzles in the pub. Here's a producer, Simon Tillerson with an offer. You're right.

Got to stop now. Your coffee? Anyone likes to your coffee? Yes, please. A cup of tea. Tea. Tea. Tea. Tea.

Tea. Tea. Tea. Maybe. Tea, yes. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Anna Delvey was due to inherit $67 million.

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