Alcuin of York
Alcuin of York was the Northumbrian schoolmaster whom Charlemagne met at Parma in 781 and took home to run the palace school at Aachen, and who for the next twenty years was the mind of the Carolingian renaissance: he wrote its textbooks, corrected its Bible, drew up the reform of the liturgy, taught the king and his children, and trained the men who made the scriptoria that gave Europe its script. He was also the man who, when the Vikings sacked Lindisfarne in 793, wrote to the king of Northumbria that never before had such terror appeared in Britain, and asked whether the sins of the English had brought it. He was born about 735 near York and was educated in the cathedral school there under Archbishop Egbert, Bede's pupil, and became its master and the keeper of its library, the best in the north. At Charlemagne's court he was one among the Italians and Spaniards and Irish the king collected, and the one the king listened to. He wrote the grammar, the rhetoric and the dialogue on the arts that were used in the schools, revised the Vulgate text that the Tours scriptorium copied into the great Bibles, and argued the case against the Spanish bishops' Adoptionism at the councils of Frankfurt in 794 and Aachen in 800, which was the king's theology as well as his. His letters, more than three hundred, are the largest correspondence of the age and the one in which the idea of an empire of the Christians under a Frankish king was first written down. In 799, with Leo III a fugitive at Paderborn, he wrote to Charlemagne that the pope's authority and the emperor's at Constantinople had both failed and that the king now stood above them, and the coronation followed in a year. He argued with the king about forced baptism of the Saxons and about the death penalty for pagans, and lost. In 796 Charlemagne gave him the abbey of St Martin at Tours, where he set up the school and the scriptorium whose minuscule is the basis of the letters this is printed in. He died there in May 804, having asked to be let go to Fulda to die and been refused.
- Lived: 735 CE – 804 CE
- Nationality: Northumbrian
- Roles: scholar, theologian, teacher, abbot
