Justified True Belief

(●) The English schoolmaster Charlemagne put in charge of his kingdom’s learning, who argued that a Christian people has to be a taught people. + Somewhere this morning a student is reading a page of Cicero, or of Augustine, or of the Latin Bible. The odds are very good that the oldest surviving copy of that text was written out by a monk in Francia in the ninth century, by candle and quill, in a round and evenly spaced hand that a modern reader can still make out at a glance. Behind a great deal of that copying stands one man’s conviction that ignorance is a spiritual emergency. Alcuin came from York, taught at York, and was past forty when a chance meeting on an Italian road put him at the side of the most powerful ruler in the West. Charlemagne wanted a Christian kingdom. Alcuin told him that he could not have one while his priests could not read the service they were saying, and then spent twenty years building the schools that would fix it. The programme he pressed on Charlemagne, a school attached to every cathedral and every monastery, a corrected Bible, a corrected liturgy, and boys of free families sent to learn their letters, is the beginning of what historians call the Carolingian renaissance, and it is the root from which the medieval cathedral schools and eventually the universities grew. One detail is worth holding on to, because it says a good deal about the man and about the age. Alcuin was never a monk and never a priest. He was a deacon of the church at York, one step short of the priesthood, and he ran the intellectual life of Western Europe from that modest rank. About three hundred of his letters survive, to kings, bishops, former pupils and worried friends, which makes him one of the best documented human beings of the eighth century.

(●) c. 735 AD: Born to a Northumbrian family of some standing, and handed over as a small boy to the cathedral school at York. + Nobody recorded the year. His biographers put his birth somewhere between 730 and 740, and the conventional figure, the one the reference books and his anniversaries use, is about 735. He was Northumbrian, from the kingdom that ran up England’s north-east coast, and by his own account he was kin to the father of Willibrord, the missionary who had carried the gospel a generation earlier to the Frisians, the pagan people of the North Sea coast where the Netherlands is now. That family connection to the continent is the first hint of the direction his life would take. He was given to the church at York as a child, in the ordinary way of the time: a boy of good family was handed to a school and grew up in it. Two men taught him there, and the first of them put him within arm’s reach of the greatest scholar the English church had yet produced. Ecgbert, the archbishop, had been a pupil of Bede, the monk at Jarrow up the coast whose history of the English church is still the first book anyone reads about Anglo-Saxon England. Bede died in 735, the year Alcuin was most likely born, so the boy never met him; but he was taught by a man who had, which in that world is how learning moved. Alcuin’s other master was Ælberht, who ran the school itself and who seems to have loved him. What they taught was the seven liberal arts, the standard curriculum that late antiquity had handed to the Middle Ages: grammar, rhetoric and logic first, then arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. "Liberal" there means the studies proper to a free man rather than a tradesman, and the whole course was understood as a preparation for reading Scripture well. He was a good pupil and a famous enthusiast for Virgil, a taste he later worried about, since a Christian schoolmaster who loves a pagan poet has to work out sooner or later what he thinks the poet is for. When Ælberht travelled abroad hunting for books, as scholars of that world did, he took his favourite student with him, and the road ran through Francia and down into Italy. Alcuin never forgot Pavia. Something had happened in that city: a famous debate between Peter of Pisa, the grammarian who would one day teach at the Frankish court, and a Jewish scholar whom Alcuin names Lullus. Writing to Charlemagne as an old man (Letter 172), he was still turning over the days he had spent in the Lombard capital on his way to Rome, and what he sets down is that the two men disputed there and that the argument had been written out in the city. Whether he stood in the room or only heard afterwards that a record of it existed, his sentence does not settle, and modern readers of the letter have taken it both ways. Either way an argument had been fixed in writing and was travelling, which is how a famous debate moved in a world with no printing and no newspapers. Years afterwards he would be the one standing in a room arguing a case of his own, for six days, in front of a court; but that was a long way off, and for the moment he was a young man in a foreign city, catching the report of somebody else’s words.

(●) c. 767 AD: When his teacher became archbishop of York, the cathedral school passed into his hands. + Ecgbert died in 766 and Ælberht was consecrated archbishop in his place on 24 April 767, which left the school without a master, an archbishop having a diocese to run and no mornings to spare on grammar. Alcuin took it, and taught there for about fifteen years. Pupils came to him from across the sea as well as from England; Liudger, later the apostle of the Saxons and the first bishop of Münster, came over from Utrecht to sit under him. It is hard to overstate what the York library meant. In a poem on the bishops, kings and saints of York, Alcuin later walked his readers along its shelves and named what stood there, which is why we know: Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine and Gregory, Bede and Aldhelm, and beside them Virgil, Cicero, Pliny and the Latin grammarians. It was very likely the finest collection of books in Britain and among the finest anywhere in the West, and it had been assembled by two generations of patient men writing to other houses and buying abroad. Nothing like it could be bought; it could only be gathered, slowly, by people who thought it was worth the trouble. The books did not become his own charge until near the end of his time there, and the way they came to him says something about how they were valued. When Ælberht laid the archbishopric down in about 778, he divided what he had built between two men. The church went to Eanbald, who was consecrated in his place. The library went to Alcuin. That is to say the old man treated the shelves as an inheritance of the same order as the see itself, and gave them to the pupil he trusted with them. Alcuin knew exactly what he had, and one of the sorrows of his later life was leaving it behind. These were his settled years, and he looked back on them with longing. He taught, he kept the books, and he spent his free hours with the old archbishop he honoured as a scholar and loved as a father.

(●) 781 AD: A meeting with Charlemagne on the road at Parma turned a schoolmaster into a king’s adviser. + He was in Italy on church business, sent to Rome to collect the pallium for Eanbald, the new archbishop of York. The pallium is a narrow woollen band worn over the shoulders that a pope gives to an archbishop as the sign of his office, and fetching one meant a long journey and a good deal of waiting. On the road home, in March 781, Alcuin met Charles at Parma. Charles was building a kingdom, and he had begun to understand that he could not run it on soldiers alone. A kingdom needs men who can read a law, keep an account, draft a letter to another ruler and say a service without mangling it, and those men have to be made somewhere by somebody. Here on the road was a man who had spent fifteen years making them. Charles wanted this Englishman, and said so. Alcuin was cautious and correct about it, which is worth noticing in a man being offered the most interesting job in Europe. He would not say yes until he had leave from his own archbishop and his own king. Having got it, he crossed to Francia in 782 and took charge of the king’s palace school. The palace school was not a schoolroom of children. It was the king’s household: his sons and daughters, the young men being groomed for bishoprics and counties, and the king himself. Einhard, Charlemagne’s biographer, says his master kept wax tablets under his pillow so he could practise forming letters when he could not sleep, and that he began too late in life and never got the hang of it. The circle took classical nicknames for their letters and their verses. Charles was David, the psalm-singing king; Alcuin was Flaccus, after the poet Horace. It was a court, with a court’s jealousies. His Frankish pupils did not always enjoy being corrected by a Saxon, and more than once he asked the king to protect him from their mockery.

(●) 790–792 AD: He went home to Northumbria for two years, and was back in Francia when the Vikings came to Lindisfarne. + He went back in 790 hoping, probably, to end his days quietly in a small monastery on the Humber. Instead he spent the visit as a diplomat, patching up a serious quarrel between Charlemagne and Offa, king of Mercia, and watching his own Northumbria tear itself apart in coups and murders. He gave up on retirement at home and went back to the Frankish court in 792, called for by a king who had a heresy on his hands and wanted him to answer it. Then, on 8 June 793, raiders from the sea fell on the monastery of Lindisfarne, the island house off the Northumbrian coast where Aidan had planted the faith and where Cuthbert was buried. They killed monks, took others away as slaves, and stripped the church. Alcuin heard about it in Francia, and the letters he wrote are the reason we know what the shock felt like from inside. To King Æthelred he wrote (Letter 16, in Page’s translation of 1909): "Alas, the Church of St. Cuthbert, so honored by all the people of Britain, hath been given over wholly to the pagans for plunder; despoiled of its ornaments, bereft of its glories, it has been spattered with the blood of its priests. Verily, if the Holy St. Cuthbert cannot defend his own in that place where religion was first implanted in our race, verily there remaineth naught for us to do save to cry out, ‘Spare, O Lord, spare thy people, and give not thine inheritance unto the heathen, lest they say, where is the Christians’ God?’" The honest thing to add is that he read the disaster as judgment. He wrote to Higbald, the bishop of Lindisfarne, that the monks had grown soft, dressed like princes and drunk too well, and that God does not strike without cause; and he turned on the Northumbrian king and his nobles for luxury, injustice and the robbery of the poor. That is the standing prophetic reading of catastrophe, and he applied it as freely to his own nation’s rulers as to its monks. It also lands hard on survivors, and it is part of his record either way.

(●) 794–799 AD: He took up the fight against the teaching that Christ is God’s Son by adoption, and argued its ablest defender into recanting. + Two Spanish bishops, Elipandus of Toledo and Felix of Urgel, had begun to say that Christ as God is the Father’s own natural Son, but that Christ as man is the Father’s adopted Son. Felix’s diocese lay inside Charlemagne’s borders, on the edge of Muslim Spain, where the loyalty of a frontier bishop was never a small question. That turned a Spanish argument about a word into a Frankish problem about allegiance, and the king wanted it settled. What actually hung on the word is the substance of the quarrel (T3). Councils tried first, which was the ordinary way to settle a question of doctrine: the bishops of a region gathered, the teaching was read out and examined, and a verdict went back to the churches over their names. At a council at Regensburg, Felix recanted. Then he went home and thought again. The Council of Frankfurt condemned the teaching in 794, with Alcuin present, and still it did not die. When the councils failed to end it, Charlemagne turned to Alcuin, and for five years Alcuin fought it with everything he had: letters to Felix himself, a short tract, then seven books against Felix, then four more against Elipandus. His letters from those years carry a rancour his friends rarely heard from him. He began gently enough, begging Felix to give the word up rather than put the unity of the church and his own soul at risk, and when the appeal failed the tone hardened and stayed hard. It ended in a room at Aachen in 799. Felix was persuaded to come and defend himself in open court, with Alcuin against him, and after six days of argument he gave way and afterwards wrote out a profession of faith for his clergy. Alcuin treated him gently in victory and had always called him a man of blameless life. Whether the surrender was real is another matter. Agobard of Lyons, who went through Felix’s papers after his death, reported that he had held the doctrine to the end.

(●) 796 AD: At about sixty he was made abbot of Tours, and set the house to copying a corrected Bible. + He had asked to be allowed to retire to Fulda. Charlemagne gave him St Martin’s at Tours instead, the richest monastery in the kingdom, with estates scattered across Francia and thousands of tenants, and told him to put its monks and its learning back in order. It was the highest monastic appointment the king had to give, and it went to a man who had taken no vows. He did three things there. He disciplined the house, which had been living well below its rule. He rebuilt the school, teaching the same arts he had taught at York and at court, and wrote to Charlemagne for leave to send boys back to York for books, because Tours had nothing like the library he had left. And he took up the king’s commission to amend the text of Scripture. Four centuries of copying had left the Latin Bible in a state: chapters missing, readings drifting, one house’s text disagreeing with the next. Alcuin’s men produced a corrected text and wrote it out in pandects, single volumes containing the whole Bible, which was itself an unusual and expensive thing to attempt. Tours went on making those Bibles for fifty years after his death, and dozens of them survive. The script they are written in matters as much as the text. A clear, rounded, separately formed lower-case hand now called Caroline minuscule had begun to take shape in Frankish houses before Alcuin arrived, so it is not his invention; but Tours under him and under his successors became one of the great engines that perfected it and sent it out. Italian humanists six centuries later took that round hand for the script of the ancients and copied it. The first printers then cut their roman types from the humanists’ copies, and roman type is what nearly every printed book and nearly every screen has used ever since. The lower-case letters an ordinary reader looks at all day still have the shape a Frankish scribe gave them.

(●) 804 AD: He died at Tours on the morning of Pentecost, which is the day he had asked for. + His last years were tired ones. He complained to friends that the abbey’s wealth and its lawsuits were burying him, and he begged Charlemagne to let him lay the work down. A bitter quarrel with Theodulf, bishop of Orléans, over a fugitive who had claimed sanctuary at St Martin’s cost him the king’s good opinion for a while (†3). The two were reconciled, and Charlemagne went back to sending him questions about theology and the stars. He was afraid of dying. He wrote that he trembled at the thought of the day of judgment in case it found him unready, and he asked Pope Leo III to pray for his sins. Two wishes he named: to die at Pentecost, and to be buried beside Boniface at Fulda, among the English missionaries who had gone before him. The second was beyond him, since he was far too weak to be carried to Fulda. But he got the first exactly. His life went out at Tours on 19 May 804, just as the monks finished singing the morning office on Whitsunday, which is the old English name for the feast of Pentecost, and his pupil Fridugis took the abbey after him.

What He Taught

(T1) A people that cannot read cannot keep the faith it professes. + Picture a village priest in eighth-century Francia standing over a font, saying words he has learned by ear and does not understand, in a Latin that has drifted so far from his own speech that he gets the case endings wrong and changes the sense without knowing it. That was not a scare story. Charlemagne’s own capitularies, the written orders he issued to his kingdom, complain about clergy who could not perform their ministry properly because they could not read the law of God, and therefore could not preach it to anyone else. Alcuin’s answer was not a sermon about standards. It was an institution. Under his hand the king’s orders required schools: the Admonitio generalis of 789, a long instruction to the whole kingdom, told the monasteries and cathedrals to teach, and a later order told fathers to send their sons to study letters and to leave them there until they were properly taught. Books had to be corrected, because a psalter copied by a man who could not read it was a psalter full of nonsense. Teachers had to be chosen who were both able and willing. The point of all of it was Scripture. Alcuin did not love grammar for grammar’s sake; he taught grammar because a man who does not know what a relative clause is cannot follow Paul’s argument in Romans, and he taught the arts as servants of the text. When Tours turned out to have no books worth the name, he wrote to Charlemagne asking leave to send some of his young monks home to York to fetch "the flowers of Britain," so that there might be a garden at Tours on the Loire as well as the one at York. It is a small request with a large programme inside it: the church’s learning is not a private possession of the place that happens to hold it.

(Q) "If only there were many who would follow the illustrious desire of your intent, perchance a new, nay, a more excellent Athens might be founded in Frankland; for our Athens, being ennobled with the mastership of Christ the Lord, would surpass all the wisdom of the studies of the Academy. That was instructed only in the Platonic disciplines and had fame for its culture in the seven arts, but ours being enriched beyond this with the sevenfold plenitude of the Holy Spirit, would excel all the dignity of secular learning." + Source: Alcuin, Letter 170, to Charlemagne, c. 799 (West translation, 1892). Letter numbers follow Dümmler’s edition; West cites the older numbering of Jaffé. Alcuin is writing from Tours, in the last years of his life, to the king whose schools he had spent twenty years building, and he stops to say what all the study is for. The Academy is Plato’s school at Athens; the seven arts are the liberal arts of the ordinary curriculum; the sevenfold plenitude is the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. The claim is not that Christians will out-argue the Greeks, but that a school which knows who the Master is has something the Academy never had (T1).

(T2) Faith is something a person gives, and a sword cannot take it. + Charlemagne fought the Saxons for thirty years, and his settlement of the conquered country made baptism a term of surrender. His Saxon capitulary prescribed death for refusing it. Converts were then required to pay the tithe, the tenth part of a year’s produce owed to the church, which meant that a beaten farmer’s first experience of Christianity was a tax collector with soldiers behind him. Alcuin told the king this was ruining the thing it claimed to be doing. His argument runs in three steps, and it is worth watching, because it comes from a courtier who admired the conqueror and had no illusions about his own position. First, teach before you baptize: a man who has not been instructed cannot mean the vows he is made to say, and a sacrament received by a mouth and not a mind is an empty rite. Second, go gently with the tithe, since it is not clear the apostles ever exacted it, and if Christians born and bred in the faith resent paying it, newly conquered pagans will hate it. Better to give it up for a time, even at a cost to the public purse, until the faith has taken root in their hearts. Third, and most pointedly, send them preachers rather than collectors, because whatever a mission spends its effort on is what the converts will take Christianity to be. Where later Christian thought agrees with him is plain enough, and Alcuin got there by reading his New Testament: faith comes by hearing, and a man cannot mean a promise he has never been taught the sense of. What he did not do, and it is fair to say so, is question the wars themselves. He wrote as an adviser trying to reform a method of conversion, not as a critic of the conquest that made conversion a question. Within those limits he said the right thing loudly, to a king who could have silenced him.

(Q) "If the same pains had been taken to preach to them the easy yoke and light burden of Christ as has been done to collect tithes, and to punish the slightest infringement of the laws on their part, then they would no longer abhor and repel baptism." + Source: Alcuin, Letter 111, to Megenfrid, AD 796 (Page translation, 1909). The easy yoke and the light burden are Christ’s own words about what following him is like (Matthew 11:29–30), and Alcuin sets them against what the Saxons had actually been handed. Megenfrid was an officer of the royal household, one of the very few laymen outside the king’s family that Alcuin wrote to, and the letter belongs to a run from the autumn of 796 in which he presses the same case on Charlemagne himself and on the bishops working in the conquered country (T2).

(T3) Christ is God’s own Son by nature, and a Son by adoption would be no Saviour. + Adoption is the ordinary word it sounds like. A family takes in a child who was not born to them and gives that child their name and their inheritance, and the child is genuinely theirs by the act, not by birth. The Spanish bishops Elipandus and Felix used that word of Christ. As God, they said, the Son is the Father’s own Son by nature. As man, born of Mary, he is the Father’s Son by adoption. The teaching is called adoptionism, and they thought they were protecting the reality of his humanity and honouring what their own Spanish service books had long said. Alcuin heard something else in it. Sonship, he argued, is not something a nature has; it is something a person is. My humanity is not my parents’ child, I am. Nobody was ever introduced to a human nature at a family gathering, and nobody says that a nature was born in March: a person was born in March. So if the man Jesus is an adopted son while the Word is a natural Son, you have not described one person with two natures. You have described two sons. That was not a new mistake, and Alcuin said whose it was: the old teaching of Nestorius, coming back in new clothes. Nestorius had been archbishop of Constantinople, and the Council of Ephesus condemned him in 431 for so dividing Christ that he came out sounding like two persons sharing one name. The three and a half centuries between that council and Alcuin had not reopened the question. To say the name Nestorius to a Frankish bishop, then, was to say that this question had been asked and answered long before anyone in Spain thought of it. He pressed the point from the Gospels, where the Father’s voice at the Jordan comes down over a man standing in the water and calls him beloved Son (Matthew 3:17), not over an invisible nature hidden behind him. And he pressed it from the weight of the tradition, which is the note his opponents found hardest to answer: a doctrine that had to be dug out of a few local liturgical phrases and no council was, he said, an innovation dressed as antiquity. What made this worth five years of an old man’s life is what hangs on it. The New Testament does use the language of adoption, but of us: believers receive the Spirit of adoption as sons and cry Abba, Father (Romans 8:15), because the Son was sent so that we might receive adoption (Galatians 4:5). Adoption is the gift. If the one who brings it is himself one of the adopted, there is nobody left in the family by right to bring anyone else in. Modern scholars are kinder to the Spaniards than Alcuin was, and several think Elipandus meant less by the word than his opponents heard; but the Frankish church heard the second son, and said no.

(Q) "Why do you wish to impose a new name upon the church? Has God revealed it unto you, amid the Spanish mountains, during these latter days of the faith? Think you that, in contravention to the apostolic teaching and that of the Fathers, you shall be permitted to rear a new church in a remote corner of the earth?" + Source: Alcuin, Against Felix I.2 (Page translation, 1909). Alcuin is addressing Felix of Urgel directly, as he does through all seven books. The "new name" is the word adopted applied to Christ. Behind the sarcasm is his standing test for any doctrine: show it to me in Scripture, in the Fathers, in the decrees of the councils, or in the practice of the churches, and if it is in none of them, it is not old and it is not catholic (T3).

(T4) The voice of the crowd is not the voice of God. + There is a Latin tag that turns up in political speeches and on newspaper mastheads: vox populi, vox Dei, the voice of the people is the voice of God. The oldest known appearance of it in that form is in a letter Alcuin wrote to Charlemagne in 798, and he wrote it in order to reject it. He is quoting a saying he dislikes, telling the king not to listen to the people who go about repeating it, and giving his reason: a crowd worked up is never far from a madhouse. This is not contempt for ordinary people, and his other letters are the proof. He told lords to be just and merciful to those under them, and he told Charlemagne plainly that poor men were being ruined, driven into debt and slavery, pressed into service again and again by great men who wanted their land. What he refused was the leap from a crowd’s enthusiasm to God’s endorsement. A king is answerable for justice whether the shouting is for him or against him, and the shouting is not evidence. Christian readers have generally thought he had the better of the argument, and Scripture gives them reason: the crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem was a crowd, and so was the one that asked for Barabbas before the same week was out. Two things should be said on the other side, though. Scripture also puts the cry of the poor in a privileged place and expects rulers to hear it, which Alcuin accepted. And his own answer to "who then speaks for God" had a weakness in it, which shows up plainly in what he taught about kings (†3).

(Q) "Nor should those be listened to who are in the habit of saying, the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness." + Source: Alcuin, Letter 132, to Charlemagne, AD 798, rendered from the Latin of Dümmler’s edition (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae IV): "Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, vox populi, vox Dei, cum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit." The sentence sits in a letter of advice about government. Rolph Barlow Page, whose 1909 study went through the whole correspondence, summed the position up in a line: Alcuin rejected the saying, holding instead that the voice of the people was the voice of madmen (T4).

(Q) "I, your Flaccus, following out your exhortation and desire, strive to minister to some in the house of St. Martin the honeys of Holy Scripture. Others I seek to inebriate with the old wine of the ancient disciplines, and still others will I begin to nourish with the apples of grammatical subtlety." + Source: Alcuin, Letter 121, to Charlemagne, c. 796 (West translation, 1892; Jaffé numbers this letter 78). Newly installed at Tours, and writing to the king who sent him there, Alcuin describes his working day as a man setting out different food for different appetites. Flaccus is his court nickname. Later in the same letter comes the request to send boys back to York for books, so that the enclosed garden at York might be matched by orchards on the Loire.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The schools he argued for outlasted the empire that paid for them, and so did the books they copied. + Charlemagne’s empire came apart within forty years of Alcuin’s death, carved up among grandsons at Verdun in 843 after they had fought each other for it, and all the while Viking fleets came up the rivers. The schools did not come apart with it. Once a cathedral kept a school because the law and the bishops expected it, the habit survived the government that started it, and the cathedral schools of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, out of which the universities grew, stand at the end of that line. The copying had an even longer reach. Latin manuscripts and fragments written before 800 survive to the number of about eighteen hundred, and every one of them is catalogued; from the ninth century something like seven thousand survive. Set those two figures beside each other and the scale of what happened is hard to miss: one century left behind roughly four times as many surviving books as all the centuries before it put together. Most of the classical Latin literature anyone reads today comes down through a Carolingian copy or through a later copy of one, because the Frankish houses went hunting for old books, corrected them, and multiplied them. Whether Alcuin himself cared much for Cicero as Cicero is doubtful; he wanted trained readers for Scripture and correct texts for worship, and the pagan authors came along because they were the grammar teachers of the West. The effect was the same. A programme meant to save the Bible from bad copying saved a good deal of antiquity along with it. The corrected Bible and the corrected liturgy were the parts he cared about most. Neither the Tours text nor the Frankish service books settled matters for good, and both were revised again later; but the standard they set, that the words the church reads aloud ought to be the words that were written, is the standard itself.

(†) His pupils carried the method across Europe, and one of them became the teacher of Germany. + In 802 the abbot of Fulda sent a promising young monk down to Tours to study the liberal arts with the old Englishman. Alcuin had a habit of giving his students names out of the tradition, and this one he called Maurus, after the disciple of Benedict. The young monk went home as Rabanus Maurus, became abbot of Fulda and then archbishop of Mainz, wrote an encyclopedia and a shelf of commentaries, and was remembered as the teacher of Germany. He said afterwards that he wrote down everything his master taught him by mouth, in case his wandering wits lost it. He was not the only one, and the pattern repeats often enough to stop looking like luck. Fridugis followed Alcuin at Tours. Sigulf, who had come over from York with him in the first place, became abbot of Ferrières, and the school at Ferrières later produced Lupus, one of the sharpest textual scholars of the ninth century, which means the line runs three deep from York. Hatto, who had travelled down to Tours with Rabanus, followed him as abbot of Fulda, and their fellow student Haymo became bishop of Halberstadt. Alcuin’s own textbooks, written as conversations between master and pupil so that a boy could hear the questions in his head, were still being copied centuries later. That is the shape of his influence, and it is worth naming exactly, because it is unusual. He was not an original theologian and never claimed to be; his doctrine is Augustine and Gregory and Bede, carefully sorted and passed on. What he was, supremely, was a teacher of teachers, and the measure of him is that by the third generation the schools no longer needed him.

(†) Where he went wrong: he taught that the church’s safety rested on a king, and lived to find out what that costs. + On 25 April 799 a Roman mob set on Pope Leo III in the street, and when the news reached Francia Alcuin wrote to Charlemagne and set out what he took the order of the world to be. There were three dignities above all others: the apostolic one at Rome, the imperial one at Constantinople, where the Roman Empire had continued in the East and where, as he noted in the same breath, the ruler of that empire had just been impiously deposed by his own people and fellow citizens, and the royal dignity of Charles himself, which he ranked above both, "more excellent in power than the other aforesaid dignities, more illustrious in wisdom, more sublime in the dignity of your kingdom." Then the sentence that gives the game away: "Lo, now upon you alone reposes the whole salvation of the Churches of Christ." Both lines come from Letter 174, written in June of that year, in Thomas Hodgkin’s translation in Italy and Her Invaders. He meant it as praise, and he lived it. He called Charles a second David, urged him to correct the morals of the clergy, and took his own abbeys, St Loup, Ferrières and finally Tours, from the king’s hand as benefices. A benefice is a holding granted by a lord and kept at his pleasure: the estates, the rents and the roof over the holder’s head are given, and what is given can be given to somebody else. Alcuin’s living, in other words, came from the man he had just called the whole salvation of the churches. The trouble with making a ruler the church’s protector in that sense is that a protector who can guard your doors can also open them, and Alcuin met the consequence in his last years. In 802 a cleric convicted by Theodulf, bishop of Orléans, escaped from custody and ran to the basilica of St Martin at Tours to claim sanctuary, the ancient right of a fugitive to be safe at an altar until his case was properly heard. Alcuin sheltered him. The bishop’s men came to take him, acting for the emperor; the people of Tours thought the shrine itself was under attack and there was a riot in the church. Charlemagne took Theodulf’s side, rebuked Alcuin sharply for setting himself against imperial authority, and suggested that the discipline of his monks was slack. The old man who had written that the salvation of the churches rested on the king alone had just discovered what that meant when the king disagreed with him about an altar. The ledger has another column, and fairness requires it. He used his access to restrain the man he flattered, telling him that converts must be taught and not driven, that tithes were crushing the Saxons, and that the poor of his kingdom were being robbed. Few courtiers said as much. But the settlement he helped build put the church’s government inside the king’s, and Christians of every tradition since have had to work out what he did not: the church has one head, and he is not on a throne in Aachen (Colossians 1:18).