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Updated: May 22, 2025
Few scholars of Alcuin were more attentive than his imperial pupil; he had learned grammar from Peter of Pisa; he was instructed in rhetoric, dialectic, and astronomy by Alcuin.
Their Alcuin founded the University of Paris. Their Dionysius Exiguus perfected ecclesiastical computation. Their Guido invented the scale of music; their Sylvester, the organ. They boasted to have produced Anselm, Ildefonsus, and the Venerable Bede."
The libraries were burned, and Northumbria was overwhelmed in darkness and slavery; and Alcuin wrote again, 'He who can hear of this calamity and not cry to God on behalf of his country, must have a heart not of flesh but of stone. Benedict Biscop was our first English book-collector.
The Emperor had a fine private collection of MSS. adorned in the Anglo-Frankish style; and he established a public library, containing the works of the Fathers, 'so that the poorest student might find a place at the banquet of learning. Alcuin presented to the Emperor's own collection a revised copy of the Vulgate illuminated under his personal supervision.
Learning followed in the train of Christianity. The poetry and eloquence of the Augustan age was assiduously studied in the Mercian and Northumbrian monasteries. The names of Bede and Alcuin were justly celebrated throughout Europe. Such was the state of our country when, in the 9th century, began the last great migration of the northern barbarians.
Taking charge of this angular kingdom, he established thus the mighty country which now rules the world in some respects, and which is so greatly improved socially since those days. Two distinguished scholars flourished in the eighth century, Bede and Alcuin. They at once attracted attention by being able to read coarse print at sight. Bede wrote the Ecclesiastical History of the Angles.
Among this unworthy crew a certain Polybius was not the least conspicuous. He was the director of the Emperor's studies, a worthy Alcuin to such a Charlemagne. All that we know about him is that he was once the favourite of Messalina, and afterwards her victim, and that in the day of his eminence the favour of the Emperor placed him so high that he was often seen walking between the two consuls.
There is no evidence of the abrogation of the Sabbath by Christ or by His Apostles, but St. Paul declared that its observance was not binding on Gentile converts. This day has many names in the works of Christian writers. St. Ignatius, M. calls it Regina omnium dierum; St. Chrysostom, dies pacis; dies lucis; Alcuin, dies sanctus; feria prima, Baronius tells us, was another name for our Sunday.
I cannot doubt that among the books imported in the seventh century from Italy by Benedict Biscop and Theodore and Hadrian, and in the great library of York, which Alcuin panegyrizes in his poem on the saints of York, there were texts now lost. But the Danes made a clean sweep of all those treasures, as they did of the whole vernacular literature of Northumbria, undoubtedly a rich one.
The names of Paul Warnefrid, of Alcuin, of Luitprand, and Eginhard, are even yet universally respected. They all, however, wrote in Latin. They had all of them, by the strength of their intellect, and the happy circumstances in which they were placed, learned to appreciate the beauty of the models which antiquity had left them.
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