A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  Probably the woman who made the greatest impression on Boniface, as she seems to have done on all who met her, was Lioba (also Leoba). At his request she was sent out at the head of thirty nuns, all able to read and write and with some Latin, to act as a sort of missionary back-up team.

  In his biography of her, Rudolf of Fulda, writing about 830, tells us that St Lioba was born about 699 in the island of Britain, which, he adds, ‘is inhabited by the English nation’. Her aristocratic parents had almost given up hope of having children and Lioba’s birth, foreseen by her mother’s aged nurse in a dream, seemed divinely ordained. Devout Christians, they vowed the child to the service of God – and rewarded the aged nurse, evidently a household slave, with her freedom. The girl entered the Wessex convent of Wimborne under Abbess Tetta, sister of the king and well known to Boniface.

  The community had just come through a troubled time. Tetta kept a strict house, even guarding her girls from contact with clerics – and that included bishops (drunken or not!). But her deputy, still more severe and quite unwilling to apologize, had infuriated the younger sisters, who were mostly young aristocrats used to deference. In due course the termagant died. Within days some of the younger nuns were jumping on the grave and cursing the body. Ominous portents subdued the more rebellious spirits and by the time of Lioba’s arrival Abbess Tetta was presiding once more over a docile community.

  It was a sympathetic atmosphere for the serious-minded young novice, at this time perhaps something of a prig (bishop-proof certainly). But she was to become a model of spiritual commitment and wisdom, truly worthy of sainthood. Boniface knew about her, as she was ‘related to him on his mother’s side’, and wrote to Abbess Tetta asking her to release Lioba for service in the German mission. Continually building churches and monasteries throughout Hesse, Thuringia and Bavaria he wrote regularly to England to rally recruits, not just as missionaries in the field but to head his new monastic communities, which were to be homes of both prayer and scholarship, as well as anchors for the scattered rural congregations of believers. Tetta released her community’s most celebrated member with a bad grace. Boniface made Lioba abbess at the convent of Tauberbischofsheim and general superintendent of nuns throughout Germany. By the end of her career there was hardly a convent in the region that did not have one of her pupils as abbess.

  Lioba was described as beautiful (angelic) in appearance, abstemious (her personal drinking cup was known as ‘Leoba’s little one’) and unfailingly good natured. A woman of private means, she was generous in her hospitality, hosting banquets for her guests even when she herself was fasting. In summertime she took an afternoon siesta, observing that lack of sleep dulled the mind, especially for study. But she expected a scripture reading all the same. Younger nuns competed for the privilege and the fun of trying to trick the holy abbess. Even when she seemed most soundly asleep she would correct any slip or omission and no one was ever able to catch her out.

  Serious to a fault, apparently she never laughed out loud. Quite averse to the courtier’s world, she was nevertheless much respected in court circles, above all by Queen Hildegard, wife of Charlemagne, who ‘revered her with a chaste affection and loved her as her own soul’. There are hints that Lioba detected undertones in the queen’s regard. In response to a pleading letter that they might meet one last time, Lioba complied ‘for the sake of their long-standing friendship’. She received the usual effusive welcome, but cut short the visit. Their farewell embrace was more affectionate than usual, Rudolf tells us. The abbess kissed her royal friend on the mouth as well as upon the forehead and the eyes, saying

  farewell dearly beloved lady and sister . . . most precious half of my soul . . . we shall never more enjoy one another’s presence on this earth. May Christ . . . grant that we meet again without shame on the day of judgement.

  Shortly after, returned to her convent, Lioba fell into a terminal illness and was given the last rites from her English priest and confessor Torhthat.

  The consequences of a pioneer age

  Summing up what we know of the English missions in Germany during the eighth century reveals an episode of immense consequence in the history of the European continent. By its constant allegiance to Rome and the popes, the English mission assured the ascendancy of the Roman rite in the Western Church’s liturgy until the Reformation of the early 1500s and, for good or ill, the survival of papal authority over Western churches. By its organization of the German church hierarchy the mission and its leaders prepared, under papal direction, a structure that proved central to the administration of the medieval, later Holy Roman, empire. So much for the future. At the time, contemporaries recognized its leaders as men of importance at the very summit of European affairs. According to tradition, the seventy-year-old Boniface anointed Pippin the Short, ancestor of the Carolingian dynasty, king of the Franks in 751. At the local level English clerics and monks were doers and role models admired and long remembered in the lands of the old Germany hegemony. Willibrord of Echternach, Willibald at Eichstätt and Boniface are only the most notable in the roll call of Anglo-Saxon names who were fundamental in the formation of early European history.

  The reform spirit created by the Anglo-Saxons was alive in the Frankish church and the ecclesiastical policy of these Carolingians on the whole may be regarded as the continuation and the heritage of the work of St Boniface. Of crucial significance, according to Professor Rosamond McKitterick, were their methods of teaching, their conviction of the importance of papal authority, their emphasis on synodal authority and the energy they devoted to establishing a coherent diocesan structure.18

  Professor McKitterick showed also that there is ‘abundant manuscript evidence’ of English men and women at work on the Continent in the form of the books they copied, both west and east of the Rhine. Even where, as at Jouarre, near Paris, the work is in Merovingian Frankish style there may be ‘unmistakable insular traits’ indicating connections with England. From the regions of Germany where Boniface and his colleagues were active, manuscripts in distinctively insular script styles indicate many more men and women from England than would be expected. McKiterrick found similar evidence of English scribes in Bavarian records, representing a continuous influx of Anglo-Saxon volunteers up to thirty years after the death of St Boniface.19 Such a trend might help explain the low level of learning in England deplored by King Alfred in the next century. On the continent, the contribution of these Anglo-Saxon expatriates was undeniable.

  Work by Professors McKitterick and Rollason in England and Joachim Ehlers in Germany, has revealed that Bede’s Ecclesiastical History was widely influential on the continent from the late 700s. Presenting the English church as an extension of the primitive church and of the universal mission enjoined by Christ on his disciples, Bede belongs in the tradition of ‘l’histoire universelle’, according to Georges Tugène. Continental copies, probably made at Aachen from manuscripts originating in Northumbria, such as the so-called ‘Leningrad’ Bede (completed about 746 and in St Petersburg since the early eighteenth century), arrived at monastic libraries from Würzburg to Tours and from St Hubert in the Ardennes to Trier. Recounting the conversion of a heathen people and the building of a Christian polity, Bede’s work appealed to a Frankish elite pushing Christianization as a tool of imperial expansionism first among the Frisians, then the Saxons under Charles the Great, and under his successors (less effectively) among the Danes. When Europe’s present nomenclatura wrote religion out of its failed ‘constitution’, it betrayed the convictions of Charlemagne himself, eponymous hero of its most vaunted prize.

  At the time, the English example of diocesan organization was as important as Bede’s historical schema. In the 760s, Abbot Gregory of Utrecht, a young Frankish nobleman, disciple of Boniface, took on an English auxiliary named Aluberht, who was duly consecrated bishop of the ‘Old Saxons’ at York; here a brilliant young scholar was making a Europe-wide reputation. His name was Alcuin.

  6

&n
bsp; ALCUIN OF YORK AND THE CONTINUING ANGLO-SAXON PRESENCE ON THE CONTINENT

  The French historian and minister of education (1832–7) Guizot may have dubbed Alcuin of York ‘Charlemagne’s minister of education’, but Alcuin himself looked upon his role, as did many aristocratic Anglo-Saxon churchmen, as that of a warrior in the service of Christ. Writing to Charles from his retirement at the abbey of Tours about 802, he begs not to be called once more to fight again and ‘sweat under the weight of armour’ having ‘laid aside the soldier’s belt’.1 He was well aware of the honoured place the war belt with its costly buckle enjoyed in the rating of a warrior’s equipment – the buckles at Sutton Hoo and Prittlewell tell the story.

  Alcuin was born, it is now thought, about the year 740, into a well-connected kin group, perhaps of the minor nobility. He had also inherited ‘by legitimate succession’ the monastery of St Andrew built near the mouth of the Humber by Wilgils, father of St Willibrord, on little parcels of land given to him by kings and nobles. The career of Wilgils was not untypical of devout countrymen turning to the life of religion and attracting a small, sometimes ‘distinguished’ following so that their hermitage might evolve into a modest minster.

  Alcuin’s kinsmen included Willibrord, whose biography he wrote, and also Willehad, a cousin who would become the first bishop of Bremen. We have already noted that he almost certainly had relatives in Northumbrian court circles (see chapter 3). Another was Beornred, to whom he dedicated his two biographies of St Willibrord and whom he nicknamed Samuel. (The biblical Samuel, it will be remembered, had sponsored King David and ‘David’ was Charles the Great in Alcuin’s system.) Beornred, who was abbot of Echternach from 775 and ten years later archbishop of Sens, was an important figure among the Anglo-Saxons in the Frankish administration of state as well as church: in 785–6 he shared with the abbot of St Vaast a two-man commission from King Charles to report on the condition of the church in Italy, which would also include the state of the papacy.

  The aristocratic world of the court and the warrior is never far from Alcuin’s correspondence. Writing to Archbishop Simeon of York in 801, who was at odds with King Eardwulf of Northumbria (the ‘tyrant’ as Alcuin dubs him), he urges him to resist and stand bravely like the standard-bearer in Christ’s battle line, for if the standard-bearer leave the field what is the army to do? Later in the same letter Christ himself is compared as a war leader ‘going before the ranks of his host . . . [who] first bore his cross to his Passion’.

  Clerics shared the heroic and military culture of their class. Writing to another churchman, Alcuin seems to give us a glimpse round the screens of a cathedral monastic refectory where the readings, which should be from scripture or some improving book, may sometimes in fact have been from bardic lays or from Beowulf itself, with musical accompaniment. Specifically, Alcuin complains about the story of Ingeld or Hinield, a prince of the Heathobards, probably the one featured in the Beowulf epic, being declaimed to harp or lyre accompaniment. ‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ?’ he exclaims, ‘Your house cannot have room for both.’2 Since at least one modern scholar has surmised that Beowulf itself may actually have been composed in a clerical community, Alcuin’s allusion becomes the more intriguing.3

  Alcuin entered the cathedral school at York under Archbishop Ecgberht (d. 766), brother to the king. He made precocious progress, showing mastery of the Psalms of David and fluency in the works of Virgil well before the age of ten. They were happy days. His teachers seem to have been more indulgent than Alcuin himself would be with advancing age. We are told that Sigulf, a favourite pupil who followed him to the Continent and became an assistant teacher at Tours, would read Virgil with his own pupils but in secret because Alcuin would not approve.

  The school at York was a stronghold of learning and its library ‘a wondrous treasure’ of many books under a single roof. In his long verse history of the church and saints of York, considered the first historical epic to survive in the literature of the medieval Latin west,4 Alcuin recalled works in Hebrew and Greek, as well as the major Latin grammarians and classics such as Cicero and Virgil, but the library also held in its catalogue books by English scholars such as Bede and Aldhelm. In fact the library, built up by archbishops Ecgberht and Ælbert (d. 780) in the tradition of Benedict Biscop at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, won repute throughout Europe for the range and depth of its learning. Alcuin, who in the 760s graduated to a teaching post in the school of York, was also becoming known on the Continent.

  But he was deeply proud of the ‘famed’ city of his birth. His verse history tells of the high walls and towers of the Roman castrum Eboracum, which he believed had been built with the collaboration of the local tribes. The Britons of those days were not cowed and resentful, but worthy to stand as partners in an empire ‘whose sceptre ruled the world’. By contrast their descendants had been cowardly and incompetent before the onslaught of a warrior race from distant Germany called ‘Saxons’, so called because they are ‘hard as stone’. (No doubt Alcuin reckoned the derivation from the Latin word saxum, ‘stone’, more flattering than the one from the Germanic seaxa, the short stabbing knife, the Saxons’ traditional weapon.) And there is a vivid landscape of the York, the emporium, he knew:

  a merchant town of land and sea . . . where sailors haste to heave their hausers out and ride at rest . . . a town . . . whose river flows through flowery meads to haven for its ships . . .5

  The scholar never lost his loyalty to Northumbria, the country of his birth. Both as courtier and scholar he honoured the name of its warrior patron saint Oswald, describing him as a man powerful in virtue and the guardian of the fatherland (‘vir virtute potens, patriae tutator, amator’).6

  At about the time his reputation was taking off outside England, Alcuin made his first visit to Rome on the school of York’s business travelling via the important abbey of Murbach in Alsace and the Lombard capital at Pavia. In 778–9 he was sent on a mission to the Frankish court and apparently made useful network connections with courtiers on his journey up the Rhine, though not meeting the king on this occasion. But the following year he was again in Rome to collect the pallium, or scarf of office, for York’s archbishop Eanbald from the pope On his way back he had a momentous interview in the north Italian city of Parma with Charles the Great, king of the Franks, in March 781. As a result he was to become the leading member of the palace school, though perhaps not ‘head’ in a formal sense.

  Ten years before he encountered Alcuin, Charles the Great had become sole ruler of the Frankish lands following the death of his brother Carloman. Called by Alcuin the father of Europe (an early instance of the use of that word in common parlance), he was a man of towering stature and ambition, bent not only on conquest and power but also on a cultural programme to revive learning we know as the Carolingian Renaissance (from Carolus, Latin for Charles). It was the view of the late Professor Elton that ‘learned Englishmen like Alcuin . . . helped to civilize the court of Charlemagne.’7 The English were not alone, as Alcuin indicated in one of his letters, where he speaks of a new Athens in Francia (Athens having attracted men from all over ancient Greece) and perhaps rather flatteringly praises Charles as an example of Plato’s philosopher king. A man of great intellect and wide familiarity with the studies of the men he recruited, Charles was also a ruthless evangelist determined to make the heathen, and above all the Saxons, ‘submit to the mild and sweet yoke of Christ’, whatever the cost in blood. War rumbled on round the more conventional missionary efforts of the churchmen. Back in the 740s these had already established an institution that would be vital to his great cultural initiative and that Charles himself was to enrich with valuable endowments – the monastery of Fulda, inspired by Boniface.

  Fulda, foundation for the future

  The building of Fulda had been a classic case of the application of practicalities to the achievement of great ideas. Having decided on the site, Boniface had gone to the man in authority, Carloman, the current mayor of the palace. A re
ligious man who would later retire into a monastery, he willingly granted the site whole and entire, together with all the land that he may be ‘supposed to possess’ within a radius of three miles. The area in question is termed ‘wilderness’ and property boundaries are vague. In these last years of the Merovingian dynasty titles of authority are vague too: one source calls Carloman ‘king of the Franks’, another ‘king of Austrasia’. Strictly speaking, he was not king at all.

  A charter was drawn up and signed by the ‘king’ and an assembly of nobles of the region, who are told that the king ‘requires’ them to give any land they may hold in the area for the use of the monastery. Towards the end of March ‘in the year of the Incarnation [i.e. AD] 744’ (note the Bedan date)8, Boniface visited the site. He was accompanied by a body of labourers and their supervisors who cleared the site of trees and undergrowth. A year later building work was well advanced and the archbishop came again, this time to give instruction in the Rule of St Benedict. It is apparent that the abbey already had a thriving water-powered craftwork production. Sturm had recruited workmen to divert a channel from the River Fulda under the abbey workshops, which ‘conferred great profit upon the brethren . . . as is still obvious to those who use it . . . to this day’.9 This strongly suggests that the abbey had installed a horizontal wheel water mill, no doubt similar to the type of machine, dated to about AD 700, of which traces were excavated at Ebbsfleet, Kent, in 2002 (as reported in Current Archaeology, no. 183).