Alcuin of york biography summary

Alcuin name

British Broadcasting Corporation Home. Alcuin of York spent most of his life abroad. He was an an adviser to Charlemagne the Great, and had the ear of Europe's intellectual elite. Despite his absence from home, his writings offer a vivid insight into the realities of life during Britain's Dark Ages. This famous scholar is one of our best sources of information for the later eighth century.

He was educated in the cathedral school at York, and became a monk and teacher there. He was a deacon of York when, in , he was returning from a visit to Rome and met the king of the Franks at Parma. King Charles the Great, known often as Charlemagne , recognised in Alcuin a scholar who could help him to achieve a renaissance of learning and reform of the Church.

At the king's invitation, Alcuin joined the royal court in , and became one of Charlemagne's chief advisers on religious and educational matters. Alcuin was made head of the palace school at Aachen, which was attended by members of the royal court and the sons of noble families, and he established a great library there. He revised the church liturgy and the Bible and, along with another great scholar, Theodulf of Orleans, he was responsible for an intellectual movement within the Carolingian empire in which many schools of learning were attached to monasteries and cathedrals, and Latin was restored to a position as a literary language.