Alcuin of York

While looking in my diary to find out the date of Ascension Day this year (why I was doing it I can't remember) I noticed that the day, 20th. May, is also the feast day of Saint Alcuin of York, Deacon and Abbot, someone of whom I have never heard. So who was he, and what was his claim to fame.

Alcuin was born sometime about 735 into a high ranking family who lived in York. Little is known about his early years except that he was educated at Archbishop Ecgberht's School, the school of York cathedral. At the end of his time as a pupil he stayed on as a teacher. He became a monk in the Benedictine Order, and was later ordained deacon. In 788 he became headmaster of the cathedral school. During his time as a teacher at the school Alcuin built up a fine library, one of the best in Europe, and made the school one of the most important centres of learning in Europe.

In 791 Alcuin accepted an invitation from the Frankish king Charlemagne to go to Aachen in Germany to a meeting of the leading scholars of the time, and after this meeting, he was offered the post of head of Charlemagne's Palace School at Aachen. This was no altruistic gesture on Charlemagne's part, for Alcuin brought to his court the very best of English learning. During his time at Aachen, Alcuin worked on the development of the Carolingian minuscule, a clear script which became the basis of the way we write today. This script had a large impact on the history of mathematics. It was a script which was much more readable than the old unspaced capital script which was in use before, and a lot of technical books were copied in the ninth century using it. Most of the works of the ancient Greek mathematicians which have survived until today do so because of the survival of these copies.

In 796 Alcuin retired from the Palace School at Aachen and became abbot of the Abbey of St. Martin at Tours, where he, with his monks, continued to work with the Carolingian minuscule script. He also arranged for some of his pupils to go to York to collect some of the rarer works that he had collected and take them back to Tours. They were also instructed to bring back some flowers from the walled garden so that they could be propagated in the abbey garden at Tours.

During his lifetime, Alcuin wrote many elementary texts on arithmetic, geometry and astronomy (amongst other topics) at a time when there was just beginning a renaissance in learning in Europe, a renaissance mainly led by Alcuin himself. He died at Saint Martin's in Tours on 19th May 804, just twelve hundred years ago. Yet the work he did during his life is still affecting the way we do things today.

Bill Hutchings