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Alcuin of York

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Tonight, a tribute to a man to whom every book lover owes an incalculable debt. But do you ever think about Alcuin of York? No, I’ll bet you don’t. You only think about yourself.

The simple video above pretty decently describes that great Englishman’s achievements in the intellectual sphere. Did you know he was the one who popularized putting spaces between words in a text? He didn’t invent the idea — I believe he got it from the Irish. But he took it with him to Charlemagne’s Cathedral School and made it the standard for western Christendom. Also punctuation marks and capitalized first letters of sentences.

The video doesn’t mention the matter Alcuin himself would have considered most important in his life — his work to spread the gospel. His master Charlemagne was essentially a jumped-up Germanic barbarian, and not above letting his sword do the talking for him. In 782 he baptized 4,500 (the number is probably exaggerated) Saxon chiefs who had reneged on an agreement, and then beheaded them on the spot. Alcuin was not pleased about that.

He lived at the very beginning of the Viking Age, and his lament over the sacking of Lindisfarne in 793 is often quoted.

When I was with you, your loving friendship gave me great joy. Now that I am away your tragic sufferings daily bring me sorrow, since the pagans have desecrated God’s sanctuary, shed the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste the house of our hope and trampled the bodies of the saints like dung in the street.

What assurance can the churches of Britain have, if Saint Cuthbert and so great a company of saints do not defend their own? Is this the beginning of the great suffering, or the outcome of the sins of those who live there? It has not happened by chance, but is the sign of some great guilt. You who survive, stand like men, fight bravely and defend the camp of God. 

(Alcuin, letter to Bishop Higbald)

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Many thanks for nothing, Alcuin

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Alcuin is the fellow in the middle. (Wikipedia)

No review tonight. My chosen topic was prompted by a video clip I saw, one of many floating around YouTube, which extract moments from conversations between the historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. (I can’t find that particular one at the moment.)

Anyway, one of the two men – I think it was Holland – mentioned, in a parenthetical way, that the English divine Alcuin of York (ca. 735 – 804 A.D.) was responsible for the innovation of putting spaces between words in documents. (You may be aware, if you’ve read about ancient manuscripts, that they wrote out their sentences without spaces, sometimes making interpretation hard.)

This intrigued me, as I’m something of an admirer of Alcuin’s. I thought I’d do some web searching on the subject.

My conclusion: Alcuin certainly did not invent the separation of written words. But he’s very likely responsible for its adoption as a standard.

When I deliver my little lectures on the book Viking Legacy (which I translated), I must perforce mention the contention of the author, Prof. Titlestad, that the Viking raids, starting at Lindisfarne in 793 AD., were a strategic response to Charlemagne’s massacre of the Saxons at Verden in 782. In discussing Lindisfarne, I always quote Alcuin, who famously wrote of the raid:

“Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold, the church of St. Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples.”

Alcuin would (to his eternal credit) pressure the emperor to stop using violence to try to convert the heathen. He joined Charlemagne’s court shortly after the Verden atrocity, and he brought with him the influence of the English church. The English tradition was inherited from Pope Gregory and St. Augustine of Canterbury, who urged missionaries to be kind and tolerant of heathen ways, so long as those ways were morally innocent. (It was this policy that led them to convert heathen festivals to Christian purposes – which means that when people complain that Christmas and Halloween were originally heathen festivals [a great oversimplification in itself] they are complaining about a tradition arising from the church’s rejection of conversion by the sword.)

As far as the spaces between letters goes, scholars tell us that the idea first arose in Ireland, where the monks adopted it to assist them in reading Latin, an unfamiliar language. Alcuin promoted this system during his time in France, helping to make it the standard throughout Europe.

So if you like reading, and appreciate those spaces – those blessed little bits of nothing – that help us recognize and identify separate words in a fraction of a second, you might pause a moment to remember and thank God’s servant, Alcuin of York.