CHAPTER XX.
LEARNING AND LITERATURE TILL POPE SYLVESTER II.
Only a few years before the death of Bede, Alcuin was born, and in Alcuin we have the principal link between the vigorous learning of these islands and that, hardly yet born, of Central Europe. The main facts of the connexion are familiar. Alcuin, educated in the traditions of York, left England at about the age of fifty, on a mission to Rome to receive the archiepiscopal pall for Eanbald of York, and in 781 met Charlemagne at Parma and was invited by him to come to his court as soon as his errand should be accomplished. With the exception of one interval spent in England, the rest of Alcuin's life was passed on the Continent. It ended in 804.
Meanwhile England had begun to be the prey of Danish invasion. Exactly when the library of York, which Alcuin describes so glowingly in an often-quoted passage of his poem on the Saints of the Church of York, was destroyed, we do not know; but that this was a time of destruction, that a whole literature in the English vernacular was wiped out, and that the stores of ancient learning, accumulated in the North by Benedict Biscop and in the South by Theodore and Hadrian, were scattered, is certain. Only waifs and strays remain to attest the height which art and learning had attained here, and the value of the treasures that had been imported. The Lindisfarne Gospels and the Ruthwell Cross on the one hand, and the Codex Amiatinus (happily retrieved by its parent country before the catastrophe) on the other, are outstanding examples.
Between the departure of Alcuin for the Emperor's court and the revival of English letters under Alfred, England, disunited and ravaged, makes no contribution to the cause of learning.
Interest is centred upon that same court of Charlemagne. Here for a time lived Paul the Deacon and Peter of Pisa, both representatives of Italy, where learning, if inert, was not dead. Incomparably the more important figure of the two is that of Paul, chiefly in view of two pieces of work, his abridgment of the Glossary of Pompeius Festus, and his History of the Lombards. Both are precious, not for style, but for the
