He was born around and became the student of Archbishop Ecgbert at York. At the invitation of Charlemagne , he became a leading scholar and teacher at the Carolingian court , where he remained a figure in the s and s. Before that, he was also a court chancellor in Aachen. Among his pupils were many of the dominant intellectuals of the Carolingian era. Alcuin wrote many theological and dogmatic treatises, as well as a few grammatical works and a number of poems. In , he was made abbot of Marmoutier Abbey , in Tours , where he worked on perfecting the Carolingian minuscule script.
He remained there until his death. Alcuin was born in Northumbria , presumably sometime in the s. Virtually nothing is known of his parents, family background, or origin. Alcuin's own work only mentions such collateral kinsmen as Wilgils of Ripon , father of the missionary saint Willibrord ; and Beornrad also spelled Beornred , abbot of Echternach and bishop of Sens. In his Life of St Willibrord, Alcuin writes that Wilgils called a Pater familias , had founded an oratory and church at the mouth of the Humber , which had fallen into Alcuin's possession by inheritance.
Because in early Anglo-Latin writing paterfamilias "head of a family, householder" usually referred to a ceorl " churl " , Donald A. Bullough suggests that Alcuin's family was of cierlisc "churlish" status: i. The young Alcuin came to the cathedral church of York during the golden age of Archbishop Ecgbert and his brother, the Northumbrian King Eadberht.
Ecgbert had been a disciple of the Venerable Bede , who urged him to raise York to an archbishopric. King Eadberht and Archbishop Ecgbert oversaw the re-energising and reorganisation of the English church , with an emphasis on reforming the clergy and on the tradition of learning that Bede had begun. Ecgbert was devoted to Alcuin, who thrived under his tutelage. The York school was renowned as a centre of learning in the liberal arts, literature, and science, as well as in religious matters.
He revived the school with the trivium and quadrivium disciplines, [ 10 ] writing a codex on the trivium, while his student Hrabanus wrote one on the quadrivium. Alcuin graduated to become a teacher during the s.
