The large bulk of Alcuin’s letters and other writings.—The main dates of his life.—Bede’s advice to Ecgbert.—Careless lives of bishops.—No parochial system.—Inadequacy of the bishops’ oversight.—Great monasteries to be used as sees for new bishoprics, and evil monasteries to be suppressed.—Election of abbats and hereditary descent.—Evils of pilgrimages.—Daily Eucharists. We in the diocese of Bristol have a special right to study and to make much of the letters of Alcuin. Our own great historian, William of Malmesbury, had in the library of Malmesbury from the year 1100 and onwards an important collection of these letters, from which he quotes frequently in support of the historical statements which he makes. More than that, we know of some of the letters of Alcuin only from the quotations from them thus made by William in this diocese some 800 years ago. This is specially stated by Abbat Froben, of Ratisbon, who edited the letters of Alcuin 140 years ago. The letters of Alcuin are addressed to an emperor, to kings, queens, popes, patriarchs, archbishops, dukes, and others; so that of Alcuin’s political importance there can be no question. As to his learning, William of Malmesbury pays him the great compliment of naming him along with our own Aldhelm and with Bede. “Of all the Angles,” he says,[75] “of whom I have read, Alcuin was, next to the holy Aldhelm and Bede, certainly the most learned.” Alcuin was born in Northumbria in or about the year 735. He left England to live in France in 782, returned for a time in 792, and left finally in 793. He died in 804. We can thus see how he stands in regard of date to those with whom we have dealt in former lectures. Aldhelm and Wilfrith died in 709, only about a quarter of a century before Alcuin’s birth. Bede died, according to the usual statement[76], in 735, the year of Alcuin’s birth. Boniface was martyred in Holland in 755, when Alcuin was twenty years old. As in the case of Gregory and of Boniface, who have been the subjects of the last two courses of lectures, the letters of Alcuin are the most important—or among the most important—sources of information for the history of the times. The letters are 236 in number, and they fill 373 columns of close small print in the large volumes of Migne’s series. The letters of Boniface are not half so numerous, and they occupy considerably less than one-third of the space in the same print.