“And now as regards these messengers—who have come from my own fatherland and my own city, to solicit the dignity of the sacred pall, in canonical manner and in accordance with the apostolic precept of the blessed Gregory who brought us to Christ—I humbly pray your pious excellency that you receive benignantly the requests of ecclesiastical necessity. For in those parts the authority of the sacred pall is very necessary, to keep down the perversity of wicked men and to preserve the authority of holy church.” That is a remarkably limited statement of the need for the pall, when we remember the tremendous claims made for it in later times. And it is the more remarkable because Alcuin is evidently making the most persuasive appeal he could construct; he would certainly state the case in its strongest terms when addressing the one man with whom it finally rested to say yes or no. He seems to say clearly that to have the pall was _bonum et utile_ for the archbishop, for the purposes which he names; he says nothing, because apparently he knows nothing, of its affecting, one way or another, the archbishop’s plenary right, in virtue of his election and consecration, to consecrate bishops, ordain priests, and rule his province and his diocese. Alcuin digresses from the series of archbishops to deal with the saints of the Church of York, of times near to and coinciding with his own. Of the former, he naturally takes Bede, and he takes no other. To Bede he gives only thirty-one lines, but he does not stint his praise. Six of the thirty-one lines are devoted to Bede’s abbat, Ceolfrith, who took from Wearmouth as a present to the Pope the famous Codex Amiatinus, now at Florence,[89] and died and was buried at Langres. From Alcuin’s poem we learn that Ceolfrith’s body was eventually brought back to Northumbria, and this enables us to accept William of Malmesbury’s statement that King Edmund, on an expedition to the north, obtained the relics of Ceolfrith among many others, and had them safely buried at Glastonbury.