Of the saints who lived on to the time of Alcuin’s own manhood he takes two, and we are rather surprised at his selection. The one is Balther, the occupant of the Bass Rock, known later as Baldred of the Bass; the other is the anchorite Eata. Both, indeed, were anchorites, the one at Tyningham and on the Bass, the other at Cric, which is said to be Crayke in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Baldred died in 756, and Eata in 767. At Thornhill, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, there is a sepulchral monument, one of three with inscriptions in early Anglian runes, in memory of one Eata, who is described as Inne, which some have guessed to mean a hermit.[90] On the strength of this guess they have claimed that Thornhill was the place of burial of Alcuin’s Eata. To Balther Alcuin gives more than twice as many lines as to Bede; to us this seems a remarkably disproportionate treatment. There is a considerable amount of uncertainty about Balther, and Alcuin’s lines leave the uncertainty without solution. The events which he connects with the anchorite Balther, as one of the saints of the Northumbrian Church, are really connected with an earlier Balther, of the time of St. Kentigern, a saint of the ancient British Church of Cumbria. The death of this Balther is placed in 608; and in any case he was before the first formation of the Christian Church among the Northumbrian Angles. Simeon of Durham puts the death of Balther in 756, and this fits in well with Alcuin’s statements; but we may most probably suppose that there was an earlier Balther and a later, and that the legendary events of the life of the earlier have been transferred to the life of the later. Alcuin certainly understood that his Balther was Balther of the Bass. It is when Alcuin comes to Archbishop Albert that he really lets himself go. Ecgbert had in fact established the eminence of the great School of York, and had himself acted as its chief governor and its religious teacher. But Alcuin does not even refer to that in his account of Ecgbert. The praise of the school goes all to the credit of Ecgbert’s cousin, his successor in the mastership and eventually in the archbishopric, Albert. Eight lines of laudatory epithets Alcuin bestows upon Albert, before proceeding to detail; his laudation fitly culminates in what all ages have regarded as high praise, _non ore loquax sed strenuus actu_—not a great talker, but a strenuous doer.