Alcuin three times insists on the lawful hereditary descent of the ownership and government of a monastery. A second case is in his preface to this Life of Willibrord. The body of the saint, he says, “rests in a certain small maritime cell, over which I, though unworthy, preside by God’s gift in lawful succession.” A third case occurs also in this Life. “There is,” he says, “in the city of Trèves a monastery[6] of nuns, which in the times of the blessed Willibrord was visited by a very severe plague. Many of the handmaids of the Lord were dying of it; others were lying on their beds enfeebled by a long attack; the rest were in a state of terror, as fearing the presence of death. Now there is near that same city the monastery of that holy man, which is called Aefternac,[7] in which up to this day the saint rests in the body, while his descendants are known to hold the monastery by legitimate paternal descent, and by the piety of most pious kings. When the women of the above-named monastery heard that he was coming to this monastery of his, they sent messengers begging him to hasten to them.” He went, as the blessed Peter went to raise Tabitha; celebrated a mass for the sick; blessed water, and had the houses sprinkled with it; and sent it to the sick sisters to drink. Needless to say, they all recovered. In two of these cases, the two in which Alcuin speaks of his own property, he uses the word succession, “by legitimate succession” in the one case, _legitima successione_, “through legitimate successions” in the other case, _per legitimas successiones_, the former no doubt referring to the succession from his immediate predecessor, the latter referring to the four, or five, steps in the descent from Wilgils to Alcuin. In the case of the monastery of Epternach he defines it from the other end, “from the legitimate handing-down,” _traditione ex legitima_, the piety of the most pious kings being called in to confirm the handing-down. It is remarkable that Alcuin should thus go out of his way to insist upon the lawfulness of the hereditary descent of monasteries, when he knew well that his venerated predecessor Bede, following the positive principle of the founder of Anglian monasticism in Northumbria, Benedict Biscop, attributed great evils to such hereditary succession to the property and governance of monasteries. We shall see something of this when we come to the consideration of Bede’s famous letter to Ecgbert, written in or about the year of Alcuin’s birth.