The extent and character of Alcuin’s learning will be more properly studied when we come to speak of his labours at the court of Charlemagne; it will be sufficient here to notice the fact that he was a scholar of exclusively English growth, and drew all the materials with which he worked in his after career from the library and the schools of York. In his writings he often alludes to the want he feels of “those invaluable books of scholastic erudition” which were there placed at his command, through the affectionate industry of his master, Albert, who continued, after his elevation to the episcopate, to add to the treasures already collected. Two years before his death Albert resolved on resigning his pastoral charge that he might spend his last days as a simple monk, and devote himself exclusively to the affairs of his salvation. Calling to him, therefore, his two favourite pupils, Eanbald and Alcuin, he committed to the first the care of his diocese, and to the other that of his books, “the dearest of all his treasures.”[61] Alcuin was despatched to Rome to obtain the sanction of the Holy See for the appointment of Eanbald and it was at Parma on his homeward journey that the solicitations of Charlemagne won his promise to settle at the court of that monarch, and transfer to a foreign soil the learning he had acquired on the shores of Saxon England. With the death of Albert the prosperity of the Early English schools may be said to have closed. Five years later the Danish keels appeared for the first time off the Northumbrian coast: it seemed only a passing alarm, but in 793 another armament effected a landing at Lindisfarne, and after slaughtering the monks, gave to the flames the most venerable of the English sanctuaries. This was but the beginning of sorrows. The following year the twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow shared a similar fate, and all the treasures of art and literature collected by St. Biscop were ruthlessly destroyed. For seventy years these scenes of carnage and plunder went on without interruption in every part of England, and the riches laid up in the churches everywhere pointed them out as the first objects of attack. The finishing-blow came in 867, when “a great heathen army,” as they are called by the Saxon chronicler, having wintered in East Anglia, and there supplied themselves with horses, marched northwards and made themselves masters of the city of York. Thence they overran the kingdom of Northumbria, carrying fire and sword wherever they appeared, till the whole country between the Ouse and the Tyne presented only the smoking ruins of what had once been cities and abbeys. Beverley, Ripon, Whitby, and Lastingham, all seats of learning and civilisation, were swept away, and in 875 the sea-king Halden crossed the Tyne and destroyed the last remains of the monastic institute in Northumbria. After burning Jarrow for the second time, he directed his course to Lindisfarne,