In Alcuin England was linked to the wider world of Christendom. This has been summarily expressed by a great English historian thus: "The schools of Northumbria had gathered in the harvest of Irish learning, of the Franco-Gallican schools still subsisting and preserving a remnant of classical character in the sixth century, and of Rome, itself now barbarised. Bede had received instruction from the disciples of Chad and Cuthbert in the Irish studies of the Scriptures, from Wilfrid and Acca in the French and Roman learning, and from Benedict Biscop and Albinus in the combined and organised discipline of Theodore. By his influence with Egbert, the school of York was founded, and in it was centred nearly all the wisdom of the West, and its great pupil was Alcuin. Whilst learning had been growing in Northumbria, it had been declining on the Continent; in the latter days of Alcuin, the decline of English learning began in consequence of the internal dissensions of the kings, and the early ravages of the Northmen. Just at the same time the Continent was gaining peace and organisation under Charles. Alcuin carried the learning which would have perished in England into France and Germany, where it was maintained whilst England relapsed into the state of ignorance from which it was delivered by Alfred. Alcuin was rather a man of learning and action than of genius and contemplation like Bede, but his power of organisation and of teaching was great, and his services {170} to religion and literature in Europe, based indeed on the foundation of Bede, were more widely extended and in themselves inestimable." [1] [Sidenote: John Scotus.]