The Influence of Anglo-Saxon Political Thoughts on Carolingian Kingship

Master's Thesis from the year 2001 in the subject History - World History - Modern History, grade: 70, University of Leicester, course: Humanities, language: English, abstract: The geographical area we now call England produced four great political thinkers in the eighth century, the Venerable Bede, Boniface, Cathwulf and Alcuin of York. The first of these was a monk who lived in the monastery at Jarrow in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, while the latter three were clerics who were more at home in the palaces and at the courts of Continental monarchs. All lived in a society that was governed by kings and united under Roman Christianity. Their careers as churchmen gave them the opportunity to write down ideas on monarchical government: the rule of kings. Each had a different background in the church, yet all had an impact upon the kingship of the Frankish dynasty, the Carolingians, by engaging with the contemporary political issues of their day. The surviving works to be focused upon here are Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum and his Letter to Egbert; Boniface's correspondence ; Cathwulf's letter to Charlemagne, king of the Franks ; Alcuin's Versus de Patribus Regibus et Sanctis Euboricensis Ecclesiae and his correspondence. Within these extant works can be found a fairly sophisticated theory of kingship that was in essence Anglo-Saxon but which had evolved in the works of each writer to meet the needs of their own situation. The ideology they articulated in their writings needs to be explored in detail, as does the evidence of the transmission of the HE across the English Channel, for as a book the HE would have had a markedly wider audience than the epistolary evidence and with the exception of the Letter to Egbert it is the only text that was definitely not written on the Continent. Moreover, how these ideas affected the practical and theoretical basis of Carolingian kingship in the eighth and the ninth centuries needs to be examined; ideas that were inherently Insular because of their biblical tone.