Carolingian Schools - The Start at Court

The Start At Court

It was not, however, until the arrival of Alcuin at his court seat Aachen in 782 that the work of educational reform began to have any measure of success. Alcuin was not made head of the emperor's school in the palace, but was admitted to the council of the emperor in all educational matters and became Charlemagne's "prime minister of education". He represented the learning of the school of York, which united in its traditions the current of educational reform inaugurated in the South of England by Theodore of Tarsus and that other current which, starting from the schools of Ireland, spread over the entire northern part of England. He was not an original thinker, but he exerted a profound cultural influence on the whole Frankish Kingdom by reason of the high esteem in which Charlemagne and his courtiers held him. He taught grammar, rhetoric, dialectic and the elements of geometry, astronomy and music (see Seven Liberal Arts), and his success as a teacher of these branches seems to have been generally acknowledged by all the courtiers as well as by his royal patron. We know from Einhard's biography of Charlemagne that the emperor, the princes and princesses and all the royal household formed a kind of higher school at the palace in order to learn from Alcuin what would nowadays be considered the merest rudiments.