ABSTRACT
The subject area of Patrick’s interests that I have been asked to consider is Carolingian, and particularly Alcuin. Although Patrick was primarily a historian of Anglo-Saxon England and of the whole British Isles in the Anglo-Saxon period, he had also an astonishing mastery of the history of continental Europe in the same period. One can see this for the tenth century from his paper on Aethelwold of Winchester in a collection of conference papers on Aethelwold edited by Barbara Yorke;1and he had deeply imbibed the lessons of James Campbell that Britain had to be considered in the light of the Continent, expressed by the latter in his seminal paper which could almost have been called ‘Carolingian England’.2 In Oxford during the 1990s he was an outstandingly stimulating tutor on the Carolingian Renaissance optional paper, and sent his pupils, already fired up, for some of their later tutorials to me. This was typical of his generous colleagueship.
