York
Throughout the western Church more settled communications were developing a stronger corporate sense and a consciousness of united spiritual endeavour which are reflected in the international association of clergy for spiritual purposes. Anglo-Saxons on the Continent were anxious to preserve contact with their compatriots and to read recent works from home. Alcuin's poem on the Church of York obtained wide circulation among Englishmen abroad, while his pupils at York sent him new poems on the miracles of St. Ninian of Whithorn.
When, Æthelberht in turn resigned the archbishopric to another pupil, Eanbald, Alcuin also assumed the direction of the library. Meanwhile the continental experience and contacts of Alcuin had been steadily broadening. As befitted a kinsman of Willibrord, he enjoyed close relationships with the Frisian church and received Frisian pupils at York including the young Liudger, afterwards first Bishop of Münster, who, having studied under Alcuin at York, returned home to Utrecht about 773, bene instructus, habens secum copiam librorum. After his travels abroad and his sojourn at the court of Charlemagne, Alcuin returned to York for a brief visit in 786, and a prolonged one from 790 to 793. In a letter to King Offa written in 796 he remarks that the violence of the pagans and other disorders were preventing him from returning to the north, and in this same yeare the emperor gave him the rich abbey of Tours. Throughout his stay abroad he maintained the vital link with his birthplace; at Tours he missed the splendid books of the York library and asked the emperor's permission to send some of his pueri to bring them back.
By the time York trembled before the Viking incursions, its message had been handed on: the 8th century forms the apogee of its history in the annals of European culture. Such a concatenation of opportunities and personalities was never to recur, and by the time of Alcuin's death the contribution of York to the Frankish schools had substantially been made. Nevertheless the international tradition lingered for another halfcentury. Its vitality is attested almost on the eve of the Danish interruption by certain items in the correspondence of Lupus, Abbot of Ferrières, the great classicist of his day. In letters probably dated between 851 and 852 and addressed to Archbishop Wigmund and to Aldsige, abbas or vice-dominus of the Church of York, Lupus expresses a wish for the renewal of friendly intercourse between Ferrières and York. From Aldsige, Lupus solicits the loan of a manuscript of Quintilian, one of the Questions of St. Jerome on the Old and New Testaments, together with a similar work by Bede.
York was captured several times in the seventh century. By the eighth century the picture is clearing. There is evidence of an Anglo-Saxon settlement in the Fishergate area, by the River Foss – perhaps an industrial and trading community serving the resident administrators – which justified the "wik" in the Anglo-Saxon name for the town: Eoforwic. The Anglo-Saxons may have been deliberately avoiding the area of Roman habitation on the south-west bank of the Ouse. This shift of the civilian settlement would help explain why the medieval bridge across the Ouse was further east than the likely site of the Roman crossing at the end of Stonegate. In 735 York's bishop acquired archiepiscopal status and York was beginning to acquire a reputation as a centre of learning, thanks to a school attached to the church of St. Peter. There seems to have followed a period of prosperity – yet also one of complacency for, whereas an eighth-century writer mentions the city having high walls (presumably the remnants of the Roman fortifications), the existence of strong walls was denied by a later writer, referring to events of the 860s, so perhaps the walls had been allowed to fall into disrepair.