Chapter five moves to the third main theme of the book, that of Aachen itself. Where earlier scholars took note of only a few sources, Sulovsky reconstructs Barbarossa’s crown chandelier, known as the Barbarossaleuchter, on the basis of findings ranging from annals, charters, liturgical books and theological literature to the visual and textual consonances of the chandelier with other parts of the Marienkirche in Aachen. This demonstrates deep traditionalism of Aachen, including the link between Aachen’s Carolingian dome mosaics, Alcuin’s commentary on the Apocalypse that was its textual counterpart and exposition, and the Barbarossaleuchter, which imitates both the dome and the commentary numerologically and visually. By using the annals of Aachen, a text barely noticed by historians, the dating of the chandelier’s inauguration is established. The chapter shows how Saladin’s emissaries were kept in attendance during Easter 1174, when the chandelier was being dedicated, so that Barbarossa could have Arabic representatives present. This was done in order to imitate Charlemagne’s cordial relationship with the Arab caliph Harun al-Rashid, who had given his Christian counterpart two golden candelabra, which Charlemagne then dedicated to the Virgin of Aachen. Thus, Frederick was not trying to sacralise the Empire, but to follow Charlemagne’s example.

Alcuin of York, who ended his days at St. Martin’s, Tours, in France, after working for Charlemagne at Aachen, wrote a biography of Willibrord, an early missionary in Frisia, mentioned also in Eddi’s life of Wilfrid. Alcuin made both a prose and a verse version: excerpts from both are recorded here. Willibrord studied at Ripon and in Ireland before crossing to the Continent to work as a missionary in Frisia, as well as making a journey to Rome.

Alcuin’s dialogue on grammar shows two teenage students discussing the basics of Latin grammar with their teacher. The work survives in a manuscript written at Tours in the early ninth century, now in St. Gallen in Switzerland.

Alcuin’s letter no. 16 is addressed to Æthelred, king of Northumbria in 793, the year in which Lindisfarne was destroyed by the Vikings in their first attack on England. In the letter Alcuin blames the king and the people for their immoral lives, and like Gildas before him, sees the foreign invasion as God’s just punishment for such immorality. The excerpt from Symeon of DUrham’s twelfth-century history shows the portents seen shortly before the Viking attack.

This chapter presents a survey of both Latin and Old English visions of heaven and hell in Anglo-Saxon England from Boniface to Aelfric. The Anglo-Saxons were not content with reading about visions of foreigners, such as the Vita Fursei, the Visio Pauli, or pope Gregory’s Dialogi, but were eager to find native Anglo-Saxons who experienced visions themselves. With the account of the monk of Wenlock, Boniface presents the first native Anglo-Saxon’s vision, but the desire to Anglicise visions becomes most apparent in Bede who first – and incorrectly – transposes the vision of the Irishman Fursey to England, and then narrates the vision of the native Anglo-Saxon Dryhthelm. Aelfric silently corrects this ‘pious fraud’, but by his time Anglo-Saxons such as the monk of Wenlock, Dryhthelm, Guthlac, and Merchdeof had already experienced visions, and England had therefore joined the other nations in meriting this special grace.

This chapter looks at the belief, expressed in Wulfstan’s work Geþyncđu, that the public obligations inherent in the right order of society were closely connected with landholding. His concern that holding five hides should underpin the standing of those active in public life was part of a moral order in which for young nobles and peasant boys alike, acquiring land was the gateway to marriage and the establishment of a family . These should mark the beginning of a man’s life as a responsible and armed member of society. At the root of this concern is the lesson of the past expressed, and still read in Wulstan’s time, of Gildas’ narrative of the ‘Downfall of Britain’: England was vulnerable to invasion.