Alcuin spent much of his early life in Yorkshire England. In 781 he met Charlemagne in Italy and accepted his invitation to become head of the Palace School at the court of Charlemagne in Aachen, Germany. There he was gathering the leading Irish, English, and Italian scholars of the age and the school became a centre for the dissemination of knowledge.

In 796 Alcuin left the school to become abbot of the monastery St.Martin at Tours, where he was working on the Caroline miniscule script, the ancestor of modern Roman typefaces.