Event: ProphecyAnonymous 374.foretelling of his own death

Scholarly Info
Description Anonymous 374 foretold his own death to Alcuin 1 during a virulent epidemic.
Primary Source Info
Original Text ... post tempus eodem anno percutitur populantis peste doloris ...
Date from Source Later in the same year in which Anonymous 374 had had his second vision

Notes:

*@Godman 1982, p. 133 note to lines 1635-6, makes the following important observations: 'The Continuations to the HE s.a. 759 (app. iii ad loc.) records a series of "malignant diseases that wasted the people" of Northumbria in the years 760-1. The continuator uses language similar to that employed here by Alcuin 1 to describe the epidemic which killed his boyhood friend. There is no evidence for another calamity on this scale in Northumbria between 730 and 780. If these two catastrophes are identical and Alcuin 1's friend died a iuvenis, when Alcuin 1 was a puer, then we have a clue to Alcuin 1's date of birth. Pueritia, according to the definition given by Isidore (Etym. iii. 2. 3) and observed by Alcuin 1, began at the age of 7 and ended at that of 14. It would follow that Alcuin 1 was born 737/8-745/6. A date some five to ten years later than the one currently accepted is, on this hypothesis, no more shaky than c.735, which coincides, perhaps too conveniently, with Bede's obit (Introduction, p. xxxvi n n. 1).'

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