CHARLEMAGNE'S English adviser, Alcuin of York (d. 804), is a figure instrumental in shaping Carolingian perceptions of kingship, warfare and sanctity. In his poem The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York Alcuin devotes more than 250 lines of verse to describing the deeds of the king and martyr Oswald of Northumbria (d. 642) – the most poetic space of any one figure in the narrative. Alcuin's account of the king's early military victories communicates an important facet of Oswald's persona:

Not merely a victorious king in battle, Oswald is also a fiercely brutal and emphatic conqueror of his enemy. Alcuin relishes describing Oswald's unrestrained violence, in spite of the king's sanctity. However, wholesale promotion of secular force represents a moral problem to the Church. Alcuin immediately qualifies the above description with the following:

These qualifications rein in and circumscribe Oswald's cold-blooded brutality. Describing Oswald's movement from the battlefield back into his fatherland underscores the king's return to performing a different set of virtues. When not on the battlefield, Oswald dedicates his prowess to embodying Christian values. The attributes Alcuin assigns Oswald, themselves dependent upon and elaborated from Bede's original account, represent core values Christian kings were expected to demonstrate in their comportment. This emphasis on the virtues of the militant king is significant given Alcuin's close relationship to Charlemagne. The liturgies written for the canonization of King Louis IX of France (1297) testify to the permanence of these values in continental thought. The yearly commemoration of St Louis casts him as enjoying many of the same moral qualities found in Alcuin's description of Oswald.