Alcuin of York was largely responsible for the way we read and write today. His contribution to world literacy includes spaces between words, the use of capital letters at the start of sentences and the first stages in the development of our modern lower-case alphabet.

The Roman alphabet was more or less the alphabet we know today but only included upper-case or capital letters. A quick look at your computer keyboard will show that these are largely made up of straight lines; ideal for chiselling into stone or wood, which was the Roman’s principal way of writing.

However the development of writing by hand with pen and paper (well, quill and parchment) necessitated a new way of writing. Writing in block capitals is much slower than writing in modern script, which suits handwriting with its curves and rounded lines.

Various European scripts had arisen as a result of the new forms of writing, with the result that a literate group in one region might not understand the writing of a literate group somewhere else – although, as clerics, they were reading and writing in the same language: latin.

The boffins at Charlemagne’s Palace School took this problem on board and – as writing’s undisputed centre of excellence in Europe during the Dark Ages – decided to do something about it.

Alcuin apparently came up with a whole new alphabet, known as Carolingian Minuscule, which was disseminated from Aachen as a standardised lower-case alphabet. Its pre-eminence among other scripts paved the way for the lower-case letters we recognise today.

The beauty of Alcuin’s lower-case alphabet was that it facilitated the quick, easy writing of words. Consider how long and how many strokes of a pen it takes you to write the word “ALERTED” in upper-case: now think how much quicker and easier it is to write “alerted”.

It’s also worth noting that Romans and the various schools of first-millennium Europe didn’t have sentence breaks: there was some development needed in the field of punctuation.

Alcuin and the Palace School worked round this problem by retaining the use of Roman capital letters at the start of sentences. They also made reading easier by starting the fashion for including spaces between discrete words – something we take for granted today.