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Chapter 9.2: The
English conquest and conversion
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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From a geopolitical point of view,
the conquest of Britain by the English is really
not separate from the process of internal
collapse and localization that had been taking
place in Britain throughout Gildas’ adult
lifetime, and which was echoed here and there
throughout the former Empire: a process of
violent, mostly unconscious adaptation to changed
circumstances, which had to take place in
uncontrolled and disorderly fashion because the
Empire had not been able to perform it
consciously. We should not, however, imagine that
the fact that it was English kinglets rather than
British who completed the process was of no
importance in itself, any more than that it was
the Muslim Arabs, rather than any other race or
religion, who completed it in the East. The
victory of the English meant the triumph of a
new, more stable model of kingship. Unlike the
Celts whom they overcame, they recognized no
prescriptive rights in the mere existence of
other kingdoms and were therefore able to
conquer, annexate and reorganize at will; which
had a major influence on later British history.
In spite of the rhetorical hatred
unleashed at the Saxons by Gildas, there is no
indication in his work that they were a present
threat. He is constantly raising the
spectre of murdered fathers, grandfathers and
great-grandfathers, to make the memory of their
crimes loom large and present, but if the battle
of Badon (516/7) had been “almost the
last” of their defeats as Gildas was writing
in 561, then they cannot have been extensively
engaged in war against the British. Indeed,
he insists that “external wars have
ceased” (26.2). Yet thirty years later
we find them masters of south-east Britain; sixty
years later, the north has fallen and Edwin is
threatening Gwynedd, Strathclyde and Man.
What has happened? I think
one theory is likelier than any other. The
Saxons, or their successors (who, in my view,
acquired the Angle ethnic name when the Anglian
lord Icel crossed over and took over kingship
over the Teutonic settlers of eastern Britain at
some point before the 520s), had a tradition of
going abroad to fight or settle, which – in
spite of the invaders of the 520s and the
division and weakening that followed
–carried on into the sixth century. Procopius
knew the English as stratiotes, soldiers,
and was told that they were being regularly
settled in Frankish land; and their known
settlements confirm this. In other words,
the Saxons/English had never lost the habit of
being mercenaries.
Now, one development that seems to
me, in the bellicose atmosphere of Gildasian
Britain, almost inevitable, is that sooner or
later some ambitious or threatened British
kinglet would resort to them to shore up his
military resources. Ethnic hatred and
contempt have never been a bar to employing even
the most despised aliens as temporary mercenaries
or even as regular soldiers. English
war-bands would begin to be settled here and
there in Britain, as local lords saw need; hence
the blossoming of English graves across the
country which archaeology suggests took place in
the middle and later sixth century. This
would probably be more marked in the agricultural
and relatively prosperous south, whose lords
would have less readily available manpower –
in a comparatively settled agricultural society
– disposed to go to war at a moment’s
notice, than their northern counterparts, and
would conversely be much more threatened by the
latter’s ambitions. At some point in
the unsettled post-542 period, English military
settlements would multiply across the face of
Christian Britain, still separated from their
British neighbours by a virtual apartheid of
religion, language and mutual disdain, but
increasingly necessary for their defence. In
France, as late as the 580s, the Saxons of Bessin
are on record as putting on British clothing and
entering a battle against the Franks on the
Breton side; which shows that British settlers in
Gaul could use Saxon allies or mercenaries - even
at such a late stage, when the Saxons were
rampaging across the British mother country.
The beginning of the English wars
of conquest in the west, whose leading spirit
seems to have been one Ceaulin, are dated by the
Anglo-Saxon chronicle at 568; I think this is a
very likely date, give or take a few years (it
is, perhaps, a little suspicious that it should
correspond so exactly to the Longobard invasion
of Italy). The ASC itself was written in
Wessex, the kingdom that claimed succession from
Ceaulin’s original rebels, and where, if
anywhere, traditions could be kept among a
nobility descended from his raiders; but more
importantly, a number of considerations suggest
the 570s as a credible date for the ruin of the
British south of the Humber and Trent. Firstly
– let me insist on this - Gildas knew
nothing of a present and immediate Saxon threat
in 561; but by 597 all of southern England except
Dumnonia and perhaps the Lichfield-Wall area were
in English hands. Over a smaller period of
time, Gregory of Tours seems to change his
attitude to Kent and its lords: when he wrote the
first of his two passages about Bertha, daughter
of Ingoberga, describing her father
Charibert’s life, he only spoke of her
husband as someone from Kent; when he gets back
to her marriage, in a passage written after the
death of her mother (589), he has no qualms about
calling her husband the son of a king of Kent.
Clearly, the degree of force he felt in the
political position of the future king Aethelberht
has changed radically, probably as a by-product
of the British collapse. Gregory the Great,
proclaiming the success of Augustine’s
mission, has a similar picture in mind:
"Indeed, look how that once enraged ocean
now lies down and serves the feet of the Saints;
and those very barbarous energies which earthly
lords could not beat down with iron, now by the
fear of God are bound by the simple words of
priests; and the infidel who never feared any
horde of fighting men, is now a believer and
fears the tongue of humble men". What this
shows is the picture of an established order, old
enough to seem stable (the expression terreni
principes, earthly lords, does not show any
sense of inner instability; to the contrary, it
seems to include in a small space the whole
conception of ordinary human political power,
that is to involve as much stability as political
power ever has) struck and erased by something as
alien and as unstoppable as the ocean itself.
It seems that Gregory still thought of the
English as chiefly a maritime race, the naval
terror that horrified Sidonius Apollinaris and
that the Frankish kings described to Procopius
tried to use for their own advantage. But
above all, the sense it gives is that of an
established order which still existed in the
recent past, but which has been overwhelmed and
destroyed beyond recall.
Bede’s list of Breatwealdas
is in a sense the pendant to this Gregorian
vision, an ideologically significant document
intended to prove several points. With one,
the need to set up an opposite term to the Welsh
theory of the Seven Emperors – that is, to
the Welsh image of sovereignty over Britain
– we have already dealt; but equally
significant is the journey of this English image
of royalty. The first Breatwealda,
as we have seen, was Aelle, who was regarded as
having established English sovereignty in
Britain, and who was probably the Saxon leader
who defeated Vitalinus and was himself defeated
and killed by Ambrosius. After this,
English royalty goes as it were underground, only
to reappear with Ceaulin in the 570s. The
third Breatwealda is Aethelberht, who
cannot be in any sense regarded as the successor
to the rebel chieftain in the west; it is all too
obvious that he is there because through him
Roman Christianity reached the English. For
the same reason, I do not for a minute believe
the claims for his sovereignty reaching as far
north as the Humber; for sheer unlikelihood, it
matches the one about Maelgwn terrifying all
Britain from Gwynedd. Kent – think
about it – Kent, the pocket handkerchief
garden of England, exercising overlordship over
half of England, over Essex, Wessex, Sussex, East
and Middle Anglia, Mercia and Lyndsey? And
the high king of England, who surely should be
one of the greatest barbarian kings in Europe,
nevertheless ends up marrying an unimportant
member of a dead branch of the house of Meroveus,
and is not even recognized as royal by Gregory of
Tours until the early 590s?
No. The place of Aethelberht
in the list of Breatwealdas depends on his role
within the overall ideological picture. That
he was supposedly overlord south of the Humber
implies a progress in the nature of
Breatwealda-ship, but only to an incomplete
stage, which does not embrace the fullness of
what the imperial, English monarchy of all the
island is to be. Aelle, the first
independent English (Saxon) king in Britain, had
fathered the monarchy. Ceaulin had
resurrected it. Aethelberht had put it on a
sound basis by consecrating it to the One God.
But the completion would only come with the three
great Christian Northumbrian kings, Edwin, Oswald
and Oswy. That they finish off the list is
evidence enough that they are its intended end,
that the list is meant to climax with them.
And what Aethelberht has done has been to make one
English crown Christian; but the completion would
not come until true sacred royalty came to what
was, to Bede, the central English kingdom, his
own Northumbrian homeland. The fourth is Redwald
of East Anglia, and, again, the ideological and
Northumbrian intent is obvious: not only did
Redwald expand Christianity into his own kingdom,
but he was above all the instrument by which the
first and greatest of Northumbrian Breatwealdas,
Edwin, started his glorious rule, which was to
lead Northumbria both to Christianity and to
supreme power in the island. (As for
Redwald being supreme among the kings of Britain,
his own people do not seem to have thought so; in
their eyes, he was not important enough to
preserve his name, like that of the national
father William Wehha, in the later, formulaic
fourteen-generation pedigree.) In other
words, what the list of Breatwealdas describes
is the migration of overlordship from English
origins to Northumbria and from paganism to
Christianity.
The essential role of Ceaulin in
this list, whose next stage after him is the
entrance of Christianity into the island’s
new royal race, is to resurrect Aelle’s
ancient claim to independent kingship; in other
words, to throw off for good and for ever any
claim of British kingship over the Saxons. From
the day of Ceaulin, the English are independent;
and being independent, they are sovereign. In
other words, Ceaulin – a war-lord
established somewhere in the South-West, perhaps
originally ranged against Dumnonia – had
been the first to rise against the British with a
complete rejection of the existing settlement,
carving a Saxon sovereignty dependent on no
British or Roman title.
What this describes is the
successful insurrection of an English war-band
settled very far from the Saxon homelands, which
threw what British political organization out of
balance altogether. Since Badon Hill, if
not indeed since Ambrosius, the Saxons had been
contained in a number of eastern territories; it
seems probable that the catastrophe of Badon Hill
had instilled in them a healthy dread of British
military power, especially if, as I argue, it had
been followed by the repeated successes of the
same military leader across various seas, as well
as by invasions from Scandinavia. But by
the time of Ceaulin, the memory of Arthur had
lost potency because of the suicidal squabbles of
his diadochi; the invasions had long since
ceased; and a number of English military colonies
were in existence across Britain, not to mention
in Frankland. The English were overdue for
a realization of their own strength and of their
potential enemies’ weakness. The
fragmentation of their own polities, began or
brought about somehow in the 520s, weakened them;
but now the British were at least as weak, at
least as divided, and there was space for a
military adventure.
In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
Ceaulin’s wars stand out with a strange
clarity, as compared with the other murderous
blows by which, one presumes, south Britain must
have been wrested from its many kings. It
would be possible to suspect Wessex chauvinism,
were it not that, more than a century before
Alfred the Great (in whose period and possibly at
whose court the Chronicle was written), Bede
already regarded Ceaulin as that essential stage
in the progress of imperial, all-British, English
monarchy. Indeed, it is Bede, rather than
the ASC, who places Ceaulin in the ideologically
significant list of Breatwealdas, despite
the evident Northumbrian bias of the Ecclesiastic
History; more than one hundred years
before the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle imposed
its Wessex one. The claim for Ceaulin, that
is, is not a one-sided Wessex affair; all the
Teutons of Britain recognized Ceaulin’s
historical role. This does not necessarily
make it historical - there are still several
decades, at least, between Ceaulin’s time
and the earliest possible likelihood of written
records - but it testifies to a consensus in a
period in which Wessex simply did not have the
means to impose one.
There is, incidentally, a great
need to clarify a major difference between Dark
Age ideas and ours. To use any term related
to the modern concepts of ethnicity to explain
the Bedan vision of Britain, and for that matter
that of his Welsh enemies, is to make it
incomprehensible. We must begin with the
realization that the central social institution
of the time was not the nation, not even the
tribe, but the monarchy. All the stories
that were not about saints were about kings; it
was the king, and all the institutions that
related to him, that was the source of sense and
meaning in society. In the Bedan idea of
the seven Breatwealdas, what was central
was not that they were English, but that they
were sovereign; it was not that they received
their own value from being expression of English
society, but that English society received its
own value from being the matrix of kings. In
our world, the source of meaning and sense in
society is the whole body of society itself, the
people in their corporate character; and it
follows that a society can only legitimately
claim as much territory as its members
legitimately occupy (which is why all the major
unsolved and insoluble conflicts of our own time
are ethnic conflicts, with two ethnic groups
settled on the same territory claiming it for
separate and opposing states). In the world
of the first Welsh and the first English, the
centre was the king, and if such a thing as an
all-British crown was recognized, it followed as
the day followed the night that the ethnic group
to which the king belonged was inherently royal
over the whole territory. What the British
hated the English for was not having stolen their
territory, but their sovereignty; and conversely,
the reason for the extraordinarily swift and
thorough Anglicization of the conquered British
was that they recognized the king, whether he had
become so by force or by inheritance, as the
royal centre of society. If the king spoke
English, there was no reason why they should not
speak it too.
It is the language that manifests
most clearly this sense of royal self-assurance.
There is a confidence about early English that
seems to echo the wealth of hoards like Sutton
Hoo. Old English absorbed few Celtic or
even Latin words: Latin loans tended to be
functional terms like cheese, and as for
Celtic, philologists have traced no more than 10
– ten! – in the whole Anglo-Saxon
vocabulary. For all the world, these are
the linguistic habits of a dominant culture (it
would be interesting to study the proportion and
type of early Latin loan words in other Germanic
languages like Gothic). By contrast, there
is Gildas spitting out English keels,
treating the alien word as if it represented a
linguistic aggression.
Pope Gregory was, in his own way,
no less a revolutionary than Arthur, David, or
Ceaulin. The body whose highest authority
he was, the orthodox Church, was naturally
aligned with the Roman Empire and with the Roman
party everywhere. Therefore he was expected
to oppose, if not every barbarian – I do not
suppose even Justinian imagined he could subdue
the Franks – at least the most recent and
least Romanized waves of invaders, the pagan
English and the Longobards, last and most
threatening of the Arian powers, surrounding Rome
with a ring of iron. However, his policy to
both was consistently one of approach, of
attempts to convert, and – what was odious
to both Byzantines and Britons – recognition
of their conquests. Later Popes, even those
like Gregory II and III, who admired the first
Gregory, followed a policy of implacable
hostility to Longobard aims, motivated mainly by
their temporal role as kings of the city of Rome;
but Gregory himself was a complete exception to
the rule. A Catholic but patriotic
Longobard like Paul the Deacon saw him as
something like a light though the darkness.
And he pursued such a policy in a period in which
hostility would have been more than ordinarily
justified, since the Longobards were still
largely Arian or even pagan, and they had (in
historical terms) only just entered the peninsula
with fire and sword.
There is a letter in existence
that startles by its sheer cheek. When
Byzantine power in Italy crumbled under Longobard
onslaught, Byzantium, finding itself militarily
helpless, fought back with the one weapon it had
left. Gold; gold; rivers and mountains of
gold; to corrupt Longobard dukes, to cause
anarchy in the fledgling political entity, to pay
for Frankish allies to come crashing from the
Alps. It was very nearly a successful
strategy: the Longobards were for ten years
without a King, one Duke defected to Ravenna and
a few others were suspect of wanting to follow
suit, and for a while the Frankish invasions of
584-585 (the one which cost Mauricius 50,000 gold
solidi – and it was only a part of
his policy) seemed about to crush them.
In this political landscape,
Gregory I had the nerve to send to the court of
Byzantium a letter of self-defence against a foul
accusation (allowing a bishop to die in jail over
a matter of money. The fabrication of such
a vile charge clearly proves that, in some
Byzantine circles, Gregory was hated), in which
he said that he had so little taste for the death
of men, even Longobards, that he has done nothing
of what he could have done against them, even if,
had he wanted, the whole nation would have been in
summa confusione, with no kings, dukes or
counts left. In other words,
he has the supreme effrontery (or the divine
innocence) of using, to defend himself, a clear
statement that, having been in a position to
successfully carry out Imperial policy,
destroying the social and political cohesion of
the Longobard people, he did not. I
remember reading somewhere - though I haven't
been able to track down the reference - that
Roman and Byzantine documents of the sixth and
seventh century show very little veneration or
respect for the great Pope's memory, and that it
was not until the age of Bede - when two
pugnacious Popes in succession took the name of
Gregory, and deliberately imitated Augustine's
mission by sending the Englishman Boniface to the
Saxons - that he was recognized as a major
figure. If that is the case, then his
attitude to the Longobards goes far to explain
why. If any age is ever prepared for
forbearance to one's enemies, Gregory's certainly
wasn't.
The English and the Longobards
broke into Catholic lands, and established their
own lordships, almost at the same time, spreading
like two black oil slicks beginning in the late
560s, conquering not at one blow and not under
one leader, but region by region, kingdom by
kingdom, the English under self-proclaimed
kinglets, the Longobard under dukes theoretically
obedient to a king. By the time that
Gregory was enthroned, their power in both
countries was stabilized, although in both cases
fighting at the borders, with the Byzantines and
the British losing further swathes of land
(Liguria, Tuscia, the fortresses of the Po
Valley, in Italy; Northumbria, Chester and
Dumnonia up to the Tamar in Britain) went on for
many more decades. In both cases, Gregory
seems to have been minded to recognize what the
British and the Byzantines would not, that the
conquest was irreversible.
But while the circumstances in the
two countries were almost the same (though the
material culture in Italy was far more advanced),
the Pope’s motivations were not the same in
both cases. A major factor was his
perception of the quality of the local Church.
It has been pointed out that Gregory must have
formed, at some point, an extremely negative view
of the British Church, since in consecrating
Augustine Archbishop of all Britain he mandated
him not only to convert the English but also to
rule over the remaining British bishops, with the
extraordinary commission “that the ignorant
might be instructed, the weak strengthened by
your counsel, and the perverse corrected by your
authority”.
What this meant, and what the Pope
expected, is made clear in the same collection of
answers to questions from Augustine, called the libellum
responsionum, or Little Book of Answers.
This is not to be read as a series of actual
questions and answers, as much as a demand from
Augustine to be supported by authoritative Roman
rulings on issues on which this or that party had
refused to defer to his authority. It is
not a coincidence that, according to Bede, the libellus
responsionum reached him as soon as he was
consecrated full (arch)Bishop by Aetherius, the
important Bishop of Arles, in 601. The two things,
episcopal authority and Roman backing in
difficult questions, went together. And the
other question to which Augustine sought an
“answer” was: is it legitimate for me
to consecrate Bishops alone? Answer: in
your case, yes, since there are no Bishops near
you this side of Gaul to come and be
co-consecrators. In other words, Gregory
expected the existing British bishops to refuse
to help Augustine consecrate bishops himself.
According to Bede, the libellum
responsionum was written some considerable
time before the famous two synods of Augustine
and the British, in which the split was
formalized. On the other hand, to judge by
a letter written in 619 to the Bishops of Ireland
by the successors of Augustine – Bishops
Lawrence of Canterbury, Mellitus of London and
Justus of Rochester – the break between Rome
and the Welsh Church took place after the
beginning of the mission. Lawrence was
actually a member of Augustine’s first
mission, so that when the letter says that
“When… the Apostolic See… sent us
to preach the Gospel to the heathens… we
came to this island of Britain. Until we
realized the true situation, we had a high regard
for the devotion… of the British”, we have to accept that
it reflects their actual experience. The
bishops report with shock that the Irish bishop
Dagan refused even to eat with them. All
these missionaries were – as we say – Romani
de Roma, from the diocese of Gregory himself,
and we cannot doubt that they reflected the
attitude of the Pope. Early in the mission,
the Pope was gung-ho about evangelizing the
English while the Gaulish bishops, who were
closer to events, dragged their feet – as he
says in a letter to the Frankish regent Queen
Brunhilde. This indicates that he must have
started with a rosy view of the situation.
I have suggested the role of
David’s monastic movement in the schism; but
there is another possible element to be
considered. Pope Gregory’s
disappointment seems to have been even earlier
and more radical than that of the missionaries
themselves. The nomination of Augustine,
not only to missionary bishop to the English, but
to primate of all Britain, is a slap in the face
for existing Church authorities in the
unconquered areas; and it is accompanied by the
evidence of the libellus responsionum that
the Pope expects a schism and that he has had
reason to find the Britons ignorant, immoral
(“weak”), and stubborn. While the
missionaries were still trying in Lawrence’s
time to establish relationships with their
colleagues in Britain and Ireland, Gregory seems
to have resolved by 601, four years into his
great enterprise, that there was no hope in the
Celtic Churches, and that the only future was
through a new Roman-led Church evangelizing those
blank slates, the English, rather than accepting
the bad habits and perverse ways of the British.
We have certain notice of one
visitor from the British Islands who came as a
complete shock to the Pope, namely St.Columbanus,
the renewer of monasticism in Frankland and
Northern Italy, who addressed the Chair of Peter
in letters whose tone was free and confident to
the point of near-insolence, and who is
punctually mentioned in the three Bishops’
letter as one of their disappointments; but while
the Saint might not unreasonably be described as
stubborn, nobody but a fool would call him either
weak or ignorant, and Gregory was no fool. Besides,
the letter of Lawrence, Mellitus and Justus says
explicitly that they were first disappointed by
the British Church, and that it was only after
that that their contact with the Irish Church
showed the same arrogance, bad customs and
obstinacy. In other words, whatever bad
impression may have been made by Columbanus only
went to reinforce impressions already formed in
the contact with British Church authorities.
This happened between 596 and 601; an instant in
historical terms, but time enough for one group
of people to change their minds about another -
radically.
It is my belief that that bad
impression arose when surviving British Church
authorities tried to pressure the Pope into
reversing his pro-English policy. Bede’s
famous story of two meetings between Augustine
and British church authorities, the second of
which was attended by no less than seven bishops,
and which resulted in an incurable schism
between, proves that, in spite of the collapse of
central Britain, British church authorities still
acted in concert and saw themselves as a unit.
Now there is a story which claims to document,
from the other position, British activity in this
period, to do with the great political and
religious crisis of the rise of England.
The Life of Kentigern,
compiled from earlier sources by the monk Jocelyn
of Furnessin the eleven hundreds,
is a truly bizarre product many of whose features
seem to want to make the founding bishop of
Glasgow into nothing less than a reincarnation of
Jesus Christ. His birth and youth are
modelled point by point on those of Our Lord in
canonic and apocryphal Gospels, with one Fregus
deputized to serve as old Simeon of the Gospel of
Luke, claiming that “The Lord is with
us” when Kentigern comes to visit him, and
singing Simeon’s hymn, “Lord, now
lettest thy servant depart in peace”, when
he sees Kentigern’s face. All the
chapters about Kentigern’s birth, childhood
and youth, from his conception by the virgin
Theneu (who had prayed that she might be
“like the Virgin Mary in all things”
and promptly produced a virgin birth) to the
visit to Fregus, are consistent; only one detail
– Kentigern’s study with the elderly
teacher St.Servan – has no counterpart in
the Gospel, though it affords the writer a
parallel with Moses walking through the Red Sea.
On the other hand, it is noticeable that there is
no visible further allusion to Kentigern as
Christ except in the stories of his childhood; as
an adult, there is nothing particular to connect
him to Our Lord.
I want to introduce a new
analytical model. In the development of
legend from historical fact, I think we should
speak of the First Biography and of the Second
Biography. When a man has left a
considerable impression, it often happens that a
member or members of his circle, or people
commissioned to do so, should write an account of
the remarkable events of his life. This is
what I would call the First Biography: it is
essentially historical, although its early
chapters, dealing with the childhood and youth of
the great man – when nobody knew that he was
going to be great, and when most or all of the
future members of his circle had not met him or
were not even born – are considerably less
reliable than the accounts of his great years of
activity and success. A pleasingly perfect
instance of what I mean is in the Penguin volume Two
lives of Charlemagne. The Vita
Karoli (Life of Charles) by Einhard or
Eginardus is a fine example of First Biography:
although Einhard, a member of the Emperor’s
administration in the later part of his life, was
a wholehearted supporter who consciously modelled
his biography after Suetonius’ account of
Augustus, never-theless it has its feet planted
firmly in the soil of historical events, and the
worst that may be said of Einhard as a reporter
is that he may have exaggerated his own role at
court, and perhaps been uncritical of his hero.
However, the very importance of
the man’s deeds mean that his image goes
marching on, after the circle of friends has
dissolved; spurious stories become attached to
him, true ones are exaggerated or misunderstood,
and it may even happen that true stories are
preserved that the circle itself never knew of or
never considered important; and there is also a
great need to attach him to all sorts of issues
on which men of latter days like to think that
they would have had his endorsement. At
some point, it happens that someone reads the
First Biography and finds it depressingly flat
and short of all the good stories, interesting
insights and wonderful instances of greatness (as
he himself conceives it) which were flying around
in his time; and resolves to write those
down. This is the Second Biography; an
intermediate stage to legend, since what it is
composed of is not so much one big legend of the
great man, as many small anecdotes. The De
Karolo Magno by Notker the Stammerer, a monk
of Sankt Gallen (Switzerland), is a lovely
example of the Second Biography. The honest
author does not even claim that it is a Vita,
an account of the emperor’s life; only that
it is a book that speaks “about the Great
Charles”, setting down all the welter of
poorly connected anecdotes that Notker had heard
about the figure that loomed so large across his
whole world seventy years after his death, king,
warrior, hero, sage, and saint – and earthy,
humorous Frankish country gentleman.
The fact that the weak point of
the First Biography is the childhood and youth
raises an echo in the Life of Kentigern’s
shameless “portrait of the bishop as a young
Jesus Christ”. As I said, one
discordant element in this clear, consistent and
unabashed picture, is the education of Kentigern
with Servan: no schoolteacher of Our Lord appears
in the corresponding legends, at least not in
anything like the positive role of Servan. Another
is that his mother, Theneu, is the daughter of a
king, Lleuddun Lluyddog, the eponymous king of
Lothian; the Virgin Mary certainly is not. It follows that
these two items of information have a chance of
being historical, while the rest of the story has
simply been attached to Kentigern at some point
later on in order to fill in a gap in the story
and to exalt the Saint according to his
followers’ idolatrous idea of him.
I am of the opinion that a First
Biography of Kentigern existed. In spite of
the manifest legendry, there are a number of
things in Jocelyn of Furness’ Life
that seem not to belong to the realm of myth, let
alone to the blatant and consistent picture
created in the early chapters, but to the world
of prosaic fact. Indeed, my own taste finds
it rather disappointing that the Dominical
pattern of Kentigern’s life peters out
completely after the Fregus episode: in spite of
the careful build up to the idea of Kentigern as
Jesus, the adult Kentigern, bishop, politician,
diplomat, courtier and miracle-worker, does
nothing whatsoever like Jesus. Even his
miracles, where it would have been easiest to
insert Jesus-like features, are nothing like Our
Lord’s. And there is something, on the
other hand, quite satisfying – to the
analyst if not to the ordinary reader – in
that, while the account of Kentigern’s birth
and youth is the most scandalous fake – and
I wonder Jocelyn was not ashamed to copy it out
– the account of his old age and death is
one of the parts that sound most lifelike. And
because of the extremity of old age and
infirmity, the fastenings of his sinews were
almost entirely withered and loosened; therefore
he bound up his cheeks and his chin by a certain
linen bandage, which went over his head and under
his chin, neither too tight nor too loose…
that nothing indecent should appear in the gaping
of his mouth. This hardly sounds like
romantic hagiographic invention; and the fact
that it refers to a certain linen bandage,
as though the author had a specific item in mind,
suggests that the bandage in question was
preserved as a relic of the saint.
And then there is the matter of
his death. Kentigern died while having a
hot bath; a matter of which the story is so
ashamed that it has to invent an angel – one
of those useful angels that always turn up to
tell Celtic saints what to do or where to go – telling him to
take a bath, the first hot bath of his life, in
recognition of his lifelong asceticism. I
think that on this episode depends the somewhat
exaggerated description of his austerities
earlier on in the book, whose climax is an
account of his extended vigils of prayer immersed
in freezing rivers – an ascetic practice
typical of the Celtic churches, but one which, in
this case, sounds like a denial-in-advance of the
luxurious lifestyle implicit in his bath. Most
of us, today, would not deny an old man so
physically decrepit, in the climate of Glasgow,
the pleasure of a hot bath; but to the monastic
communities that preserved this story, to admit
that Kentigern could command the resources for a
hot bath in mid-January (in the octave of
Epiphany, January 14, says Jocelyn) –
firewood, servants to carry the water to boil,
servants to pour it in the stone bath –
meant that the man simply did not live according
to the rule of the monks.
As indeed, why should he. He
was in the confidence of the king, with whom
– says the Life in a revealing aside
– he used to travel around; and the most
important legends of his adulthood show him
supporting the power, prestige and magical
authority of his king, Rhydderch Hael, by hook or
by crook. He was the son of a woman of
royal blood, the grandson of a king, the founder
of the diocese of Glasgow, so involved in its
politics that the party of one king – dead,
it was felt, because he had quarrelled with the
bishop – expelled him and another king
called him back; everything about his biography,
whether historical or legendary, bespeaks the
king’s man, the court bishop, as committed
to the preservation and power of the king of
Strathclyde as to his own church. Even the
fact that the Life clearly means us to
understand that his teacher Servan was a
prestigious teacher, strongly suggests an
aristocratic identity: we have seen, in
discussing Gildas, the class overtones of being
an educated person in Educated Britain.
It is as a diplomat, and possibly
as a king’s man, that Kentigern enters our
subject matter. The Life claims that
he travelled to Rome no less than seven times to
discuss the parlous situation of Britain with
Pope Gregory. I do not think that the
number of seven journeys is reliable, considering
the difficulty of such a journey, and the
King’s need to have his bishop at home to
run the Church for him. On the other hand,
the detail that Kentigern fell badly sick on his
way back on his last journey back and therefore
did not embark on another, is one of those things
that sound like real life rather than legend.
I think we can envisage a plural number of
journeys, two, three, maybe four, with the last
ending in a serious illness on the way home.
I would suggest, however, that Kentigern may have
had other reasons than illness and hardship to
decide against going back to Rome again.
We are warned (by an unusually
cautious John Morris) that meetings with Pope
Gregory are among the commonplaces of Celtic
hagiographic legend, and that therefore there is
a presumption that any tale of saints
encountering him would be unhistorical; but in
the case of Kentigern I think we have cause to
suspect otherwise. Proceeding from the
weakest to the strongest reason: first, there is
an indication that Kentigern may have had family
ecclesiastical connections on the continent.
In the 550s, a bishop with the unusual name of Conotigernus
appears in the episcopal lists of Senlis in Gaul.
Unlike John Morris, as rash, in this case, as we
are used to see him, I cannot bring myself to
believe that this is the Kentigern of Glasgow,
who died about 616: even granting him a great
age, he would by then be a boy or little more,
and one cannot imagine why a very young
ecclesiastic, neither Frankish nor Roman, would
be placed at the head even of a fairly
unimportant diocese. But it seems likely
that this is a kinsman. Second, the typical
hagiographic saints’ encounter is a one-off
event (the Life of Kentigern has a classic
instance in the obviously unhistorical meeting of
Columba and Kentigern), attended by all the
panoply of vision and miracles that the writer
can summon up; but in this case the journeys are
many, there is little by way of visions, miracles
or angelic visitations, and there is the
life-like detail of the illness that strikes
Kentigern on the way back. Thirdly, the
list of gifts from Gregory to Kentigern is not
only lifelike but, as we will see, possibly quite
significant: codes of canon laws, “other
books of holy writings” (it is not clear
whether the text originally meant Bibles, or
simply Christian literature), privileges for his
church, and relics of Saints. All of these
are the sort of thing one would expect the bishop
of Rome to give to a visiting dignitary from a
distant and rather primitive Church; in fact,
every ecclesiastical journey was among other
things an occasion to replenish libraries.
The fourth and strongest reason is
the wholly untypical historical setting of the Life.
The most superficial acquaintance with
Welsh/Cornish/Breton hagiography will show that
its authors were apt to be wildly careless in
matters of chronology, if indeed any chronology
could be discovered in their writing at all.
Many Welsh saints can be dated with a margin of
error of as much as centuries; however untypical
the Life of St.Gurthiern may be in other
respects, the fact that the hero is made the son
of a woman who lived a century after the real
Vortigern is wholly in character. But
Kentigern moves in a recognizable world and time.
He is contemporary with St.Columba and king
Rhydderch Hael; he helps found the bishopric of
St.Asaph, which probably was a reaction to the
collapse of the British Midlands in the same
period; and he goes to see a Pope who not only
lived at the right time but had a deep interest
in all things British. And all these
historical features are decidedly not the work of
Jocelyn himself, whose historical picture of
British history is a ridiculous concoction of
Gildasian and Nennian or near-Nennian lore from
which he unerringly managed to single out all the
unhistorical features; rather, if a mind may be
judged by its products, it is the unfortunate
Jocelyn who, in trying to expand on the original
historical picture of his sources, has exposed
his fantastic, or, to quote Trevor-Roper, his
“oceanic” credulity. He was not
the man to put the journeys of Kentigern in a
credible historical context.
Indeed, why should anyone want to
employ a Pope of Rome in the foundation legend of
two British bishoprics, Glasgow and St.Asaph?
Let us remember the context: this was a Church
that split from Rome in Gregory’s own
lifetime, and on account of his policies. It
did not return to Rome until about 768. It was in this
period, surely, that the legend of Kentigern took
shape. The only reason why it should be
written down at all is as a self-defence of the
British Church for its actions, including the
schism; and that, in my view, is exactly what we
find.
Jocelyn himself was quite clear
about the conditions in which Kentigern lived,
and his potted history of Britain, otherwise a
mere and bad hodgepodge of known sources,
acquires both precision and an interesting kind
of vagueness when describing both the reason for
appointing Kentigern bishop of Strathclyde and
for him to go to the Pope. Kentigern’s
mission to the Pope is motivated by two reasons:
firstly, that the island of Britain was being
assaulted by “idol-worshippers”;
secondly, that even within the Church of Britain
itself there were many usages contrary to
Catholic usage and a good few heretics. It
is however on the uncanonical usages that he
insists: it is, after all, the same reason why
Kentigern himself was made bishop of Strathclyde
years earlier – because the locals,
nominally Christian, were both so untutored and
so threatened by vicious and often
idol-worshipping neighbours (clearly the Picts)
that Christianity was stained by ignorance,
carelessness and bad customs. This is quite
a credible picture, and it agrees with the fact
that the first item on the list of Papal gifts to
Kentigern was a code of canons. At the same
time, there is little or no description of what,
exactly, Kentigern did to change all that. We
hear that he preached and that he built stone
crosses (which, incidentally, has a certain hazy
echo of the stone bathtub in which he died, in
the sense that carving stone for decorative,
ceremonial or palatial purposes was not alien to
him), but there is little account of the more
typical activities of a reforming bishop, which
must inevitably involve a certain amount of
correction, compulsion and the odd expulsion;
Kentigern’s life as told by Jocelyn is long
on public events and ceremonies, but rather short
on discipline.
Even the fact that he founded a
monastery seems to be a by-product of his
political activity: exiled in North Wales, he
sets up a bishopric at St.Asaph and suddenly
finds himself surrounded by nearly a thousand
monks. This apparently crazy number is
actually in keeping with the more than 2100 whom
Bede claimed belonged to the nearby monastery of
Bangor Is-Coed at the same time, and must
represent the presence of exiles from
English-conquered or threatened lands; not only
the fact that the monks massed to pray for the
victory of British forces against the hated
English at Chester, but the fact that all 2100
had to earn their living by manual labour, suggests that these
were in effect huge monastic refugee camps.
When Kentigern is recalled to Glasgow, he finds
that the majority of monks want to go with him
– to distant, secure Strathclyde –
rather than remain with Bishop Asaph –
within raiding distance of Saxon swords. It
seems likely that Kentigern was working to firm
up the Church in the threatened regions, and that
he may never even have originally thought of a
major monastic foundation at all.
The most visible supposed result
of Kentigern’s visits to Rome was a Papal
privilege that he should be subject to no other
bishop, which Jocelyn explains anachronistically
by his having been made a papal vicar and
chaplain. Such a dispensation is highly
relevant to early seventh-century conditions, in
which the Welsh church refused to accept the
primacy over Britain granted by the Pope to his
appointee Augustine; it is, in fact, a direct
denial of the authority of Canterbury over
Glasgow, on the supposed authority of the very
Pope who had made Augustine head bishop over all
Britain!
In other words, this is a
deliberate falsehood. Specifically, it was
intended to explain why Kentigern and his diocese
should claim to be absolved from obedience to any
other see without being itself made an
archbishopric; and it shows a clear awareness of
the issues facing Gregory, Augustine and
Kentigern. The urge to reconcile all the
great names of the past, and probably a complete
failure to understand the issues involved, led
Jocelyn, himself an Anglo-Norman and therefore
sympathetic to the church of Augustine, to try
somehow to place this in harmony with
Augustine’s arrival on the island; but it
must be obvious that what we have here is a
justification for going against him in every
significant way, for rejecting archiepiscopal
authority altogether.
Some of the justification must be
of a later date than a First Biography; in
particular, the impossible life-span of 185 years
attributed to Kentigern, which seems to have been
invented to push back the foundation of the
diocese of Glasgow; and the anachronistic
features of the rejection of Canterbury’s
authority, specifically the weight given to the
title of Archbishop in the so-called Papal
dispensation – which sounds like it might
come from a century or two later – and the
titles of Papal chaplain and vicar – which
sound as though they came from very much
later, and are probably Jocelyn’s own
invention. But apart from Jocelyn’s
own part, what this testifies to is only the
persistence of a culture of self-justification
and self-defence; the fact is that the issues
alluded to in Kentigern’s false Papal
privilege and also in the Pope’s gift of
books of canon law are sixth- and seventh-century
issues. Jocelyn admits that the practices
of the British Church were often at variance with
those of the universal Church, which agrees with
Bede’s picture, or even downright corrupt,
which agrees with Gildas’. And the
fact that Kentigern had to flee Strathclyde for
his life when his enemy Morkent died, only to be
called back when another king came to power, has
not a little in common with Gildas’ picture
of the control of the Church by
“tyrants” and their episcopal
creatures, who saepissime are killed by
the tyrants who created them. From this
point of view, the gift of books of canon law and
other teaching matter acquires a quite different
significance from what Jocelyn thought, more
along the line of “the Lord in His goodness
shed light on you, and meanwhile, here is
something for you to chew on”.
You cannot get away from the fact
that at some point in the early years of the
mission, both the Pope and the missionaries
conceived a great dislike for the British Church
and its practices – a dislike which,
according to the missionaries’ own words,
did not pre-date the mission. As a
prominent bishop in the British Church, Kentigern
would at the very least have been a prominent
part of that group of people whom the
missionaries began to dislike; and when we are
told that, at the same time, he is claimed to
have made not one, but several, journeys to the
Pope in Rome – whose apparent result, on
Kentigern’s own British side, was a group of
claims that was starkly at odds with Papal and
missionary policy and claims – then we have
to say that it is very possible that Kentigern
himself had something to do with Gregory’s
view of the British as stubborn, ignorant, weak
and in bad need of discipline.
There can be no doubt that if such
missions took place, they must have had a
strongly anti-English content. Whatever
counsels the Bishop of Glasgow urged on the
Bishop of Rome, they cannot have included setting
up a church authority supreme over all the island
in the territory of the English. He is more
likely to have urged an alliance of all existing
Catholic powers to destroy them – the
daydream of the Welsh down the ages. But as
with the Byzantine plan to cause civil war among
the Longobards, Gregory not only implicitly
rejected the idea, but explicitly adopted an
opposite and indeed extreme policy. Just as
he had not only negotiated with the Longobards
and even called the Duke of Benevento “our
true child”, but actually thrown his
rejection of imperial policy in the Empire’s
face; so he actually placed the bishops of the
British under the control of the new archbishop
of Canterbury. Informing Augustine of the
new authority he intended to confer on him,
Gregory’s words indicate that he already had
reason to expect resistance, obstinacy, indeed
even schism, from the British, and that he had
the Pope’s own mandate to effectively ride
roughshod over them.
I think that Kentigern’s
journeys must have taken place between 596 and
601, and must have represented an attempt to stop
the mission to the English, which the Welsh
positively did not want to see evangelized.
I think that in or some time before 601, the last
journey ended in a breach, and then Kentigern
used the illness he suffered on the way back to
excuse himself – probably to the king –
from further fruitless endeavours. I very
much doubt that Bede’s two synods had much
to do with the decision of the British to break
from Rome; I think that the game had already been
played and lost on other fields, and that the
famous story of Augustine refusing to rise before
the assembled bishops and abbots was only a
ceremonial assertion – on both sides –
of positions already taken and now made
irrevocable.
A side-effect of Gregory’s
severely diminished view of the British
Christians was his remarkably severe attitude to
the cult of a local martyr by name Sixtus, found
by Augustine somewhere in Kent. This
episode is treated in an item in the libellus
responsionum which Bede omitted, and which shows, by the
way, that Augustine’s so-called questions at
the head of each “answer” are only
summaries of longer and more circumstantial
expositions. Gregory begins his
“answer” with mihi tamen uiditur,
“it seems to me, however”; which
obviously implies a difference of opinion with
Augustine himself; and that means that Augustine
had not only sent a request for advice, but a
plan for action for which he sought the
Pope’s support. We need not doubt that
the other libellus items were, similarly,
the result of long documents from Augustine with
similar suggestions, in which, however, the Pope
had acquiesced, so that no trace of a difference
of opinion remains in his prose.
The difference was on what to do
about this cult of Sixtus; and it must be noticed
that both the missionary and the Pope were not
very happy about it. Augustine seems to
have suggested that relics of the historical and
indubitable St.Sixtus of Rome (Pope Xystus or
Sixtus II, martyred 258, a martyr of the batch of
St.Lawrence and nearly as popular in the early
Roman church) should be brought in and buried
near the tomb of the Kentish Sixtus, so as to
transfer popular devotion from what, he seems to
have thought, was a badly documented and probably
valueless cult. Gregory, however, was more
radical: he sent along the requested relics, but
he suggested that the grave of the Kentish Sixtus
should be fenced off altogether and no cult
allowed there at all. This is not really
out of keeping with ordinary Church practice
– the Church does not like unproven or
unhistorical Saints and their cults – but
reflects a view, on Gregory’s side even more
than on Augustine’s, that British Christian
institutions really were not trustworthy.
And this leads us to the people
whom Augustine found in Kent. We should not
speak of the conversion of England as though the
religion, or for that matter the ethnic identity,
of the English, were the same for every dweller
in their kingdoms. The fact that the word wealha
had quickly passed over from meaning Roman/
Welshman to meaning slave, shows
sufficiently that large swathes of the population
were serfs descended from conquered
Roman-Britons; and such people may be assumed not
to be welcome at whatever religious functions, in
particular sacrifice, were known to their
conquerors. Slaves are frequently excluded
from sacrifice; and conversely, they can never
have quite forgotten the Roman identity and
religion of their fathers; not when most of
Britain was Christian, governed by Christian
kings, until the 570s. It is not to be
imagined that the Romano-British slaves of the
new English kings in places like Kent would not
tell tales of their free and royal kinsmen across
the border, of their churches, their bishops and
their saints.
There is evidence that cults of a
specific kind carried on, probably with no
consecrated priests, at specific spots. In
Appendix III I argue for the existence of a
martyr’s cult in Hoxne, Suffolk (in the
heart of the earliest Saxon conquest) located at
a specific spot, a bridge, and attracting
pilgrims – indubitably of servile status
– from the neighbouring region. That
it was a servile cult is suggested by the fact
that it seems to have had none of the skills that
come with book learning, failing to preserve
dates and circumstances, and attaching its own
historically based legend to a much later and
completely different martyr who had no original
connection with Hoxne at all. These are the
same features of the Kentish martyr’s cult
of the otherwise unknown Sixtus, and Augustine
and Gregory’s visible distrust for it
suggests that its legend was also of the kind I
postulate for the martyrium at Hoxne,
poorly grounded in history and with no book
learning behind it, a popular memory preserved by
the existence of the cult centre itself rather
than properly recorded.
This kind of place of cultic
assembly has to do, in my view, with the many
places called Eccles or their compounds,
spread all over the country. The word comes
from Ekklesia, assembly (of the brothers),
the old term for Christians as a corporate group,
especially at their ceremonies. There are Eccles
in areas of early English settlement such as Kent
(near Rochester) and East Anglia (between
Happisburgh and Palling), and places in
stubbornly pagan Mercia, where the English took
longest to convert. Now one feature to be
noticed is that names formed with Eccles
compounds practically always indicate open-air
places – Ecclesfield, Eaglesfield,
Eccleshill, Ecchinswell (that is Eccles
well), Eccleshall (nook of land, healh,
of the Eccles) – or farmsteads –
Eccleston, of which there are several in
Lancashire and Cheshire; the point being, surely,
that a farmstead is an isolated building on open
farming ground. In all likelihood it is the
farming ground, or part of it, which is the Eccles
that qualifies the tun or farmstead.
It seems to have been a regularity, therefore,
that Eccles corresponded with open
grounds.
Now, as soon as English begins to
acquire a Christian vocabulary, the word it uses
for “a sacred Christian building”
is not Eccles from Greek Ekklesia
(a gathering of people, especially of citizens)
but cirice, Church, from the adjective Kyriacon,
belonging to the Lord. That is, it seems to
understand the difference between ekklesia
and kyriacon, eccles and church,
that is between the assembled body of members,
which does not have to gather in an enclosed
place at all, and the building consecrated and
set apart, “belonging to the Lord”, kyriacon.
This definite difference in meaning corresponds
to the difference between the various open-air Eccles
and the enclosed and preferably stone-built church
building. I would also suggest that there
is no reason why the distinction between cirice
and eccles should not have been known to
the English before conversion; it was, after all,
part of a landscape in which they had been
settled for over a century.
What this suggests to me is that
the conquering English would allow their
conquered serfs to cultivate their own religion
in the open air, but not in consecrated
buildings. This reminds us of King
Aethelberht’s reluctance to meet the Roman
missionaries except under the open sky, since he
was afraid that they could do something
maleficent to him in an enclosed building. The
reasons for this are not terribly clear in the
absence of any statement of pagan English views
on such matters as the value of sacred buildings
(it is perhaps significant for Aethelberht’s
understanding of the Church that, while he had
this superstitious view of her buildings, he
understood the principle of endowing it, and did
so as soon as he was convinced of
Augustine’s good intentions); but the effect
on history ought to be tolerably obvious. While
there is a good deal of work to be done into why
the English, alone among all the conquering
German hordes before and after, had such a
negative relationship with Church buildings, it
is clear that the conquering English would
destroy or deconsecrate every church building
they could lay their hands on, making sure above
all that the local wealhas would not use
them again. Sixth-century buildings in
Britain were made of wood, easy either to
dismantle or to burn; and Gildas testifies that
there had been a spate of vainglorious, highly
visible church-building in his day (79.3; 80.4),
with every refinement of luxury, it seems. Such
churches would make both highly visible and
highly vulnerable targets. It is perhaps
significant that St.Martin’s, the first
church made available to the missionaries in
Canterbury, was an old, Roman building,
presumably made of stone and harder to destroy
altogether.
The destruction or deconsecration
of church buildings in conquered areas would skew
every picture of history thereafter, since the
physical traces of Christian presence would
vanish. This probably includes books and
other written matter, and certainly such places
as monasteries; and as the Church of Gildas’
time was rich (42.3), the complete eradication of
its built-up inheritance would make a great
difference to the country. But a Christian
presence of sorts would carry on, transformed
into something like a cult meeting at holy open
places, possibly with the characteristics of a
sacred fair or pilgrimage centre, and possibly
with a different frequency from the weekly or
daily celebration of a normal church. That
the two ecclesia sites I argued for seem
both to have been dedicated to the cult of
martyrs seems indicative of the mood of the
oppressed Christians of the English lands, where
suffering and dying for the faith might have been
seen as something all too real; and it seems to
reflect the fact that the shrines which Gildas
knew to exist across the barbarian border were
shrines of martyrs (10.2).
In other words, a peculiar kind of
organization carried on among the conquered
Christians of England. The wide spread of eccles
place-names indicates that English practice in
this respect was regular, carried on even in
areas such as Cheshire and Lancashire which were
conquered after Augustine’s mission had
started. And the fact that a definite form
of organization, however, peculiar, existed,
bestowing group identity and enabling Christians
to make themselves visible to their masters,
explains a few further questions. There
must have been Christians in England, since,
according to Pope Gregory, the Frankish bishops
had been asked to send a bishop before he started
his own mission, but had ignored the request.
Why they should is not clear; the stated policy
of the Frankish kingdoms was to gain influence
among the peoples of Britain, and to settle
Frankish or Frankish-controlled bishops across
the Channel would have been an obvious way to do
so. The kings themselves were in fact quite
interested in Gregory’s mission, and the
regent Brunhilde was complimented by the Pope
(and compared implicitly with the sluggish
bishops) for her help. Certainly,
therefore, any resistance or sluggishness about a
mission to England came from the bishops, not
from the kings.
Our considerations so far suggest
a reason. It seems to me obvious that the
request for a bishop for the conquered Christians
of England would come either through, or with the
consent of, their local pagan kings. Now if
the pagan kings intended to carry on with the
model thus far established, of open-air
assemblies with no consecrated buildings and (it
follows) no land set aside for the Church and
therefore no patrimony, the Frankish bishops may
have been more aware than the lord of distant
Rome of the intolerable obstacles that the
prohibition on built churches would inflict on
any mission; they may have regarded it as useless
until the English changed their minds.
Certainly, such requests were
sent. Quite apart from the fact that it was
canon law that no bishop should be sent without a
formal request, there is the size and importance
of the mission: forty men, led by the prior of
Gregory’s own monastery, St.Andrew’s on
the Caelian Hill (today dedicated to Gregory the
Great himself), successively enlarged by
interpreters collected in Gaul (probably
Gregory’s earlier plan to purchase young
English slaves to train for the mission had
failed or produced an insufficient number of
candidates). While the Church of Rome may
certainly want to send missionaries to a pagan
country, would it ever have sent a candidate for
Bishop, with a commission to set up a whole
regular Church structure, had they not been sure
of the presence of Christians waiting to be
organized? Especially the wise Gregory, a
man of wide experience and deep thought who had
worked both in government and in diplomacy before
being made Pope? All the evidence is that
the English project was a major one for him:
according to Paul the Deacon, he had thought of
it since before he had been made Pope, and a hint
in a letter to Eulogius, Catholic Patriarch of
Alexandria, suggests that he had cast as far as
Egypt for help. He must have chosen his men with
care, and meant Augustine for an Archbishop from
before he started. And what about the reception
Aethelberht gave Augustine and his crowd (and it
was a crowd)? Compare that with the tribulations
of early missionaries in Frisia and Saxony, and
the Kentish king's behaviour seems almost
impossibly tolerant. He must have been used to
Christians living peacefully in his kingdom.
It is even possible that the
recent suggestion that dioceses in Mercia were
set up by British Bishops from Wales before the
ecclesiastical troops of the Pope ever got there[16] may be subject to the
same qualification. Mercia was almost the last
English kingdom to convert, and, under the pagan
Penda, played a powerful part in the upheavals
that nearly made Cadwallon king of all Britain
above the Humber. The presence there of Eccles
names – Eccleshall, Staffordshire;
Eccleston, Cheshire – shows that the
open-air-meeting model had been imposed there as
well as in other areas of English conquest. Why,
therefore, is there evidence of British bishops
and church buildings there shortly before the
conversion of the kingdom, so that a modern
scholar could quite credibly suggest that the
British were the ones who converted the Mercians?
The historical picture I have been building up
suggests an answer. The Mercians, like the other
English, had at first suppressed church buildings
and forced their subject population to worship,
if at all, only in eccles fields. To the
Mercians as to the other English, this was part
of a very practical problem – what to do
with the slave population, and, in particular,
how to deal with their religious identity. But in
the time of Penda, the Mercians find themselves
faced with the alarming situation of the rise of
an English episcopate that might serve as a focus
for discontent among their shadow-Christian
serfs. To avoid this danger, they decide to
receive, on their own terms, bishops; not,
however, from the Roman party – which
included their prospective enemies in
Northumbria, East Anglia and Wessex – but
from their then allies, the Welsh. And so a Welsh
ecclesiastical organization is re-built on
territories from which, after all, it had only
been expelled within living memory. But I believe
that Steven Bassett exaggerates when he says that
the British evangelized “the
immigrants”, that is the English conquerors;
what they are likely to have done is minister to
the subject population. The English settler
aristocracy of Mercia is unlikely to have
converted until their king did – and when a
king of Mercia, Wulfhere, converted, he converted
to Roman, not to Welsh, Christianity[17].
In his letter to Eulogius of
Alexandria, Gregory states as a fact that in the
previous year (597), Augustine and his mission
had baptized 10,000 people. Predictably, modern
scholars have arbitrarily decided that “no
reliance could be placed in the number”,
even though Gregory was in receipt of official
reports and we are not; after all, it is not to
be expected either that a poor befuddled ancient
would understand anything about his own time
until the moderns happen along to explain it to
him, or that a Church leader would ever tell the
truth. I think the explanation of that apparently
huge number is a great deal simpler: as soon as
the King granted Augustine leave to work, all the
shadow-Christians of Kent, who probably had not
had a proper priest free to reach out to them for
decades, rushed to the consolation of Baptism.
This is why I believe that no properly
consecrated priest attended the eccles
open-air meetings of Christian serfs. And from
that point of view, the number 10,000, far from
being an absurd exaggeration indulged by a
self-important Church leader (for those folks
always lie, we know that), turns out to be a
measure of how far the old Roman religion had
faded in Kent. For however we reckon the
population of the kingdom, it is not to be
imagined that 10,000 would represent even a large
minority; I would guess that the subjects of
Aethelberht would be, perhaps, from 50,000 to
200,000 – counting women, children, serfs,
and other persons outside political consideration
but not outside Baptism – at any rate, not
enough for this first wave, not of converts, but
of recovered brothers, to make a big impact,
especially since most of them would have been of
the lowest social class. Kent witnessed some
vigorous Pagan backlashes, and it was not till
fifty years had passed that the worship of idols
was outlawed.
The inevitable backlashes and the
apparently slow process of Gregory’s
policies, means that his forward-looking –
one might almost call it visionary –
attitude to the barbarians of his time must have
seemed, to his immediate successors, one big
mistake. The Longobards continued both to be
Arian and to threaten Rome; the English mission
proceeded with what seemed agonizing slowness,
and it was not until the days of St.Theodore of
Tarsus and St.Wilfrid, the third quarter of the
seventh century, that the English church was
placed on a sound footing and all official
paganism abandoned. And yet, while Gregory may
have deluded himself as to the speed with which
his policies would work, he was, in the long run,
right, and his opponents were wrong. Within two
decades of each other, the Longobards and the
English entered the number of Catholic peoples,
the Longobards in the 660s, the English by the
680s; neither of them as a result of one single
big royal decision, let alone of the pressure of
the fading Catholic powers Byzantium and
Frankland, but as the climax to a long slow
process of persuasion and conversion adapted, in
each country, to the polycentric structure of its
society, converting kingdom by kingdom and
dukedom by dukedom. The future in Italy belonged
to the Longobards, in Britain to the English, and
any settlement in the peninsula and in the island
would have to deal with them. For that matter, it
might even be said that the barbarians in the far
end of the world turned Christian with what is,
in historical terms, staggering rapidity when
compared with neighbouring Frisia and Saxony.
Evidently the pressures for change were strong.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
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