[As I continue working on my lecture series on the history of England, I thought I’d share a section of the draft I’ve been writing this week. The overall lecture is on Anglo-Saxon England (roughly 500-1050).]
In the early 7th century, the Celtic kingdoms of Britain were Christian, but the English kingdoms of the Heptarchy [Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Wessex, Sussex, Essex, and Kent] were pagan. They worshiped a pantheon of gods with whom we’re familiar from Norse mythology: Odin/Woden, Thor, etc. The conversion of the English to Christianity is perhaps the biggest story of the 7th century. In 600, all the kingdoms of the Heptarchy were pagan; in 700, all of them were Christian. Because the Anglo-Saxon migrations had wiped out the Christian influence of the Romano-British culture that existed before the 6th century, Christian missionaries were essentially starting from scratch in their evangelistic efforts. In the end, they proved equal to the task.
Christian missionaries entered England from both north and south. In 597, a deputation from Pope Gregory the Great arrived in Kent and established a mission in the town of Canterbury. According to a famous story, Gregory had encountered Angles while walking through the slave markets in Rome. Struck by their fair complexion and light hair, he inquired about their origins. When he was told that they were Angles, he replied in Latin, “Non Angli, sed angeli.” (“Not Angles, but angels.”) Upon learning that they were a pagan people, he decided to make their evangelization a priority, and he sent a monk named Augustine to begin the work.
Today this churchman is known as St. Augustine of Canterbury (to distinguish him from St. Augustine of Hippo, the author of the Confessions and the City of God). He was the first Archbishop of Canterbury, and he is sometimes called “the apostle to the English.” He used an evangelistic strategy that was fairly common in that era, focusing his efforts on converting the king, who would then bring the rest of his warriors, and eventually the common people, into the faith. Augustine succeeded in converting the kings of Kent and Essex along with the daughter of the king of Kent. This daughter later married King Edwin of Northumbria, at that time the most powerful and influential kingdom in the Heptarchy. After conferring with his warriors, Edwin also converted to Christianity.
During the 7th century, English kingdoms sometimes “relapsed into paganism” when a Christian king died and was succeeded by a pagan. This happened in both Kent and Northumbria, for example. However, the overall movement was towards Christianity, and this trend was reinforced when King Oswald of Northumbria, who was a Christian, invited Scottish monks to establish a new monastery on the island of Lindisfarne. These monks represented a different Christian tradition, a Celtic one tracing back to St. Patrick, a Christian Briton who is credited with converting the Irish to Christianity in the 4th century. In the 6th century, St. Columba took Irish Christianity to Iona, a small island in the Inner Hebrides off the southwestern coast of Caledonia, or what is now called Scotland. Columba’s monastery on Iona became the nerve center of an evangelistic effort that converted most of Scotland over the following century, so it was not surprising that King Oswald should request help from there to establish Christianity more firmly in Northumbria. Lindisfarne, an island off the eastern coast of Northumbria that can be reached on foot during low tide, assumed a prominence and role similar to the one Iona played in Scotland. Monks went out from there to found new monasteries throughout northern England. Lindisfarne was also home to some of the most prominent figures in English church history, such as St. Cuthbert, perhaps England’s most venerated saint, and the Venerable Bede.
However, the coming together of Roman Christianity in the tradition of Canterbury and Celtic Christianity in the tradition of Lindisfarne led to a dispute in Northumbria because the two traditions operated on different calendars and calculated the date of Easter differently. This might seem like a trivial thing to someone living in the 21st-century, secular West, but it was quite significant. Much of the church calendar revolves around the dating of Easter, which commemorates the resurrection of Christ and is Christianity’s most important feast day. As you may know, Easter is preceded by Lent, a penitential season marked by rigorous fasting. In Oswald’s court, some would be celebrating and feasting while others would be fasting, and this situation naturally led to a kind of cultural tension.
In the interest of unity, Oswald’s successor, Oswiu [pronounced OZ-wee], convened a meeting at a monastery in the town of Whitby in 664 to settle the dispute. Churchmen from both the Celtic and Roman traditions argued their respective cases before the king. St. Colman, the Bishop of Lindisfarne, claimed that the Celtic tradition of dating Easter was of greater antiquity than Rome’s and thus deserved preeminence. St. Wilfrid, the abbot of a monastery in Ripon [pronounced RYE-pun], argued for the Roman tradition on the basis of Petrine supremacy. Petrine supremacy is a doctrine that asserts the ruling authority of the pope in church matters. It stems from Christ’s grant of special leadership to St. Peter in the Gospels and the further claim that the bishops of Rome—the popes—are the lawful successors to St. Peter. Because they are Peter’s successors, the argument concludes, they enjoy the same authority that Peter did while on earth. St. Wilfrid argued at Whitby that because the pope prescribed the Roman method of calculating Easter, all other Christians were obliged to submit to it. Notably, the monks of Lindisfarne accepted the doctrine of Petrine supremacy, although not the particular application of it that Wilfrid advanced.
Nevertheless, Oswiu found Wilfrid’s argument compelling, and he ruled that the Roman calendar was to be used throughout Northumbria. This event is known in church history as the Synod of Whitby, and it marked an inflection point in the English church’s development. Colman returned to Iona, and his successor bishops were aligned with Rome; in fact, the episcopal seat in Northumbria was ultimately moved from Lindisfarne to York, and Wilfrid became bishop during the reign of Oswiu’s successor. York became an archbishopric in the 8th century and remains one to the present day. Lindisfarne continued to function as an evangelistic base for northern England, and its new missions in Mercia and elsewhere taught converts to follow the Roman calendar. Unity in the public ordering of the church throughout the Heptarchy smoothed the way for the eventual unification of England politically.
It bears repeating that the conversion of England for the most part followed a top-down strategy. If Christian missionaries succeeded in converting the king, his closest supporters in the landowning warrior class, men called thegns (or thanes), would convert as well. They would support the founding of local churches and monasteries, and the priests and monks who staffed those institutions would instruct the common people in the articles of the faith. Surviving Anglo-Saxon literature such as the epic poem Beowulf and archeological evidence tell us the transition to Christianity was a gradual process. Pagan and Christian symbols continued to exist side by side in burial mounds and elsewhere throughout much of the Anglo-Saxon period. It was difficult to create a comprehensive infrastructure of Christian institutions across the entirety of England, which was mostly rural and sparsely populated. It took many years following a kingdom’s nominal conversion to Christianity before some villages even had reliable access to a priest. However, the monasteries that were founded throughout England apparently enjoyed broad popular support, and this is evidence that the faith was not simply an upper-class phenomenon.
Do you have any recommendations for books on English history, particularly the transition from the divided kingdoms to the united England? I've struggled to find one resource on this.