A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (10 page)

In 563 the Irish saint Columba founded a monastery on the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland, in the territory of Dál Riata. (The story of how this Irish influence reached the Anglian kingdoms of Northumbria is given in
chapter 3
.) In 597 Roman Catholic Christianity arrived in the south, with the mission of St Augustine sent by Pope Gregory I to King Æthelberht of Kent and his Christian wife of long standing, Bertha of Paris. For any mission to succeed it would need support in the Frankish territories north of the Alps through which it would have to pass. At this time they were divided between the kingdom of Austrasia (roughly western parts of what is now Germany) and, to the west of that, a number of kingdoms, chief among them Neustria. Rome wrote to various rulers to solicit safe passage for the planned mission.

These rival rulers were all descendants of Clovis of the Merovingian dynasty, the pagan chieftain of a confederacy of barbarian tribes known as the Franks (see
chapter 5
). Clovis had defeated the last Roman prefect of Gaul in the 480s (about the same time that Aelle of the South Saxons was carving out his kingdom). When he converted to orthodox catholic Christianity, as taught by Rome and Constantinople, it was a turning point in the history of the papacy. At that time the bishops of Rome, the popes, felt in danger of being marginalized in the west by Europe’s dominant barbarian rulers, Theodoric the Ostrogoth in Rome and the Visigothic kings in Spain who held to Arian Christianity, which taught that Christ was not God’s equal and was heretical in Rome’s view. Thus the conversion of Clovis, the rising barbarian star, to their version of orthodox Christianity was an important gain. The marriage of the Roman Catholic Merovingian Princess Bertha, eighty or so years later, into a heathen ruling house across the Channel, opened the way to a further extension of the pope’s influence north of the Alps.

Princess Bertha’s father, the Merovingian King Charibert I of Paris, had died, but a condition of the marriage had been that she should be able to continue to practise her religion – her entourage included her priest, bishop Liuthard – and a dilapidated Roman church dedicated to St Martin had been restored (probably in late sixth-century Merovingian style) for her use.
²
Kent lay within the sphere of influence of the Merovingian rulers of northern Francia. The cultural ties were evidently close. Mercantile and political contact between Kent and Francia and the presence of Franks at Æthelberht’s court had familiarized some Franks with the language of the English and some of the Kentish court with Frankish.
³
Augustine and his Italian companions were worried about linguistic difficulties. Pope Gregory had arranged for Frankish priests to accompany them to act as interpreters. The queen’s chapel meant that Latin, too, had a toehold. It also seems reasonable to suppose that these Latin clerics helped pioneer the adaptation of
the Latin alphabet to the writing of Old English (see below and
chapter 9
).

The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s
entry for 597 tells us that Pope Gregory I ‘sent Augustine to Britain . . . who preached God’s word to the English nation’. The future founding archbishop of Canterbury landed on the Isle of Thanet (now part of mainland Kent, but then separated from it by a wide channel) with some forty men, monks and presumably support personnel early in 597.

Augustine was prior of a Roman monastery that Pope Gregory had himself founded and many of his companions were from the same house. They were hardly willing recruits. Setting out in early 596, they stopped for some weeks in southern Gaul while Augustine returned to Rome hoping to persuade Gregory to recall the mission. He refused, but gave him letters of authorization and introduction to the secular and church authorities along the route. Rome’s authority was by no means absolute in Europe, even in church matters, at that time. For one thing, as Augustine discovered, churches in Gaul observed a ‘Gallican’ rite different from that of Rome.

We do not know for sure why Gregory, pope since 590, decided to launch the mission. Jesus Christ had of course charged all true disciples to spread his message to all the world. But why to the English? Why now? In terms of church politics a new province owing exclusive allegiance to Rome and following the Roman rite would obviously be an advantage to the papacy. Possibly the famous episode in the Roman slave market triggered Gregory’s decision. But the fact that the pagan English had overrun most of the Roman Empire’s once Christian province of Britain was probably the underlying cause. Eric John has controversially argued that following the death, a few years earlier, of the powerful West Saxon king Ceawlin, who according to Bede was the second to wield the
imperium
, Æthelberht was already being accorded that status. To continue with John’s analysis, because this status represented real
seniority among the English kings, Rome may have considered the time was now opportune to activate its long-standing presence at the court of Canterbury.
⁴

At all events, King Æthelberht formally received the Roman party a few days after their arrival, in an open-air ceremony. Maybe this was because he feared the newcomers could use sorcery against him in an enclosed space, as Bede believed; maybe because Anglo-Saxon pagan sanctuaries were generally in the open air; most probably because it was elementary PR to hold his first encounter with these important strangers in full view of as many of his council and people as possible. Before the end of 597 the king was converted and baptized.

Gregory, who termed Æthelberht ‘king of the English’ (rex
Anglorum
) now addressed a solemn communication to him and Queen Bertha, in which he reminded them of the example of the first Christian emperor, Constantine. The ceremony was to be understood as his solemn enrolment into the family of Catholic kings, of which the present emperor (that is the east Roman, Byzantine ruler at Constantinople), the most ‘serene prince’, as Gregory called him, was the father.
⁵
To be admitted as a member of this imperial family was probably the chief attraction of the new religion for Æthelberht. By this time, it has been said, it was ‘the aspiration of Germanic leaders all over . . . Europe . . . to emphasize their right to rule by looking like the Byzantines in their use of gold garnet jewellery.’
⁶

But we do not really know why the king took the new faith. Loyalty to his divine ancestors’ religion had served Æthelberht pretty well. He seems to have won recognition as overking without the aid of the new god. The kingdom of the East Saxons, ruled by his nephew Sæberht (d. 616/17), was a client state and further afield Rædwald, king of the East Angles, treated him with respect. Place name evidence indicates Woden cult centres close to Canterbury where Queen Bertha had her chapel. The pagan cult did survive the
king’s conversion and in fact his son reverted to it after his death. So why the switch? Possibly the simplest answer is the right one. Had the king, perhaps, experienced a genuine spiritual epiphany?

The mission proceeded apace. A second team from Rome, under the leadership of Augustine’s deputy Laurentius, arrived in England in 601; it brought the letters from Gregory and, for Augustine, the pallium of office as archbishop. He was duly consecrated and established himself – at Canterbury. Pope Gregory surely expected him to choose ‘Londinium’, a chief city of Roman Britain, as his metropolitan see. As surely, Augustine, the ‘man in the field’, must have found it impossible to present such an idea to the king of Kent. It has been argued that in fact, from the start, Christianity and Christian missions were tools of policy used and supported by kings as a means of extending their influence.
⁷
The suggestion that the senior sanctuary of the new religion of the English be set up, not in his dominions, the dominions of the senior king, but in the territory of his neighbour and nephew, Sæberht, king of Essex, would not, one feels, have amused Æthelberht. Sæberht followed his uncle’s lead, being converted in 604, when London received Augustine’s helper Mellitus as bishop. Justus, another of the Roman mission, was already installed as bishop in the Romano-British walled city at Rochester. With three centres established in less than a decade and influence established north of the Thames, Pope Gregory’s plans seemed to be advancing well. In a letter to the pope, Augustine had been able to boast of no fewer than 10,000 converts in one baptism campaign.

On a visit to the court of Kent, Rædwald of the East Angles next became a Christian. It was a celebrity coup for the fledgling Roman Christian settlement in England. As the grave goods unearthed at the Sutton Hoo ship burial demonstrate, the warrior aristocracy of the East Angles and their lord represented a realm of immense wealth. But the conversion may have been no more than a gesture of political deference to his overlord. Returning to his people,
Rædwald permitted the practice of the pagan cult to continue, even sanctioning pagan and Christian altars in the same temple. Nevertheless Bede would list him as one of the holders of the
imperium.
The truth is Rædwald was to play a decisive role in the history of Christianity in Bede’s world when he killed Æthelfrith of Bernicia at the Battle of the River Idle in 616 and so opened the way for Edwin, who would become Northumbria’s first Christian king. The victory on the Idle left Rædwald the most powerful ruler in the England of his day, yet he receives scant treatment in Bede’s history, written a century later. In fact he presented Bede, historian of God’s providential purpose, with various problems. Praiseworthy as the patron of Edwin and as an early convert to Christianity himself, the East Anglian king proved ambivalent towards that religion and, worse still, evidently reverted to paganism. Yet a later kinswoman of his, the saintly Æthelfryth, founder of the abbey at Ely, was for a time the queen of Ecgfrith of Bernicia.

The transition from pagan to Christian made for complicated allegiances and was never smooth. There would be a momentary lapse back to the old ways even in Kent. Canterbury’s first archbishop was dead by the year 610. Thanks to him, Kent was to be the home of the metropolitan see of the church in England. He was succeeded by Laurentius.

Kent: the first English government in action

Kent was unusual in many ways. Alone among the intruder kingdoms, it took its name from the local pre-invasion population, the Cantwara. Local customs here would prove especially tenacious: the longest lasting, ‘gavelkind’, an almost specifically Kentish form of land-tenure, was not abolished until 1926.
⁸
In Kent, local community divisions were different. Elsewhere there were ‘hundreds’ and, later, ‘wapentakes’; Kent was divided into ‘lathes’ apparently centred on royal manors or vills. The principal seat of the king of Kent was
in a city, Canterbury (Cantwaraburh); it was in close secular contact with the Continent – archaeology has unearthed a profusion of Frankish luxury articles in Kentish graves of the sixth century; and now Æthelberht was to break entirely new ground for an English ruler: the promulgation of a written law code. It still survives.

He enacted these ‘judgements’ we are told: (a) for his people, (b) following the example of the Romans, (c) with the counsel of his wise men and (d) had them written in the English language. They were still being observed, Bede wrote, in the early 700s. This all seems straightforward enough, but almost every item on Bede’s list presents problems. It is unlikely that ‘the Romans’ referred to are the lawgivers of ancient imperial Rome herself. Perhaps the allusion is to the great code produced a generation earlier at Constantinople by the Emperor Justinian. It seems more likely, however, that Bede has in mind the Germanic successors to Rome in the West. The Byzantines looked down on them as semibarbarians; Bede, a compatriot so to speak, would see in these opulent Germanic courts, with their garish trappings of would-be Latin gravitas, fit heirs to the Caesars, or at least to the Roman state in Gaul.

For us, the most startling element of Æthelberht’s innovation appears if we reverse the order of Bede’s priorities. Though they follow the pattern of the Alaman and Bavarian customary codes on the Continent, it was, so far as we know, the first time a European vernacular was used for a legal code – by a matter of centuries. The other Germanic codes, like the Visigothic, Lombard or Burgundian, were in Latin.

Talking of Æthelberht’s code, the editors of one edition of Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History
comment ‘These Kentish laws in their original form seem to be the earliest documents written down in the English language.’
⁹
If they are right, it is reasonable to assume that the research and development needed to create a written vehicle for English was initiated by King Æthelberht, and for this purpose. The Italian church scholars now at his court presumably led the project, but they themselves had no need of it in their own work – after all, the language of the Church and of their service books, being in Latin, already used the Latin alphabet.

Why did Æthelberht issue his code? Personal prestige was presumably part of the point. Following the example of other European barbarian kings, he had decided, wrote H.M. Wallace Hadrill, ‘to have his people’s customs written down and attributed to himself’.
¹⁰
But, since the Continental laws were in Latin, if these Kentish laws were actually the traditional customs of the people, the use of English rather than Latin surely made it harder for the king and his council to claim authorship. Unsatisfactory as it may be to attribute honourable intentions to any executive or legislature, however ancient, one must consider it a possibility that the king of Kent and his council may have been aiming, in however limited a way, at ‘open government’.