Augustine and the Roman Mission to the English

Hello, My name's Sarah,

full time the professor of church history at the University of Oxford.

And this set of lectures is about the early Anglo Saxon Church.

In this lecture,

I'm going to talk about Augustine and the Roman mission to the English.

The conversion of the pagan Germanic Anglo Saxon peoples to Christianity

from the late sixth century onwards and the establishment of a

church organisation among the English over the course of the seventh

century would have lasting consequences for the whole island of Britain.

The decision by individual kings of the separate, largely warring kingdoms

to adopt the beliefs and practises of the Christian religion

influenced every aspect of life among the Anglo Saxons.

From the process of king making

two rituals surrounding birth and death,

the new religion affected the landscape of town and countryside,

and it brought the inhabitants of the island of Britain much

closer to the culture of the rest of Western Europe.

Britain had, of course, been part of the Roman Empire,

and the population was nominally converted to Christianity when

the island lay under Roman rule and a church organisation

was set up with diocese and churches across all

the areas of Britain where the Romans held sway.

But after the withdrawal of Roman troops and the

gradual migration of Germanic peoples from the continent,

the continuation of the church may have suffered somewhat.

And when the pagan Anglo Saxons arrived,

they brought with them a very different

kind of culture and very different religious practises

before the migration.

Why we know about Anglo Saxon paganism suggests that they were.

That suggests that they had a faith that was closely tied

to their own tribal groupings and also to their landscape.

They worshipped a pantheon of many gods,

but also saw the natural world as having some spiritual force.

Their religious beliefs and practises were bound

up with their own distinctive identity.

Even so,

it seems unlikely that pagan Anglo Saxons hadn't had come into contact

with Christianity at all before the first missionaries came to these shores.

But that isn't exactly what our sources tell us.

The narratives that we have about the process by which the Anglo Saxons were

introduced to Christianity come from about 150

years after the events that they describe,

and we need to bear in mind that all our narratives are

written by Christians who have the capacity to write things down.

We have no account of what it felt like to

be introduced to Christianity from anybody speaking as a pagan.

Our main source is the venerable bead,

often described as the father of English history,

who wrote at a monastery in Northumbria in Jarrow.

In the years leading up to 7 31 Bead is a highly professional historian.

He used a dating CeCe dating events

from the incarnation, so Anna dominated dating.

He produced lots of copies of written materials in his text,

so he looks extremely professional to us.

But we need to remember, as Walter Go. For it has shown

that bead has a very clear agenda in writing.

Part of that agenda is about promoting the rightness of Christianity.

Part of it is about promoting a sense of the English,

the Anglo Saxon peoples as one united English race, united by their language,

their shared history, their law and, of course, forbid,

above all by their Christian faith.

Recent work among scholars has begun to read beads history rather differently,

setting it it in the light of what were forbid much.

The most important parts of his very large Latin written output,

the commentaries that he wrote on different books of the Bible,

as Jennifer O.

Reilly has shown, bead understood the conversion of the English is completing

the injunction that Jesus made to his disciples to

take the faith to the ends of the earth.

Beads saw Britain as an island lying at the end of the earth.

And so he read the conversion of

that island as the fulfilment of biblical prophecies

and part of beads. Argument for fostering a notion of English identity

is in order to tie this people closely to Rome,

which he portrayed as the centre of the Christian Church in the West.

As speed created a sense of the English as a distinctive people,

he did so by defining them in contradistinction to those who lived on these shores.

Already

the British,

at the very beginning of his history, Beat,

portrays the British as Christians under Roman rule.

But then he shows how they fell into

heresy and gradually moved away from their faith.

And he accused the British of adding to their other unspeakable crimes

that have never preaching the faith to the

Saxons or English who inhabited the island.

He took an unequivocably negative attitude

to British Christians for their failure to evangelise

the pagan Anglo Saxons.

They're failures properly, to calculate the date of Easter,

according to the Roman method, and a variety of other sins.

So vilified or the British in beads hands that they become,

in Alexander Murray's words, the unchosen race

and central to the argument of beads.

History as a whole is the claim that God had appointed

much worthy er, heralds of the truth, to bring the English to the faith.

Those heralds were messengers from Rome.

It was Pope Gregory the Great who decided to send missionaries to the English

bead and

another early English source a life of this pope

written at the monastery of Whitby in Yorkshire.

Both tell the same story that the pope was visiting the slave market

in Rome when he encountered

some beautiful, fair skinned young men for sale.

And so he asked the slave owner where they came from and who they were,

and he identified them with angels and thought that it would be good

if he could send people from Rome to take to this angelic race.

The faith of the Christian Church.

So Gregory chose monks from his own monastery in Rome on the

Syrian hill and appointed a man called Augustine to be their leader.

They set off overland to come to England,

travelling through Italy and then up through France,

and on their way they became a little

sceptical about whether they really wanted to go and

preach this this faith to the this barbarous

race on British shores about whom they had heard

some rather frightening stories.

But Gregory sent them letters of a vice

and encourage them on their way and eventually,

reinforced by some Frankish interpreters who would be able

to speak the barbarous tongue of the English.

Augustine and his companions landed on the coast of Kent

on what was then a small island at Thanet.

In the year 597.

The Kingdom of Kent, to which the first missionaries arrive,

was ruled by a man called Albert,

who was married to a princess of Frankish origin whose name was Bertha.

Bertha was herself a Christian and had brought a

bishop with her to count on her marriage.

A man called Lee it hard.

They worshipped in a surviving Romano British church in the city of Canterbury,

and this gives us a clear indication that although Albert had clearly contacted

the pope in Rome and asked for missionaries to be sent to him,

in fact he already had some knowledge and understanding of the Christian faith.

It may be

that his wife's family

and the Frankish kingdom had taken an interest in

trying to convert the people of Kent to Christianity.

And it may be that

other button his companions felt a little uncertain about this.

For for to accept the new faith from his frank Frankish in

laws might be also to accept their political hegemony over his rule.

Ian Wood has argued about whether there was, in fact,

a determined attempt by the Franks to extend

their power over the southern shores of England

and whether it's possible that Adelbert

turned to Rome looking for missionaries because

he did not want to accept the faith from his Frankish neighbours.

The other possibility is that he had indeed asked his

in laws for help with Evangelising his own people,

and they had failed to assist with that task, and that's why he turned to Rome.

Historians are divided on the extent of Frankish

interference in this process of the first mission

to Kent.

When Augustine and his companions first arrived and

the king heard that they had landed,

he affected to be a little bit suspicious of who they were and what they stood for.

He gave them somewhere to stay, and he arranged a formal meeting with them.

But he chose to meet them outside,

fearing that if they were to practise any magic on him,

it might be less effective in the open air than if

they met in the enclosed space of an Anglo Saxon building.

Other but was a little suspicious at

the beginning by beads account and his followers

also perhaps somewhat reluctant to forsake those beliefs

that they had held for so long.

But he gave the missionaries a dwelling place in his chief city of Canterbury

and

gradually gave them the opportunity to preach to his people.

Beat presents the missionaries as direct heirs of the

apostles of the early church in many ways,

as Roger Ray has argued model modelling his narrative on

the account given in the acts of the apostles.

The way of life that Augustine and his companions followed was

closely modelled on that of the apostles of the early church,

and it was through the example that they gave of Christian life

and devotion that many were persuaded to convert to the new faith.

So by Christmas of that first year 597,

Pope Gregory could write triumphantly to the patriarch of

Alexandria and say Augustine had baptised 10,000 Christians that Christmas

in the kingdom of Kent.

There are some apparent contradictions in this narrative.

We might remember that he told us that Augustine and

his companions were monks from Gregory's own monastery in Rome,

if they really were monks devoted to the enclosed, contemplative life.

What are they doing engaged in Mission?

This is a question will be coming back to in one of these later lectures.

But it is, in fact, central to the mission to the Anglo Saxons

that it is always closely associated with monasticism.

Any preconceived ideas that we might have about the

separation of monastic life from engagement in active evangelisation

and pastoral work simply doesn't work for the early Anglo Saxon church,

and it's important to abandon those ideas.

Augustine worked by starting at the royal court,

persuading the king and his followers and then hoping that the

faith might trickle down to the rest of the population.

This top down method of conversion is characteristic of the Roman mission and is

used as the missionaries spread their work outside Kent to other parts of England.

Men who'd come with Augustine and others whom

Gregory sent to force their efforts took the

took

the story of the Gospel

into Western Kent,

establishing a new base at Rochester and then on among Anglo Saxon peoples.

Diane Speed has described the way he talks about this as almost a travel

log that he takes us on a journey up the east coast of England,

first to London and the Kingdom of the East Saxons,

where a church is established there,

then on into East Anglia and then on up the coast and into the kingdom of Northumbria.

A missionary called Poor Linus is sent to take the faith to Edwin,

King of Northumbria Edwin, having married the daughter of Albert of Kent.

So you can see a similar process to the way that Albert had a Christian wife.

His Christian daughter then goes and marries a pagan king

in Northumbria and poor Linus went with her as

a bishop to take the faith to that people

and Beat gives a long and extremely detailed narrative

of how it was that Edwin came to choose

the new faith. It's the most detailed of all his conversion narratives.

A whole series of combinations came together

to persuade Edwin

that this was the faith that he should follow.

But although ultimately it may have been the king's decision,

he went out of his way to consult with members of his court and be provided a long,

detailed account of a set piece council at

which the high priest of the Northumbrian people,

a man called Koike,

talked about why he had come to understand the worthlessness

of the pagan faith that he'd so longer espoused.

And a layman who his name, we never know,

gives a very vivid story about how he understands from

imagining the flight of a sparrow through the hall.

How the thing it is that Christianity can

most give to the English is an understanding of

the nature of what will happen to people after death.

The promise of an afterlife is something to be held onto,

so be provides a narrative that suggests that the first

phase of mission to the Anglo Saxons led from Rome,

was enormously successful.

But for all that optimism,

we may have some cause to rethink whether the lasting success of the

Augustinian mission was quite as significant as bead might have us believe,

and that will be the subject of the next of these lectures.