For Britain, as for the rest of Europe, the collapse of the Roman Empire was an extraordinary period in its history. Nearly everything it had built – its language was one exception – was eventually demolished. It would be 600 years before anything remotely comparable emerged to replace it.
Saint Augustine Arrives in Britain
In 597 AD Saint Augustine landed in Kent as a missionary from the Pope in Rome. At the same time Celtic missionaries were at work in Ireland, Scotland and the North of England. Britain’s beginnings as a Christian nation had begun.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon is one of the greatest works in British literature. Published in six volumes over twelve years between 1776 and 1788 it surveys its subject with effortless control, its elegant prose never distracted by the mass of detail it seeks to describe. In the last chapter one short sentence stands out. Summing up his colossal narrative Gibbon wrote: ‘I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.’ In other words religion – Christianity – was for him as much a cause of the collapse of the Roman Empire as was the rise of barbarism. In the main part of the book he devoted two famous chapters to Christianity in which he displayed the sceptical attitudes of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. ‘The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity,’ he wrote; ‘the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister.’ He is particularly scathing about miracles: ‘The lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, demons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church.’ There is much more in the same vein. For Gibbon, Christianity sapped the strength of the Empire and so contributed to its fall.
His views were undoubtedly harsh – the barbarians would probably have sacked Rome with or without Christianity – but in today’s secular age Gibbon’s disenchantment with organised religion must still sound appealing to a lot of people. Whether or not one takes his view, the fact remains that from the start of the seventh century to the middle of the nineteenth, the history of Britain is as much about the history of religion as anything else. Today we may have abandoned Christian teaching in favour of scientific instruction, and prefer a society built on civic concepts of liberty rather than any thoughts of a duty before God, but we were not always like that. Saint Augustine’s mission ensured that Britain was eventually drawn into Europe’s Catholic Church. The Emperors might have gone, but Rome remained a powerful force in the life of Britain.
The history of Britain is as much about the history of religion as anything else.
We know very little about the development of Christianity in Britain during its early years. Rumour has it that Joseph of Arimathea, the man who gave up his prepared tomb for the body of Jesus, visited Glastonbury many years after the Crucifixion, but there is no evidence for this. As Christianity developed, its organisation spread all through the provinces of the Roman Empire and by the middle of the second century AD had become established in Britain. The religion prospered as the Empire tottered. In the third century, when Rome was under threat from Asia as well as Northern Europe, Christians were able to evade prosecution as their persecutors turned their attention to more pressing matters. By the beginning of the fourth century they had strengthened sufficiently to become tolerated; by the end of it theirs was the official religion.
The British took on the role of independent thinking even at this very early stage of Christian development. A man called Pelagius, who came from Britain, began to teach a doctrine that denied the idea of Original Sin, and the bishops of Gaul became so worried about its effects that in the early fifth century they sent Saint Germanus to meet with British Christians and explain the errors of their ways. During his visit Germanus went to pay homage at the shrine of Saint Alban, a martyr who had been executed during one of the last crackdowns on Christianity in the middle of the third or possibly at the beginning of the fourth century.
Before Augustine reached Britain, Celtic missionaries had begun their work, starting in Ireland, which was never part of the Roman Empire. Saint Patrick, who in his youth had been captured by raiders and taken to Ireland as a slave, seems to have carried out missions around the early part or middle of the fifth century. Much later Saint Columba travelled from Ireland to Scotland, and had founded the monastery on the Western Isle of Iona by the time Saint Augustine arrived in Kent. Christianity had successfully survived the Roman withdrawal and was continuing its work among the people of Britain. Up until the end of the sixth century, however, this work had been concentrated in Celtic areas, among the people who had previously fled west and north when German and Scandinavian tribes invaded in the wake of the Romans’ departure. It had not yet penetrated the lives of these new arrivals who were masters of Britain’s central areas. The decision to try to convert them was the most important in the whole history of Christianity in Britain.
The man responsible for Augustine’s mission was Pope Gregory. The story goes that some years before, while still an abbot, he was walking in the Forum when he saw some English slave boys for sale. Intrigued by their blond hair he asked the slave owner where they came from. ‘They are Angles,’ he was told. ‘Not Angles, but angels,’ he is reported to have replied, ‘and should be co-heirs with the angels in heaven.’ On becoming Pontiff Gregory, remembering the Saxon children he had seen in the Forum, he decided to put into action a plan to convert them and chose Augustine for the task. Augustine collected a group of monks to help him and set off. They travelled from Rome, through southern France, and stopped to rest at a monastery on the island off Lérins of the coast of Provence. Here in the pleasant surroundings of the Mediterranean they began to hear frightening stories of the dangers of travelling through Gaul, as well as being treated to tales of the Saxons and their murderous ways in the untamed country to the north. They asked Gregory if they could come home, but the Pope refused. ‘It is better not to begin a good work at all, than to begin it and then turn back,’ he told them in a letter. Suitably reprimanded, the little band pressed on. They travelled up the Rhône valley, spent the winter in Paris and in 597 AD crossed the Channel landing at Thanet in Kent. Their whole expedition had been carefully planned. They chose Kent because its king, Ethelbert, whose territory extended as far north as the Humber, was married to a Christian.
The mission was a great success. Ethelbert was converted and by December of that year over 10,000 of his people had been baptised. The missionaries found the ruins of an old Romano-British church in Canterbury which they rebuilt. By the end of the seventh century it had become the spiritual headquarters of the leader of the Christian Church in England – and remains so to this day. Pope Gregory sent Augustine reinforcements from Rome and with them letters explaining how he saw Christianity spreading through the country. He laid out in considerable detail the future organisation of the Church, recommending that the country be split into two halves, north and south, as it had been in Roman times, with the northern section based in York. Augustine failed to complete this part of his task, mainly because the Celtic bishops refused to cooperate with him. Augustine had been less than tactful in his second important meeting with the Celts, refusing