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Chapter 6

Wales and south-west Britain

Roman Christianity was adopted in the Roman Empire as a by-product of martial ambition and becamer an instrument of policy in the hands of the Emperor Constantine in 313 following the Edict of Milan. As a result it became more popularly accessible than other ‘mystery’ religions in the Mediterranean, spreading through the whole Empire and becoming a requirement for Roman citizens. This must have been seen at first as merely a political requirement for the socially ambitious but the growth of the hierarchical church reinforced observance if not belief in the heartland of the Empire. When the Empire collapsed in outlying areas, this seems to have brought about a partial abandonment of the faith.

Christianity had made its appearance in Britain during the Roman period as one of the various eastern faiths that percolated though the fabric of the Empire. Like most other religions it left little in the way of traces of its presence for the archaeologist. But, after the Emperor Constantine declared for Christianity and his guards decorated their shields with the chi-rho motif, the newly established church in Rome began, in the Roman fashion, to put together a hierarchy and a bureaucracy that came to be known as the Roman (Catholic) Church and, for the first time, some visible traces of the belief appear in Britain. Discoveries of hoards carry the archaeological evidence of Christianity in Roman Britain back to the mid-fourth century with the Water Newton, Cambs, hoard (British Museum) which must have been secreted during one of the periodic upsets that disturbed the tenor of life during the Romano-British period. It contains three silver bowls, the remains of a silver jug, a large silver dish, a complete jug, two silver cups, a silver strainer and about eighteen plaques. Several of these articles are marked with the chi-rho symbol (a cross formed from the Greek letter x surmounted by the Greek letter p, representing the word christos, meaning Christ) or inscriptions in Latin. The hoard is taken to represent the liturgical plate of a well-off Romano-British congregation. (Painter)

Much about the same time a hoard was deposited at Mildenhall in Suffolk (Painter) now in the British Museum which is thought to have been the property of the Roman Christian general Lupicinus who was despatched from Gaul with a mobile force to help quell a major attack by the Scots and the Picts upon the northern frontier of the British provinces A small hoard was found at Biddulph in Staffordshire during the last century consisting of four silver spoons, one engraved with the chi-rho symbol and the letters A and W, the first and last letters of the Roman alphabet, a reference to verse 7, chapter 1 one of the Revelation of St John ‘I am alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, saith the Lord.’ During the late-fourth century, silver objects were discovered outside the Roman city of Canterbury. They were two silver ingots, eleven silver spoons, a silver glass-headed pin, two gold objects and a ring. Two of the objects were marked with the chi-rho. Also, sometime during the fourth century, hoards were buried at Appleshaw near Andover in Hampshire and Icklingham in Suffolk. At Appleshaw thirty-two pewter vessels were found underneath the floor of a villa that was apparently abandoned during the later part of the century. They were all domestic, one having on its base a large chi-rho and another was a dish engraved with the Christian fish symbol. Nine pewter objects were found at Icklingham, cups, bowls and a dish bearing the engraving of a fish.

To the student these hoards suggest that those who converted to Christianity during the Romano-British period were likely to have been wealthy and people of good standing and influence in the community. Perhaps it is too strong a statement to suggest that they had adopted the faith for political reasons but it must be a suspicion. Therefore, it is likely that on the basis of the hoards alone, the student can expect to find very few Christian adherents amongst the bulk of the population but more amongst the British leaders even if their adherence had been had simply been time-serving. However, apart from the hoards, the late-Roman period evidence for Christianity is surprisingly strong, far stronger than the evidence for any other religious cult of the Romano-British period apart from that for the native Celtic faith.

Earliest places of Christian worship were not churches per se but meeting places constructed in domestic buildings. They are referred to as domus ecclesiae and abroad there are examples from as far east as Dura Europos on the Eurphrates in Iraq as well as several examples in Rome. An example in Britain is at Lullingstone villa in Kent (Meates) with Christian wall-paintings as at Dura Europos and others have been suggested at a villa at Frampton in Dorset (Perring) and in the villa at Littlecote in Wiltshire (Toynbee). They belong to the first stage of the adoption of Christianity and such wealthy venues are not likely to be found in post-villa Britain when even the few late-Roman churches built in the towns were apparently no longer available for Christian use. Romano-British buildings that may have been churches have been found in the towns of Silchester and Caerwent, under the present cathedral at Canterbury, others under the churches of St Martin’s at Colchester and in Exeter, Lincoln and St Albans. Extra-mural churches are likely to have been on the sites of Roman Christian cemeteries as they were in Italy. One, St Pancras, has been identified outside Canterbury north-east of such a cemetery. Colchester offers two possible examples outside its walls while at Icklingham in Suffolk on the site of a cemetery belonging to an unwalled settlement is another possible example.  In the case of all these buildings it is imposible to know how long they continued in active ecclesiastical use. At St Albans the earliest abbey was founded on the site of the Roman cemetery outside the town, like St Peter’s on the catacomb cemetery outside the city of Rome, but unlike St Peter’s the abbey of St Albans was founded nearly four hundred years after the cemetery fell out of use so it is argued that there must have been an earlier church or chapel on the site.

Apart from cemetery churches there appeared to have been little need for churches for communal worship outside towns in late-Roman Britain since wealthy adherents could hold ceremonies in their own homes. But bishops would certainly have wanted cathedrals and in London there is some excavated evidence of a large Roman church of cathedral size on Tower Hill that was burnt down in the fifth century. We know that there were several British bishops so there may have been cathedrals to be found in other Romano-British towns unless they are the structures already discovered in the various towns listed above.

Objects with a liturgical purpose are lead tanks about the size of a large foot-bath that have turned up in various parts of Britain and were used for the ceremony of baptism when the postulants stood or crouched in the bath naked and had water poured over them. They have been found at Bourton-on-the-Water in Gloucestershire, Burwell near Cambridge, in the River Ouse near Huntingdon, Icklingham in Suffolk, Walesby in Lincolnshire, Ashton in Northants and Wiggonholt in Sussex. Some are decorated with the chi-rho symbol and the example from Walesby is adorned with panels of figures. On the left are three robed figures, in the middle two women swathed in ‘bathing towels’ on either side of a naked woman about to submit to baptism while to the right are three more of the congregation. Does the preponderance of women mean that they were more likely to be converts? Certainly the role played by women in early Christianity was clearly not a minor one and suggests that perhaps that here was a religion in which they felt they could play important roles, unlike the pagan beliefs of the time which seem to have been dominated by men.

Further evidence of Romano-British Christianity is miscellaneous. It includes a few finger-rings, adopted by Christians to demonstrate their faith and often given as gifts to new members of the cult, some bronze bowls scratched with chi-rho symbols from Staffordshire, a pewter bowl from Caerwent, another from Welney near Cambridge and a pottery bowl from Richborough in Kent.  Other objects include a fragment of a casket from Margate in Kent, another from Tidworth in Wiltshire, a bronze stamp from the Chedworth villa in Gloucestershire and a curious lead tablet from Bath warning the addressee of the imminent arrival in the spa from Wroxeter of a ‘heretic dog’!  Presumably a Christian of the Arian persuasion! This evidence comes from sites across the south of Britain from Caerwent in South Wales to Margate in Kent and from the south coast to as far north as Lincolnshire. This may indicate the area where Romano-British Christianity operated but, of course, it does not tell us how thick the adherents were on the ground.

So, at the end of the Roman period, Christianity was the leading faith in Europe and certainly being practised in Britain. It, like the Imperial Cult it replaced throughout the Roman Empire, had become the state religion, presumably with, as in the past, its practice obligatory for Roman citizens, at least, in public but not at first expected of non-citizens who continued with their normal worship. There had been other imported religions, like Mithraism, mainly a soldier’s creed, and various other ‘mystery’ beliefs like those of Orpheus, Isis and others but they should have been abandoned after the Edit of Prohibition of 392.  It is almost certain that this edict would not have been completely effective so late in the history of the Roman Empire and in provinces as remote as Britannia since in earlier days when the Imperial Cult was the state religion people practised their own particular adherences and habit dies hard especially where religious belief is concerned.

In view of the widespread evidence of Christianity in Roman times described above, we should expect to find some archaeological traces of Christianity in the immediate post-Roman period but what we have is only documentary evidence that tells of the visits of the bishops Germanus and Severus to Britain and, further west and north in the British Isles, the activities of missionaries in Ireland and Scotland.

In Britain and elsewhere the early Roman Christian church was managed by bishops and assistant presbyters (priests) based in a city  Bishops met at intervals at councils like the council of western bishops at Arles in 314. Here three British bishops attended, one from York, one from Lincoln and the other possibly from Cirecester, the second largest Roman town in the country.  Later councils were held at Nicaea in 325 and Sardica in 347. At Rimini in 359 there were at least three British delegates who could not pay their own way and had to be supported by imperial funds, but we know little of the individuals or of their cathedrals. Important Roman church dignitaries visited Britain. In the mid-390s Bishop Victricus of Rouen came, perhaps on a monitoring trip or a visitation of inspection.   

Pelagius, a noted religious philosopher in the early fifth century, supposedly born in Britain, expounded the view that Man possessed free will and should have considerable responsibility for his own destiny. This conflicted with the views of established figures like St Augustine and Pelagius was adjudged a heretic. However, his views impressed many of his contemporaries as he did personally, being described as ‘a most monstrous great Goliath of a man’ who ‘confronts one, head-on, with his great solid neck and his fatness’. (Jerome) His teachings were vigorously denounced by various influential church leader, amongst them Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre who, with Lupus, Bishop of Troyes, in 429.came to Britain especially to fight the heresy that apparently was being taken seriously by many Christians in the provinces. Germanus made a second trip, accompanied on this occasion, by the Bishop of Trier, Severus, in 448, with the same purpose, presumably at the behest of the authorities in Rome who must have been receiving reports of the situation in Britain which they  considered as still being part of the Empire. But after this date all notices of the Church in Britain cease.

In order to account for this we must remember that Roman Christianity, like the Roman Empire itself, was in the main an urban creature and one whose organisation was based on the Roman bureaucracy – popes, cardinals and bishops reflect the Roman view of proper hieratical organisation so that after the withdrawal of the legions that exemplar disappeared and so, shortly afterwards to a large extent, did the towns themselves, the very bases on which the government of the provinces and of the Church depended  Mithraism probably finally vanished along with the army and the other imported religions withered away together with the Roman State. As Christianity had become the Imperial Cult in Britain it lost the most important reason for its existence but there were probably some Christians who still stuck to their faith, a few residents in the decaying towns and a few priests to minister to them, but they drop out of both historical and archaeological notice while, in the countryside, the pagans (from the Latin word  pagus  for country district) continued to enjoy their magic wells, sacred groves and heathen ceremonies. Nor did the leaders of post-Roman society in Britain and their descendants as far as we can tell, keep up their Christian faith except, as we have seen, in the west of Britain.

So Rome turned its attention to Ireland, proselytising for the first time outside the bounds of the erstwhile Empire. In 431 the first missionary was sent by the Pope to Ireland and this event was reinforced by the arrival of St Patrick from western Britain whose magical and fabulous career did little to found an Irish Church.. But, during the latter part of the fifth century monasticism reached the British Isles, first, as Charles Thomas suggests, in south-west Britain and south Wales and then, during the early sixth century, Ireland. It is likely that the earliest groups of monks were attracted by the reputation of solitary religious individuals who had settled in little-visited remote spots in western Britain as had happened in ‘the desert places’ of Syria and Egypt. In the same way monasticism had begun spontaneously at the end of the third century in the Egyptian desert where a number of ascetic Christians instituted various forms of strict religious discipline, some living in communities with a formulated rule of procedure, others living a solitary life in caves and cells or even on platforms on the tops of pillars where they gained an inflated reputation for holiness. Such was the charisma of these celebrities the movement spread widely. In the west sanctuaries and cells appeared on islands all round the coasts of Italy, southern Gaul and western Spain and Ireland and western Britain. The first communities would probably have crystallised round them and formed settlements in which they lived retired lives in separate huts, coming together for communal prayer and special ceremonies.

Almost all the islands around the western coast of Britain and Ireland have traditions of saints of this period. ‘Saint’ was the term used at that time of any educated cleric or religious person. In Welsh, the word Merthyr means an anchorite’s retreat while Dysart in Fife was once a desert (uncultivated countryside), the location of a cell of a religious individual or of a community and the word became synonymous with a monastic community of the early Celtic (British) church. Together with the increase in number of anchorite cells came the increase in the numbers and popularity of monasteries.

As with their early development in the east, they did not depend for their support, like the established Roman church, on an urban organisation or the official church bureaucracy recruited from the curial class. We know of charismatic religious who attracted followers to form communities to live a life based on their teachings which were formulated into monastic ‘rules’. St Dyfrig in Wales founded Henllan (the old Monastery) on the Wye, in Scotland, St Columba of Iona and St Kentigern, with his earliest church at Hoddom in Dumfriesshire are all examples of this phenomenon. When fully developed, the monasteries were quite unlike later medieval ones since they consisted of a small church or churches, individual huts for the monks, a communal dining hut, kitchen and a scriptoria, the whole surrounded by a bank known as a llan. Scriptoria were important because the monks needed to duplicate gospels and other religious books for their own use and in this way they became the bearers and disseminators of literacy and Christian culture.

Recruits to these early monasteries must have included some from the Mediterranean region with the skills of book production, more properly the codices that replaced scrolls or rotuli between the second and fourth centuries AD, a change that can be seen illustrated in a painting in the Catacombs of Domitilla in Rome (Cubicle of Verenanda) some time after 356 where both a book and a box (capsa) full of scrolls are pictured. As far as is known, the manuscripts produced in British and Irish monasteries were all codices.

Although some of these monasteries are still extent in Ireland like Sceilg Mhichel on an island off the coast of County Kerry where the beehive-shaped cells, the church and the tiny graveyard are upstanding, and Inishmurray, with stone buildings inside its llan, and to some extent in the places in Scotland mentioned above, in England and largely in Scotland, they have disappeared completely. Such sites as North Rona, nearly 60 miles north of the Butt of Lewis and Sula Sgeir to the north-west, Bardsey Island off the tip of the Caernarvonshire Peninsula, Caldy Island in South Wales, Ynys Seiriol off Anglesey and Lindisfarne are now celebrated for their lonely beauty rather than as the sites of long-vanished monasteries.

We know that Glastonbury and Abingdon were Celtic monasteries and attempts are made to locate other Celtic monastic sites in England. by the use of place-names. It is suggested that the element burh could have meant ‘monastic enclosure’ so that Malmesbury and perhaps Ramsbury, Amesbury, Westbury and Charlbury could have been monasteries. The Old English element eg could be relevant as in later monastic names like Thorney (where Westminster Abbey stands), Chertsey, Romsey, Selsey, Bardney, and Athelney. (Smith)

One of the outstanding features of the Celtic church in the British Isles was its overseas missionary activity. In Europe during the sixth and seventh centuries monks from Britain founded monasteries at Nivelles, Péronne, Meaux and Angouléme in Gaul. In the same country St Columban was responsible for Annegray, Luxeuil and Fontaines and another house further south in northern Italy, at Bobbio. In the Italian peninsula St Fridian founded Lucca and St Catuldus, a house at Taranto. The famous Swiss monastery of St Gall was the work of St Gallen who died there c630 while in Germany at Wurzburg St Kilian was martyred in 689. Celtic missionaries were active at Wilparting where a church was built (Cairns)

Back in Britain their missionary activity was pursued just as determinedly and one can imagine how difficult the task was. The native religion that had survived the Roman perioid was nature-based and bound up with the agricultural year, the course of which was supported by the Celtic gods who expected their adherents to pay them homage in return. If the worshippers did not play their parts then the sky would fall in and the whole world would return to what O’Casey described as ‘a state of chassis’. In these circumstances one can see how impossible it would be to achieve conversion without the use of compromise, to persuade the converts that Christianity was in some ways a version of the old belief with the added bonus of Eternal Life.

We can see how this was done is several ways. Holy wells existed in thousands in the British Isles and were reputed to be places where the goddess could be approached with human pleas. These wells were Christianised by being attributed to the same goddess, but now a saint - St Brigid. They are still in use today and people who are in need of healing leave a cloth token of some sort by the well and as it decays, the disability will go too. Celtic Festivals were retained under a Christian disguise: Imboic became Candlemas, (St Brigid’s Day), Lughnasadh is the Harvest Festival, Samhain was translated into All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day while Easter refers to the ancient spring festival Christianised as the time of the ascension of Christ and Christmas, the birth of Christ, was established to give Christian significance to the  ancient celebration of the winter solstice as celebrated in ancient times at Stonehenge and elsewhere as far back in time as the Bronze Age.
In the north, the Irish monks had Christianised the Pictish kingdom, Dalriada, and the Britons in Strathclyde and Galloway in south-western Scotland. A letter of St Patrick, then a bishop in Ireland, makes it clear that by about the middle of the fifth century Strathclyde was Christian. In the same letter he writes of ‘apostate Picts’ which suggests that the southern Picts had been Christian for some time. The northern Picts were converted by St Columba who established his residence at Iona around 563. and was responsible for monasteries at Rosmorkyn and Deer. In the land of the southern Picts was Whithorn, the monastery of St Ninian.

Oswald became king of Northumbria in 633 and during his reign a party of Celtic monks from Iona led by Aidan established a monastery at Lindisfarne and began a campaign of education and conversion of the kingdom that lasted for twenty years. Latin literacy was introduced and with it the Irish script which was to be used in the production of the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells. During this period, another monastery was founded at Melrose. In 653 the Scottish monks under the leadership of Sts Aidan, Finan and Colman widened their efforts to include Mercia, then ruled by Penda, and with the help of other British monks set up monasteries at Lichfield and Malmesbury in north Wiltshire. St Cedd, a native of Northumbria, became bishop in East Anglia and St Fursa, an ascetic, built a monastery inside the walls of the Saxon Shore Fort of Burgh Castle, traces of which have been found in excavation. (Johnson)

These missionary endeavours in Northumbria, Mercia and Essex suggest that the British, whose aristocratic forebears had been nominally Christian in the latter part of the Roman occupation, could not now still have been very enthusiastic members of the Roman church. No doubt there were many backsliders amongst the aristocracy in the intervening years and the vast proportion of common people had never been Christian at all and still persisted with the traditional Celtic pagan religion. But there must have been others who continued in the faith and who were ministered to by the earlier bishops of the Celtic church mentioned above for whom we have the documentary references

In the period between the end of Roman Britain and the seventh century archaeologists recognise a class of monuments described as shrines. They were structures built in timber or stone, sometimes set in an enclosure and were used by either Christians or pagans for religious purposes, although they were not dedicated to a particular deity.  Perhaps they were used by both fraternities in the same way as holy wells were. None were very large. In or by some there were hearths, some had surfaced floors and none have so far yielded finds with the exception of Yeavering where there was a pit full of animal bones. Only foundations have been found, some circular in stone (Maiden Castle, Dorset) or timber (Cannington in Somerset), some a simple rectangle  (Yeavering, Northumberland) or rectangular with annexes (Uley in Gloucestershire).  So far, eleven examples of this type of monument have been claimed. (Monument Class Descriptions, English Heritage)

Evidence of their religious purpose is sometimes difficult to accept in view of the well-known archaeological habit of claiming that anything whose purpose is not understood is probably ritual. No altars or even idols have been found associated with them. Their nearest analogies are the shrines of the Celtic Iron Age like the penannular example at Frilford in Berkshire and the rectangular one at South Cadbury in Somerset. 

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