Chapter 7
The Renewed English Church
Perhaps the reputation of the kingdom of Kent was spreading on the Continent and this aroused the interest of the future Pope Gregory. He would have visualised it like other contemporary kingdoms in Europe with some of the old Roman structures still in place. The concept of a kingdom would have been familiar to him since kingdoms had already been established in Italy but although we may describe the Ostrogothic kingdom or, in Spain, the Visigothic as barbarian, to Romans long familiarity with people from outside the Empire achieving high status inside would have eroded any such dichotomy. Whether Gregory was aware of the strong hold the Celtic Church had in Britain we cannot tell nor, if he did, whether he thought that it still owed allegiance to Rome.
But it is likely that he had a false impression of the situation in Britain when as Pope he despatched St Augustine and his mission to the Kentish court at Canterbury. The story told by Bede is that the Pope saw young English boys in the slave market in Rome and this gave him the idea. Actually as suggested above he had had it in his mind for years and, when younger, had wanted himself to undertake the mission. But no doubt he had now heard of the Christian Frankish queen in Canterbury and saw this as an opportunity to set the project in motion. Augustine settled in the Kentish court and had some success in proselytising. King Ethelbert himself became a Christian as a result.
One of the side effects of the re-injection of Christianity into Britain was an enthusiasm for Mediterranean things like dress- and hair-styles, jewellery, masonry building and stained glass reflected most clearly in church building while Latin enjoyed a fresh revival. The seventh century was also a prosperous time for the ruling classes as demonstrated at Sutton Hoo with wealth being accumulated from taxes, tribute, loot/piracy and trade particularly in wool and textiles. Like the Celtic Church, the Roman missionaries helped to re-kindle Latin literacy and also introduced the style of handwriting current in Rome which, until the eighth century, was used to produce the books written in Canterbury and other monasteries in the south.
A Roman Benedictine monastery was built just outside Canterbury, substantial remains of which can still be seen, and after a second mission had arrived from Rome with a pallium for Augustine appointing him as the first Archbishop of Canterbury, the construction of the first Canterbury Cathedral was begun. However, beyond the kingdom of Kent, things were not going so well. Augustine was no diplomat and his haughty manner strained relations with the Celtic Church.
A second mission from Rome reinforcing Augustine’s party arrived in 601 with instructions that demonstrated how out of touch Gregory was with events and conditions in Britain. The Pope wrote as though Britain was still being governed as a Roman province with the old civitates cities still extant so that they could form the basis of the diocesan organisation as they did on the Continent. He named London and York, the two chief cities of Roman Britain, as the seats of two archbishoprics. But the best that could be done was to establish two dioceses, one in London in the Essex kingdom and the other at Rochester in northern Kent.
In fact, the mission depended for its success on the support of the royal families whose areas of influence did not necessarily correspond with the boundaries of old civitates. London, at this time, was poorly populated, as excavations have proved, while York, abandoned by Paulinus after the death of Edwin, was not able to welcome an archbishop until 735. In the Celtic church there were bishops but they were also monks, exercising their spiritual duties under the authority of their abbots and they had few episcopal functions and no diocese that they could call their own. They could not, even if the Pope had called upon them to do so, have taken up the administrative roles of Roman bishops.
Raedwald, king of the East Angles, seems to have accepted ‘temporary’ baptism at the Kentish court but he turned out to be a backslider and so too were the royal dynasties in Essex and Kent after the death of Sabert and Ethelbert and his wife and it was only in the north that progress was made since the daughter of the Kentish monarch had married Edwin, the Northumbrian king. She took with her Paulinus, one of Augustine’s original mission, who was consecrated bishop for the purpose. Edwin himself, although he allowed his infant daughter to be baptised, hesitated to take the plunge into the Roman Church humself until he had debated the matter with his councillors, so making it clear that his conversion would be the result of a solely political decision. The upshot was that he and they were baptised in a wooden church in York on the eve of Easter Day in 627 and Paulinus was free to set about his missionary activity. Legend states that he moved to the royal estate at Yeavering and for thirty-six days never ceased instructing the people who came from neighbouring settlements and baptizing them in the River Glen.
But, after the king was killed in battle in 632, Paulinus took the queen, her infant daughter and other members of the royal family by sea to refuge in Kent and the progress of conversion was halted in the north. But after a year of confusion Oswald was accepted as king in Northumbria. He had been in exile in Scotland and there he was received into the Celtic church. On his accession he requested the monastery of Iona for help in restoring Christianity and Aidan brought a company of monks to establish a Celtic monastery on the island of Lindisfarne. During the next twenty years more Scottish monks came from Iona to found more monasteries and build more churches. In this way Celtic Christianity was firmly established in Northumberland and the Roman variety ousted.
However, further south, Roman Christianity was reviving. In East Anglia, Sigeberht, brother of the late king, returned from exile where he had been living in a Frankish monastery, and requested a missionary bishop to establish a see at Dunwich and convert the population. Wessex was introduced to Roman Christianity by Birinus who established a see at Dorchester-on-Thames in 635, leaving, in south-eastern England, only the Isle of Wight and Sussex outside the sphere of the Eternal City.
During its long period of isolation from Rome, the Celtic Church had developed independently and, as a result, had followed a path that in some ways was quite different and described by Rome as schismatic. Its striking missionary activities had spread the divergent tradition over a large part of Europe and it riled the Papacy that these congregations were not ready to recognise its authority. For its part, the Celtic Church realised that there were benefits that Rome was able to offer so there was room for compromise and reconciliation beyond the arid debates about the right method of calculating the date of Easter, the shape of the tonsure and the method of baptism but the path to conformity was a thorny one..
The authoritative Augustine had not been the man to bring reconciliation about. It was the Northumbrian king rather than a Roman churchman who took the bit between his teeth and tackled the problem without the help of emissaries from Rome. He was Osuiu, Oswald’s successor on the Northumbrian throne and strong supporter of the Celtic church. Osuiu’s Synod at Whitby in 663 followed some years of bickering with his queen, the young girl that Paulinus had taken for safety to Kent and who had returned to marry the king but retain her Roman ways. For some time two Easters were celebrated at the Northumbrian court and two Lenten fasts. Under the guidance of the charismatic priest, Wilfred, the result of the debate was an edict stating that the ways of Rome should be followed, but it took two generations for it to be fully adopted outside Northumbria.
Re-organisation was necessary and this was taken in hand in 669 by Wilfred, now bishop of Ripon, Theodore of Tarsus, newly appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury and Benedict Biscop, a Northumbrian noble who had become a monk. Theodore transferred Wilfred to York and increased the numbers of bishops, summoned the first English synod and reorganised the dioceses, putting them on a modern footing. Wilfrid, although a friend of long-standing, proved to be a thorn in his flesh, but was instrumental in forwarding the spread of the church in Mercia and Sussex. In western Britain, Theodore’s reforms allowed work to go forward to bring the Celtic Church into conformity with his new framework and English bishoprics were established in places that had once been Celtic monasteries. Whithorn in south-west Scotland is an example where excavations have discovered wattle structures belonging to the earliest foundation of St Ninian below the wooden buildings of the later Roman monastery. Eventually, conformity was achieved but not in Wales until 768.
Hexham Abbey has a substantial crypt of the period but this is the only architectural fragment belonging to a basilican church built on a grand scale as early as the seventh century remaining to us and we are told by a visitor of the time that it was decorated with pictures and colours ‘of great and wonderful variety’. We have descriptions of some other churches like that at York which was restored by Wilfred who was responsible for repairing the roof, glazing the windows and having the walls whitewashed.
Benedict Biscop was a native Northumbrian aristocratic who was educated on the Continent, spending some time in Rome and two years in the island monastery of Lérins, off the coast of southern France. When he returned to Northumbria he founded two monasteries, one at Wear (now Monkwearmouth) in 674 and eight years later, another at Jarrow. These houses were to be splendid, modelled after those he had known on the Continent. Accordingly, he sent to Rome for masons and craftsmen to make the stained glass. Later still, he returned to Rome to fetch books, paintings and instructors in Roman ritual and chanting. It is still possible to see something of the churches of the monasteries he created. The lower half of the tower and part of the nave at Monkwearmouth and the chancel at Jarrow still stand where you can see a fragment of the stained glass those craftsmen created, discovered in excavation, and now set into a tiny window. It seems that none of the craftsmen stayed in England to esdtablish their craft here after completing their contracts for in 758 Abbot Cuthbert who was refurbishing the church at Durham still had to send to the Continent to the Archbishop of Mainz for glassmakers. Incidentally, in the same letter he adds another request ‘It would please me also to have a zither-player who can play on the zither, which we call ‘rottć’ for I have a zither and do not know how to play it’.
Biscop made an immense contribution to the English church. Apart from his architecture, he was responsible for re-introducing into Britain the organised continental culture, in the form of literature, pictures and church music that it had been without since the decline of the Romano-British church in the mid-fifth century. But oral literature and folk music was already part of British common culture – bards, responsible for both, entertained at gatherings both high and low -- and one cannot believe that the creative urge to make something that could be described as art had not always existed in Britain but we have little knowledge of it apart from later on with Caedmon (c680), Bede’s Death-Song and The Leiden Riddle and other scraps but this native culture was not taken up by the Church who instead preferred to import its own.
It is only when the Church was active and staffed with educated people with an interest in culture that these arts, in the service, of the church, were encouraged and preserved. However, the early Church was suspicious of music and its power of rousing emotions. During services chanting and raising voices to the glory of God were fine but music could do more, arousing martial feelings, provoking dance, and encouraging erotic feelings or other responses that were not always respectable. But a few monks did set some secular music down on paper and preserve it.
Commonly, music in church was supplied by the human voice or voices on special days with occasional accompaniments chosen from a variety of percussive, stringed or wind instruments. The early harp was a popular choice, and we have evidence of lyres from the Prittlewell, Taplow and the Sutton Hoo burials. Every one with a pretence of culture was expected to be able accompany themselves on the instrument, although there were some, like Bede’s Caedmon, who had to leave the company before the harp was passed to him. Whistles and panpipes are sometimes found on archaeological excavations while horns were early used for war and hunting though whether they were provided with finger holes earlier than the tenth century and played in other situations is not yet clear. Drums and bells were certainly used early on during the period but if they were played with other instruments in an ensemble without a voice or voices as the principal contributor, is not known.
Further south, some seventh-century churches were built on an expensive scale. The best-preserved is Deerhurst in Gloucestershire which became a major Christian centre during the heyday of Mercia as the leading kingdom in England. The west-front has a chamber in it which was incorporated in the later tenth-century tower in an arrangement that must have resembled the westworks of later great churches in the Rhineland.
Mynster, an Old English word, was in use at the time for a religious community church consisting of monks, a monastery in fact, and also of a group of clergy who served a particular church and lived a communal life and ministered to the local community. Recent excavations have located the site of such a community in Wales, at Llandough near Penarth in South Glamorgan which was founded in c675 and archaeologists have excavated part of its cemetery. Apparently there were several burials of Late Roman date that, if they are actually part of the cemetery and not coincidentally there, suggests a continuity which, although common on the Continent is rare in this country. In the earlier monastic graves sherds of pottery from the eastern Mediterranean are the same sort as found at Dinas Powys some two kilometres away, the llys or royal court of the kingdom of Glywysing in south-eastern Wales.
In Dyfed there is a debate about the period when people began burying their dead in churchyards instead of in open cemeteries. There is a fair sprinkling of open cliff-top cemeteries in Pembrokeshire and one at Longoar Bay near St Ishnaels has recently been excavated and produced a number of burials, one of a woman with her infant, and another, a male, covered with a stone slab bearing underneath a crudely carved sign of the cross. Radiocarbon dating for the skeletal material is around 750, suggesting that organised cemeteries there could be an eighth century development. (Channel 4 Archaeology)
| Early Roman and Celtic Christianity |
 |
| main page |
 |
| Trade with Europe |
 |
