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CHAPTER 3
Saint Augustine Arrives in Britain
597 AD
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 to rise from his chair when they approached him. They were naturally suspicious of him and his Roman ways: this sort of behaviour convinced them that he was not to be trusted. The Christian religion had its divisions then as now. But the planning and care with which Augustine approached his task ensured that Roman ideas prospered, and eventually triumphed, in the way in which the English Church was organised. Pope Gregory was a wise guide. He knew how easy it was to lose people after they had been converted: they needed your constant attention. He urged Augustine not to abandon the old pagan rituals completely, but to incorporate them into new forms of worship. The heathen midwinter solstice, for instance, was slotted in to coincide with the birth of Christ. Old temples were consecrated as new churches, and Christianity embraced rather than uprooted the practices it intended to replace.
Early in the sixth century, long before Pope Gregory planned Augustine’s mission to England, a monk called Saint Benedict wrote a rule book for the monastic life. He described a monastery as ‘a school for the Lord’s service’, and set out the qualities a monk needed to have. ‘Idleness,’ he said, ‘is the enemy of the soul.’ Work, obedience and humility were essential to a life of devotion. Monks should own nothing and share everything. Saint Benedict told them what they should eat, what they should drink, what they should wear and when they should worship. His book became the basis upon which monasteries all over Western Europe were run: the discipline of the early Christian monks made them a powerful force capable not only of putting down deep roots in a single place, but also going out into the world as the persuasive agents of conversion. In Britain the growth of monasteries proved to be an important part of the country’s submission to the Christian message. Lindisfarne, founded by Saint Aidan in 635, became the centre for wresting Northumbria – which in those days made up the whole of the North of England – from pagan worship.
The date of Augustine’s death is not known but he seems to have died very early in the seventh century, probably around 604 AD. The English Church prospered but arguments continued about the proper days for feasts and important celebrations. In 664 AD the King of Northumbria, Oswy, called a synod at the abbey in Whitby to resolve the disputes between the Celtic and Roman Churches. The southern kingdoms of Wessex, Kent and Essex were following ritual according to the teachings of Rome, but the north preferred the Celtic way that had been taught them by Saint Columba and his missionaries from Iona. Oswy, influenced as much by a desire to form political alliances with his fellow princes in the south as he was by religious convictions, listened to the debate and pronounced in favour of Rome. ‘Peter is the guardian of the gates of Heaven, and I shall not contradict him,’ he is supposed to have said and, mindful of his own salvation, added: ‘otherwise, when I come to the gates of Heaven, he who holds the keys may not be willing to open them.’ All bishops and monasteries were brought under the authority of the Archbishop in Canterbury where Saint Augustine had built his church nearly seventy years before. The mission sent from Rome had finally triumphed and the long, troubled history of the Catholic Church in Britain had begun.
CHAPTER 4
Alfred the Great Becomes King of Wessex
871 AD
Alfred the Great was the most important Anglo-Saxon king to rule in Britain between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Norman invasion of 1066. By protecting his kingdom against conquest by the Vikings, he ensured the survival of the English language and English laws.
‘Rule Britannia!’ is one of Britain’s favourite patriotic songs. Even those who find its expressions of national superiority a little hard to take can find themselves jolted into acquiescence when it is belted out with gusto at events like the Last Night of the Proms. It has been a hit ever since it was first performed in the grounds of Cliveden House in Buckinghamshire in 1740 where it was the last, rousing number in a masque composed by Thomas Arne for the daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales. The masque tells the story of a wise, brave king who has fled from his enemies to live anonymously in exile among his people. He is visited by a spirit who tells him not to despair. He rallies, rounds up his troops and leads them to victory. The plot ends as the King’s son announces that British values have triumphed – ‘See liberty, virtue and honour appearing’ – and then comes the song that tells us ‘Britons never will be slaves.’ The masque is called Alfred.
Alfred was a good subject for Thomas Arne’s entertainment. The Prince of Wales was the centre of opposition to the King’s prime minister, Robert Walpole. He and his followers called themselves ‘patriots’ – so it suited their purposes to make a connection between their beliefs and those of Alfred, the patriot king who had saved his country from the tyranny of the Viking invaders. In the early eighteenth century, Alfred came to be seen as the perfect representation of British liberty and justice. The gardens at Stowe House in Buckinghamshire, one of the great ornaments of the English landscape, contain a ‘Temple of British Worthies’ designed in 1734 by William Kent in which King Alfred is described as the ‘mildest, justest, most beneficient of kings’. He ‘crush’d corruption, guarded liberty and was the founder of the English constitution’. He is the only king in British history to be called ‘Great’. He looms out of the Dark Ages like a beacon of safety. He is seen as an image of courage and common sense around which the British can build the continuity of their history. Without Alfred all might have been lost. He is the link to our true past.
By the beginning of the ninth century Britain was broadly divided into the Celtic areas of Wales, Scotland and Cornwall and the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. The highly successful King of Mercia, Offa, who ruled in the second half of the eighth century, had built a fortification along the length of his boundary with the Celtic tribes to the west. Offa’s Dyke effectively created the outline of the country which has been known as Wales ever since. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had emerged through battle and conquest between rival warlords. Since the middle of the seventh century they had fallen under the command of the Roman Church and their monks and clergy held enormous power. The Church was divided into parishes which supervised the needs of the people in their immediate vicinity. The abbots and monks could read and write, but many of the people to whom they preached could not. The clergy became the administrators of many aspects of everyday life, making wills and apportioning land. Superstitious kings, anxious to save their souls, were often only too happy to grant estates to the abbeys and monasteries that were growing up everywhere, and the Church was equally happy to benefit from this need for spiritual insurance. Already the very early signs of feudal society were beginning to emerge, a world in which each man had his place and was expected to keep to it. The Anglo-Saxons were farmers and woodsmen. They lived in clusters in small townships or in groups alone in the forest. They were suspicious of each other and did not take kindly to strangers. Then, into this quiet, inward-looking, agricultural world came the Vikings.
The Vikings were seafarers: the Anglo-Saxons were landsmen. Towards the end of the eighth century and into the beginning of the ninth, Viking sailors began to cross the North Sea from Denmark and Norway to loot monasteries and churches positioned on the British coast. Throughout the ninth century the Vikings fanned out all over Europe in search of treasure to steal and land to conquer and some went further afield, across the Atlantic to the coast of North America. The British invasions came mainly from Denmark. Great armies of Danes, different bands of warriors who had agreed to unite behind a single leader for the purpose of carrying out a raid, landed on the shores of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. Their numbers grew as they learned more about the prizes Britain had to offer. By the end of the ninth century they had created ‘Danelaw’, the rule of Vikings over Anglo-Saxons, across the whole of Northumbria, Mercia and most of Wessex. Only the western end of Wessex, Somerset and Devon, the furthest point in England from their Danish base, had not yet fallen under Viking control.
Alfred became King of Wessex in 871. He had the foresight to get a friend and confidant of his, Bishop Asser, to write his biography and much of what we know about him comes from this. His four elder brothers, three of whom had served as Kings of Wessex for a brief period of time, had died, perhaps killed in fights against the Danes. He was only twenty-one when he succeeded to the throne but experience of fighting the Vikings meant that he was an ideal choice to take over. He was not in good health and his natural temperament seems to have been for scholarship rather than war. He was a devout Christian.
In 878 the Danes mounted a surprise attack. Alfred was nearly captured and had to retreat into the Somerset marshes. The apocryphal story of his burning the cakes probably stems from this period: the lonely, troubled King so lost in thought while he shelters amidst his people that he forgets to watch the cakes before the fire as the farmer’s wife has told him. We have no evidence for this incident. What we do know is that this was a time of crisis for him. ‘King Alfred, with a few of his nobles and some knights and men of his household, was in great distress leading an unquiet life in the woods and marshes of Somerset,’ Bishop Asser tells us. ‘He had no means of support except what he took in frequent raids by stealth or openly from the pagans, or indeed from Christians who had submitted to pagan rule.’ From this position he managed to regroup and defeat the Danish leader, Guthrum, at Edington in Wiltshire. This decisive victory led to the Treaty of Wedmore in 878 in which Guthrum agreed to be baptised and to withdraw to behind the lines of existing Danelaw, leaving Wessex free. Alfred consolidated this victory eight years later when he recaptured London from the Vikings, and succeeded in beating them off when they attacked again in the mid-890s AD. This was a heroic achievement. The wars against the Vikings had left the Saxons demoralised and recalcitrant. They often resented royal orders and sometimes deserted to the other side. Alfred must have displayed impressive qualities of leadership to maintain an army capable of defeating the Danes. He knew he had no choice: it was the Vikings’ custom to kill the leaders of the forces they defeated in battle.
Alfred’s victory against Guthrum temporarily preserved the Anglo-Saxon tradition in a foreign world, but it might not have lasted had the victorious King not then demonstrated that he was as good a governor as he was a general. He ruled Wessex for another twenty-one years after the Treaty of Wedmore, a period in which he set about trying to improve the standards of education at his court. He recruited scholars from across the Channel where, following the civilising efforts of Charlemagne at the end of the eighth century, standards of literacy were higher. He was determined to resist the encroachments of the pagan Vikings and encouraged his clergy to improve both their teachings and writings. Most significantly he translated books from Latin into Anglo-Saxon, including Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. He also introduced the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the first record of historical events to be written in English.
Women enjoyed greater rights in Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon world than they would for many years to come.
He also turned to the administration of his kingdom laying out laws, as other Anglo-Saxon kings had done, in his Doom Book. He wanted to protect weaker members of his disheartened country pronouncing: ‘Any judgement should be even, not one judgement for the wealthy and another for the poor.’ He provided a structure for rents and taxes, regulating how much people had to pay and to whom. He also introduced a system of fines – wergild – the money to be paid by those who committed crimes. Women enjoyed greater rights in Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon world than they would for many years to come under other rulers of Britain. They could own land in their own name; there was no natural right for a first-born son to inherit; no woman could be sold or forced into marriage; and wives were entitled to divorce their husbands.
Alongside all of this Alfred strengthened his country’s defences, copying the earthwork forts which the Danish used very successfully. He built a strong administrative system and, aware of how vulnerable his kingdom had been from attacks from the sea, created a fleet. Taken together these things gave his people a primitive nationhood. Alfred knew they needed an army for protection, and laws for their administration, but he also realised that these on their own would not be enough to keep them safe forever. To survive Wessex needed things that it believed in, that were worth fighting for. Alfred wanted his people to understand the value of their own history and the importance of their Christian learning. The importance of their past was their best defence against the uncertainties of their future. The little nation of Wessex was an embryo from which grew ideas and methods which would heavily influence the future course of British history.
In 1693 an Anglo-Saxon jewel was found in Somerset, not far from Athelney where Alfred hid before his successful counterattack against the Danes. It is made of gold and enamel and covered with a piece of rock crystal. The purpose of the jewel is unclear, but some believe it to be an aestel, a book pointer, which Alfred intended to send to his bishops with his translation of Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care. Another theory is that it might have been a symbol of office for Alfred himself, or for one of his officials. The face of the jewel has a figure on it which may be Christ representing the incarnate ‘Wisdom of God’, or possibly the spirit of Sight. Whatever its use might have been, it is a beautiful relic from a time more than eleven hundred years ago when the Anglo-Saxon people of England faced the possibility of virtual extermination at the hands of a savage enemy. The jewel, now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, bears the inscription, in Anglo-Saxon: ‘Alfred ordered me to be made.’
Alfred died at the age of about fifty in 899 AD. In the biography that he commissioned from Bishop Asser he comes across almost as a saint, and succeeding ages have not demurred from that opinion of him. It was not only the eighteenth century that held him up as an icon of liberty. In the next century Charles Dickens in A Child’s History of England called him ‘the noble king … whom misfortune could not subdue, whom prosperity could not spoil, whose perseverance nothing could shake’. Today we tend to take a more objective view. Alfred’s achievements were momentous, though we probably feel they fell short of sainthood. But then a man does not need to be a saint to inspire affection or gratitude. When we think of the plight of Wessex in the second half of the ninth century and reflect on the King who rose out of the marshes of Somerset to rebuild his kingdom in such an extraordinary way, we realise that, saint or not, we owe a great deal to Alfred, the Anglo-Saxon King, and for the things he did. We might even say: ‘Alfred ordered me to be made.’
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