§ 2. Conversion of the English to Christianity. 597–681

The last years of the sixth century were marked by a change hardly less important than the first settlement of the Teutonic tribes in Britain. The Christian faith, which the English had hitherto despised or passed by unheeded as the creed of the conquered Welsh, was now set before them by a special mission from the city which still commanded the reverence of all Western Europe. Kent, under its King Æthelberht, who then held the rank of Bretwalda, became the first Christian |597.| kingdom, and Canterbury became the first Christian city, the spiritual metropolis of the English nation. To the vanquished Welsh the conquering Saxons and Angles |Controversies between the Roman and Scottish parties.| had never listened; but no sooner had the Roman missionaries begun their work than another Christian element was brought in from the North, at the hands of the already converted Picts and Scots. Sectarian differences divided the two parties, and led to controversies which threatened to tear the infant Church in pieces. Christian Kings and kingdoms apostatized; heathen Kings overthrew the champions of the new faith |Christianity makes its way in England without violence.| in battle; but, amidst all these fluctuations, Christianity gradually but steadily made its way. And in no part of the world did Christianity make its way in a more honourable manner. We nowhere read of any of those persecutions, those conversions at the point of the sword, which disgraced the proselytizing zeal of the Frankish and Scandinavian apostles of the faith. Of the first Christian prince in England, it is distinctly told us that, while still a heathen, he hindered none of his subjects from embracing Christianity, and that, after he was himself converted, he constrained none to forsake their ancient faith. In less than a century all the English kingdoms had fully accepted Christianity, and they had distinctly preferred its Roman to its Scottish form. |Conversion of Sussex, the last heathen part of Britain. 681| Before the end of the seventh century, the spiritual conquest of Britain was completed by the entrance of the South-Saxons into the fold of Christ; and, in the course of the eighth century, the insular Teutons showed themselves the most zealous of missionaries for the |English missionaries on the Continent.| conversion of those of their continental brethren who still remained in heathen darkness. Bishoprics were gradually founded, the limits of each diocese commonly answering to those of a kingdom or principality. The |597.| supremacy of Kent at the beginning of the conversion, |627.| the supremacy of Northumberland at the stage when Christianity was first preached to the northern English, is still shown to this day in the metropolitan position of Canterbury, the city of the Bretwalda Æthelberht, and of York, the city of the Bretwalda Eadwine. The land was speedily covered with churches and monasteries, the distinction between regulars and seculars being, during the missionary period, not very accurately drawn. Our forefathers soon acquired a fair share of the learning of the age, and the first two centuries after the conversion form a brilliant period in our ecclesiastical history, one which seems the more brilliant from the contrast with the time of renewed heathenism and darkness, which, in a large portion of Britain, was to follow it.

The conversion of the English to Christianity at once altered their whole position in the world. Hitherto our history had been almost wholly insular; our heathen forefathers had had but little to do, either in war or in peace, with any nations beyond their own four seas. We hear little of any connexion being kept up between the Angles and Saxons who were settled in Britain, and their kinsfolk |Instances of connexion with the Franks in Gaul.| who abode in their older land. The little intercourse that we read of with the mainland seems to be wholly with the Franks who now bore rule on the opposite coast of Gaul. Englishmen seem once, in the sixth century, to have found their way to the Imperial court, but it was in company with the ambassadors of a Frankish prince, who at least tried to represent himself as the over-lord of Britain. One instance of connexion between Britain and Gaul may have had some indirect effect in promoting the work of conversion. English Kings then, and long after, commonly intermarried with English women, the daughters either of other English princes or of their own nobles. But the Bretwalda Æthelberht, before the landing of Augustine, was already married to a Frankish princess, who retained her Christian religion in his heathen court. Such a fact is chiefly remarkable for its strangeness; yet it points to a considerable amount of intercourse between Kent and the Franks of Paris at this particular moment. Still, up to the end of the sixth century, Britain, as a whole, was cut off from the rest of the world. It was a heathen and barbarous island, where the Christian faith was professed only by an obscure remnant, which, in some remote corners beyond the reach of the invaders, still retained a form of Christianity which, after all, was not the orthodoxy of the Old or of the New Rome. It was the conversion of our forefathers which brought England for the first time, not only within the pale of the Christian Church, but within the pale of the general political society of Europe. But our insular position, combined with the events of our earlier history, was not without its effect on the peculiar character of |England the first strictly national Church in the West.| Christianity as established in England. England was the first great territorial conquest of the spiritual power, beyond the limits of the Roman Empire, beyond the influence of Greek and Roman civilization. Italy, Spain, Gaul, Africa, the Greek East and the remoter Churches of doubtful loyalty and orthodoxy, were all either actually under the sway of Cæsar, or retained distinct traces of the recent times when they had been so. When Æthelberht received baptism, the political sway of Rome still reached from the Ocean to the Euphrates, and the language of Rome was the one civilized speech from the Ocean to the Hadriatic. Strictly national Churches existed only in those lands of the further East, where the religious and the political loyalty of Syrians and Egyptians was already equally doubtful, and which were destined to fall away at the first touch of the victorious Saracen. In England, |Error of not employing the English language in public worship.| alone in the West, a purely national Church arose. One great error indeed was committed; the vernacular tongue did not become the language of public worship. The mistake was natural. It had occurred to no man to translate the Latin services, drawn up at a time when Latin was the universal language of the West, into those provincial dialects, the parents of the future Romance tongues, which were already growing up in Gaul and Spain. We should as soon think now of translating the Prayer-Book into the dialects of Somerset or Yorkshire. Led thus to look on Latin as the one tongue of worship, as well as of literature and government, Augustine and his successors failed to see that Teutonic England stood in a wholly different position from Romanized Gaul and Spain. They failed to see that the same reasons which required that men should pray in Latin at Rome required that they should pray in English at Canterbury. The error was pardonable, but in its effects it was great. Still, though England had not vernacular services, she soon began to form a vernacular literature, sacred and profane, poetical and historical, to which no other nation of the West can supply a parallel. The English Church, reverencing Rome, but not slavishly bowing down to her, grew up with a distinctly national character, and gradually infused its influence into all the feelings and habits of the English people. By the end of the seventh century, the independent, insular, Teutonic Church had become one of the brightest lights of the Christian firmament.

In short, the introduction of Christianity completely changed the position of the English nation both within its own island and towards the rest of the world. From this time the amount of intercourse with other nations steadily increased, and the change of religion had also a most |Practical effect of Christianity.| important effect within the island itself. The morality of the Gospel had a direct influence upon the politics of the age. The evangelical precepts of peace and love did not put an end to war, they did not put an end to aggressive conquest, but they distinctly humanized the way in which |The wars with the Welsh no longer wars of extermination.| war was carried on. From this time forth the never-ending wars with the Welsh cease to be wars of extermination. The heathen English had been satisfied with nothing short of the destruction or expulsion of their enemies; the Christian English thought it enough to |Advance of Wessex.| reduce them to political subjection. This is clearly marked in the advance of Wessex towards the West. Twenty |Conquests of Ceawlin. 577–584.| years before the coming of Augustine, Ceawlin, the West-Saxon Bretwalda, had won the great battle of Deorham; he had taken the cities of Bath, Gloucester, and Cirencester; he had then carried his arms northward, and in his northern march he had destroyed the Roman city of Uriconium. These northern conquests, as we have seen, were in a certain sense temporary; the districts overrun by Ceawlin beyond the Avon, like the other West-Saxon possessions north of the Thames, ceased for ever to be Welsh, but they did not become for ever West-Saxon. But the land between the Avon and the Axe, the northern part of modern Somerset, became an abiding part of the West-Saxon realm. This was the last heathen conquest, the last exterminating conquest, waged by the West-Saxons against the Britons. During a space of three hundred years, the process of West-Saxon conquest |Further advances of the West-Saxons. 652–926.| still went on; step by step the English frontier advanced from the Axe to the Parret, from the Parret to the Tamar; Taunton at one stage, Exeter at another, were border fortresses against the Welsh enemy; step by step the old Cornish kingdom shrank up before the conquerors; till at last no portion of land south of the Bristol Channel was subject to a British sovereign. This was conquest; it was, no doubt, fearful and desolating conquest; but it was no longer conquest which offered only the dreadful alternatives of death, banishment, or personal slavery. The Christian Welsh could now sit down as subjects of the |In these later wars the Welsh are allowed to become West-Saxon subjects.| Christian Saxon. The Welshman was acknowledged as a man and a citizen; he was put under the protection of the law; he could hold landed property; his blood had its price, and his oath had its ascertained value. The value set on his life and on his oath shows that he was not yet looked on as the equal of the conquering race; but the Welshman within the West-Saxon border was no longer a wild beast, an enemy, or a slave, but a fellow-Christian living under the King’s peace. There can be no doubt that the great peninsula stretching from the Axe to the Land’s End was, and still is, largely inhabited by men who are only naturalized Englishmen, descendants of the old Welsh inhabitants, who gradually lost their distinctive language and were merged in the general mass of their |Celtic element still remaining in the western shires of Wessex.| conquerors. In fact, the extinction of the Cornish language in modern Cornwall within comparatively recent times was only the last stage of a process which began with the conquests of Cenwealh in the seventh century. The Celtic element can be traced from the Axe, the last heathen frontier, to the extremity of Cornwall, of course increasing in amount as we reach the lands which were more recently conquered and therefore less perfectly Teutonized. Devonshire is less Celtic than Cornwall, and Somerset is less Celtic than Devonshire, but not one of those three shires can be called a pure Teutonic land like Kent or Norfolk. The same rule would doubtless apply to those less accurately recorded conquests by which the Mercian Kings extended their dominion from the Severn to the modern boundaries of Wales. We have now everywhere passed the age of extermination, and have entered on the age marked by the comparatively harmless process of political conquest.

FOR THE DELEGATES OF THE CLARENDON PRESS.