645-663:The Anglicisation of British Christianity

What we see now in English history is little more than perpetual conflict between relatively small Germanic states seeking overlordship in Southern Britain or seeking merely to survive, with the Church both tool and asset but one with powerful interests of its own. The three big players in the game are going to be Weseex, Mercia and Northumbria. Penda of Mercia drives Cenwalh of Wessex from his kingdom around 645, although nearly all dates are obscure at this time, yet Cenwalh is back in power to consecrate the precursor to the Cathedral in Winchester and found its Bishopric some time after 648.

Interestingly, Cenwalh arranges for the Bishop to be a Saxon having "grown weary of [Agilbert, the bishop of Dorchester's] barbarous tongue" suggesting a new phase for the Church in England, one of replacing foreign clerics with native clerics more in tune with the needs of courts handling people who spoke Anglo-Saxon dialects as their first language. The Church is still, however, an international corporation. Executives get moved around - the Frank Agilbert is neatly translated to become Bishop of Paris in 600. If there is a 'nationalisation' process, it seems not to be restricted to England. One suspects that Rome was having issues with Roman manpower as it expanded rapidly into barbarian territory.

A native 'spiritual sensibility' is also in evidence. On August 31st, 651, as Bishop Aidan is dying in the parish church at Bamburgh, a shepherd in the Lammermuir Hills, Cuthbert, sees a vision of angels which, connecting with the death of Aidan, he interprets as a call to religious service. Again, this 'shepherd' is not all he appears to be - he was almost certainly of noble origins and raised in the environs of Lindisfarne's sister Scottish establishment Melrose Abbey. This future patron saint of Northern England bears all the hall marks of a celebrity-driven propaganda operation but the outcome is still that the Church is no longer quite so reliant on outsiders for its maintenance.

The Church's symbiosis with royal power is beginning to nationalise it: in return for gaining royal protection, it gets political influence but it has to concede that the men who will run it in England will be of the same class and blood origins as their political allies. Though answerable to Rome, these men will interpret Roman ways according to the political, cultural and social needs of the local States. It is all very finely balanced. The unbalancing of the relationship will lead to periodic crises, excommunications and splits over the next thousand years that will lead ultimately to the breach with Rome of Henry VIII.

With exquisite timing in this context, Honorius, the aged Archbishop of Canterbury who had arrived to help introduce Christianity to Kent in 597 and was a Roman by birth, died in September 653. His successor in 655 was an Anglo-Saxon given the name Deusdedit, a transitional figure, a Romanised native, repeating the patterns of control of the old Roman Empire whose continuities have perhaps been underestimated.

Loyal natives can often be better governors of imperial systems than imposed foreigners after the first generation of charismatic leaders has passed - one might say that the entrepreneurs are being replaced by the managers and that the corporation is maturing. The fact that all this was achieved in only half a century suggests the degree to which the Church had provided some things very important to the small English states in their struggles with each other - legitimacy, administrative support, psychological management of the subject peoples and charismatic magical power.

Meanwhile kings come and go. Oswine of Deira dies in August 651 and is succeeded by Ethelwald son of Oswald. Anna, King of East Anglia dies in 654 and is succeeded by Aethelhere. The dynastic details are for antiquarians, The real action though is taking place in Middle England where Mercia's recent dominance comes under threat. Penda, the pagan mainstay of Mercia, is defeated and killed, along with a considerable number of allied royalty and nobles including Aethelhere of East Anglia (succeeded by Ethelwold), at the Battle of Winweaed (November 15th, 654).

Oswiu, King of Bernicia, brother of Oswald of Northumbria, seizes Mercia and holds it for three years as King. He follows up with the seizure of Deira in 655 and so becomes bretwalda. Peada of Mercia, brother of Penda, struggles on briefly but is murdered in 656 and succeeded by Wulfhere, son of Penda, who was king from 657 to 675. Wulfhere becomes bretwalda of at least the Southern English but not of the Northumbrians. It may not be unimportant here that Wulfhere converts to Christainity and abandons the ways of his father (Peada had also converted). His southern bretwalda role involved some support for his allies and attempts to clean up the anomalies existing on the borders between small states - in 661 he invaded the Jutish Isle of Wight (the Jutes seem to have been a problem for the dominant Saxons) and handed it over to Ethelwold, King of Sussex.

Nor should we forget the continued presence of the Cymry. King Cenwalh of Wessex is in battle with them at Penselwood in 658. Yet the real action is taking place in more prosperous England. The Cymry are largely an excluded side show to English state formation. The Church knows where power lies in that context. The monastery at Whitby is founded in 657 and an Augustinian foundation appears at Canterbury in 600.

Whitby becomes central to the history of British Christianity because it is here, in 663, that Oswiu of Northumbria holds the Synod of Whitby, ostensibly to deal with calendrical issues. In fact, it is an assertion of the dominance of Roman Christianity over Celtic Christianity. It sets the cultural seal on two hundred years of Saxon victories over the Cymry and half a century of the Roman Christianisation of the victors in the post-Roman struggle for Southern Britain. Rome is back but not as it was - not as 'top dog' but as devious and powerful junior partner to brute barbarian power.