664-694: Imperial Structures and the English Church

I suggest we avoid talk of eclipses and plagues, comets and bad luck for prelates and monarchs and their alleged connection - this was an age of simple ideas about cause and effect and so an age of magical thinking. The religious life of the second half of the seventh century has to be partly seen in this context but also in terms of chance and necessity and rational struggles of power using irrational beliefs as tools and weapons - no different from today in fact. Bishops and archbishops could die of the plague as Tuda, Bishop of Lindisfarne, and Deusdedit, Archbishop of Canterbury, did in 664, without any suggestion that they had incurred God's wrath. Bad things happen to 'good people'. Deusdedit's designated successor, Wigheard, the candidate of Oswiu of Northumbria and Ecgberht and the 'local man', also dies on arriving in Rome to be consecrated in 667. Deusdedit was to be canonised in the popular record.

Pope Vitalian, in the event, consecrated Theodore of Tarsus, a Byzantine Greek, in the following year. He arrived at Canterbury in 668 to undertake a programme of reforms which appear to have resulted in conflict with the incumbent Bishop Wilfrid of York who may here have represented a particular Northumbrian and localist interest within the English Church. The reforms are definitely 'Roman' - an orderly and strict system of parishes and a centralised episcopal structure, an imperial model that would be mimicked in due course by the secular state. These culminate in the Synod of Hertford in 672 which clarified the principle that bishops were sovereign in their territory but only in their territory, a principle that we can see working today in the conventions surrounding parliamentary constituencies, as well as greater control over the freedom of movement of the lower clergy. Theodore also brings with him a new appreciation for the culture of the Graeco-Roman world.

The conflict between Wilfrid, another example of a Northumbrian nobleman making himself part of the clerical structure and becoming a saint on the back off it, and Theodore is the defining conflict of the period. It is yet another proxy for what is becoming the defining motif of our history, one which is played out right up until the present day with the struggle over whether one empire, the United Kingdom, is to be subsumed within another, the bureaucratic, orderly but undemocratic European Union, heir to Rome. Bede says that Wigheard had not only the endorsement of Northumbria and Kent but that of all the clergy and the people, implying a national consensus around him. Although it is postulated that Oswiu was keen not to have Wilfrid as Archbishop in Canterbury, this still implies that Vitalian, in choosing his reforming associate Theodore, was coming up against some degree of nativist resistance to 'imperialism'.

This conflict between Wilfrid and Theodore is complex, too complex for our short summary of history and it involves a great deal of 'amour propre' and position-taking as well as church and royal factionalism, involving such notables as Hilda of Whitby. Wilfrid seems to have been quite good at rubbing people up the wrong way. Initially, there is no problem. Theodore deposes Ceadda Bishop of Northumbria in order to instal Ceadda's rival Wilfrid in the See (669) which is immense though soon to be whittled down in size. This is the point at which the claims of what will be the Archbishopric of York to equal status to and non-interference by the Archbishopric of Canterbury may be traced though this process does not really end until the Norman Conquest. Ceadda (also to be canonised as St. Chad after his death in 672)) was moved to the role of bishop to the relatively recently pagan Mercians.

Wilfrid gets driven out of his See in 678 by King Egfrith of Northumbria as part of a factional war of tortuous complexity. Off he goes to Rome to appeal the expulsion by way of the Frisian Kingdom based in Utrecht where he converted some nobles, at least for a while, but not the court. Wilfrid then makes it to Rome in 679. Pope Agatho orders his restoration (to no immediate effect) in a Synod but forces a compromise that substantially backs Theodore's diocesan reforms. He returns to England in 680 with a deed for the new monastery in Peterborough, which would have been pleasing to Ethelred of Mercia, and vestments and ornaments for the new church at Hexham. Regardless of the documentation, Wilfrid is virtually ignored and goes on his travels around the Kingdom concentrating on converting the recalcitrant South Saxons and Jutes of the Isle of Wight under the aegis of Caedwalla of Wessex. Theodore consecrates a reluctant Cuthbert as Bishop of Hexham (685) at the command of Egfrith who remains deeply opposed to Wilfrid, a situation only rectified by the death of the King at the Battle of Nectansmere in that year. Cuthbert is clearly uninterested in the job, retires, falls ill and dies in his monastic cell in 687. In the meantime, Wilfrid becomes reconciled with Theodore and he is allowed to resume his position in Northumbria albeit with his power somewhat reduced.

Eventually, in 690, Theodore, the last true Roman Archbishop of Canterbury dies and is buried at Canterbury, his legacy being the imposition of an imperial structure stronger than any individual incumbent and capable of being one day transferred as a 'methodology' to secular rule. Our history is often taught as if, when the Romans left in the early fifth century, Rome was no longer important to Britain. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although the secular imperial structure had gone, the Church of Rome ensured the reinstitution of its authoritarian imperial system and culture. Much of British history is about the creative tension between European or continental discipline and the more anarchic sense of local liberty and sovereignty of the natives - once again, the issue to be decided in a Referendum in 2017 or earlier.  If the ideology is different - replace God-fearing obscurantism with an attempted liberal totalitarianism - the system is much the same. Theodore was to be succeeeded by Brihtwold, Abbot of Reculver, the first native Anglo-Saxon to be Archbishop, in 692/3 who seems to have been a bit of a nonentity. It is almost as if the Church could now feel comfortable that a native could be given charge of a structure bigger than he could ever be. The story of the constraints made on free-born Englishmen by the forces of discipline and order are captured in that event alone.

Meanwhile, there were complicated issues of heresy and orthodoxy that had seemed to require the commitment to the imperial model in the eyes of Rome, with the Celtic Church remaining in the background as an issue only recently resolved. There is, for example, a new Synod (680) presided over by Theodore at Hatfield arranged largely to deal with the Syriac monothelite controversy. I suppose we may ask nowadays whether we really care about these obscure disputes - in this case about whether Christ had one will and two natures - but they mattered at the time and were intimately related to power struggles within and outside the Church. The matter exercised the Papacy considerably as a strategic threat from the East and, like all heresies, it had to be extirpated wherever it popped up its head.

The Crypt at Hexham Abbey [1]

This is also an era in which the Church becomes an ever more effective patron of building and the arts, in the North in particular, and so of propaganda. Hexham Abbey built by Wilfrid (beginning in 674) and using stones plundered from Hadrian's Wall could seat 2,000. Women also became more important participants in the Church - Aethelthryth, a female saint, founds Ely in 673. Hilda of Whitby who dies in 680 is consulted by kings and known for her wisdom. And more bishoprics are founded as order is put in place - Winchester in 674 for example.

And we should not forget our source for much of what we know about the period - the Venerable Bede, author of the 'Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation' (to be completed in 731), who was born in 673 and will report on the preceding centuries in the first part of the eighth century.

[1] The stones are from Corbridge and are recycled roman building material - photographic source: http://janusatthedoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/crypt-beneath-church-hexham-abbey.html