695-756: After Theodore - The Church Established

Once Archbishop Theodore had established the Church of Rome as a cultural absolute for the English, any lingering controversy could end and England could find its saints and shrines. We have already noted how retiring kings (perhaps saving themselves from a grisly end as power slipped away from them) became monks or found themselves migrating to Rome - Cenred of Mercia in 704 (in Rome by the next year) and Ine of Wessex who died in Rome in 726 being two examples. Aristocrats were also active in founding new establishments - Ine of Wessex's sister, Cuthburg, founded a religious community at Wimborne in 718 - so the integration of Church and aristocracy is becoming ever more close in the half century before Offa.

Wilfrid outlives Theodore by almost two decades in 709 but without any essential change to the settlement created by his old rival. He is buried at Ripon, presumably reconciled to the facts of the matter. He is succeeded at Ripon by his chaplain Acca in 710. Former John Archbishop of York (retired 717), reckoned to be a kind man, dies in retirement at Beverley (a monastery he had founded) in 721, showing that monasticism was also a means of retiring from the cares of office.

Theodore's successor at Canterbury, Brihtwold (there are many variants of the name), died in 731 after a very long incumbency (he had been appointed in 693) and is succeeded by Tatwine who has a very short incumbency (he dies in 734). Another short incumbency for Nothelm (735-739) is succeeded by another long one for Cuthbert (740-760).

This was not a conciliar period until 746-7 with the first Council of Clovesho (the first of several quasi-synods in England). The location is unclear but was probably in Mercia and it involved not only religious figures but political figures such as kings and aristocrats. Some have claimed this to be the earliest version of an English Parliament not without justification and the Clovesho Councils were to meet periodically through the second half of the eighth century and first quarter of the ninth. As far as we can gather this was primarily a dispute-resolving, administrative and advisory body to kings and shows again how the Church was becoming essential to the construction of the rules by which society would be ordered. Religious matters remained a matter for the Church alone but it seems that kings and nobles welcomed this intervention by the spiritual wing of the system as a means of securing power at the cost of some civilised restraint of their own impulses.

As for saints and shrines, at the beginning of the period (695), Abbess Sexburga, sister of Saint Etheldreda (Aethelthryth) founder of the convent at Ely in 673, places her sister's body in its Abbey Church and so created a shrine. To this day, there is a Catholic St. Etheldreda's Church in Ely Place in London - the oldest Catholic Church in London - in a building that was the town chapel of the powerful Bishops of Ely in the later Middle Ages. Another Fenland saint is Guthlac of Crowland who died at his hermitage in 714 on which site Crowland Abbey was to be founded only two years later. Six churches alone are dedicated to him in Lincolnshire today and others in nearby counties.

The Lindisfarne Gospels date from this period (late Seventh Century). England is culturally starting the process of matching the experience of the Irish Celtic Church and contributing to a later Charlemagnic Europe with its fine illuminated scholarship, piety toward spiritual exemplars and monasticism.  This is also the period of Bede's important source The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731 four years before his death in 735. His death marks the closing of a spectacular flowering of Northumbrian art and scholarship.

There is a defintely a humanising influence going on here even if the lot of the peasantry was probably only marginally improved - the real improvement (a betterment felt across Europe) was the Church's ability to defuse the sheer violence of a warlord society by imposing at least some restraint on barbarism, building a society of rules without the requirement for terror (an alternative model to Chinese legalism of which the West knew nothing thankfully), permitting a non-violent way out for yesterday's men and allowing scholars to retire in moderate security. The best of them tried to show respect to the poor and educate the brightest for the new administration - not quite mandarins in the making perhaps but still providers of rule-making and administrative services to rulers who had been little more than pirates and thugs not so long ago.