560-624: The Return of Christian Influence

Christianity can never said to have been eliminated from Britain during the extended time of troubles between the final failure of Rome to guarantee Britain's safety in 446 and the decision of Pope Gregory to send an official Papal mission to the then-most significant Anglo-Saxon Kingdom, Kent, in 596. During that 150 years, Christianity survived and even extended its range to the 'Gaels' beyond the Cymry. It undoubtedly lingered as the religion of the oppressed under Anglo-Saxon rule but without any significant help or leadership from Rome.

There were now several political considerations from the Roman Church's perspective and that of the Anglo-Saxon Kings, no doubt calculated with all the consummate cynicism of such pragmatic realists. First, the continuation of a religion of resistance amongst the Cymri without Papal authority threatened to turn into something that might became heretical, uncontrollable and an alternative focus of loyalty for the unhappy Christians in the North West of Europe. Second, the Papacy had done a great deal to re-establish itself as the cement for Kingship with those barbarians with pretensions to be heirs to Rome generally or locally on the Continent. Its support would be very valuable to rising warlords who wanted both to be respected overseas and command authority over their own chaotic and proud elites and peoples. Third, and connected to the first, stable rule required that the masses who had been conquered accept the new situation and their new masters and lose hope of a return to a former situation. The Church could certainly help with pacifying those Catholic Cymri practising the religion of the oppressed under the yoke of pagan warlordism. Fourth, pagan settlers were a lot less easier to handle with their allegiance to gods of place and struggle than Christians who were taught to seek their salvation in the world beyond through an ethos of passivity and compliance. All that was required was for warlords to aspire to become kings of small settled statelets and the Church would find a ready audience for their 'moral' message. Basically, the Cymri were about to be suckered - and so were the bulk of ordinary Saxon settlers - in a classic deal (we cannot say 'of the devil') between two powerful forces working towards order

But we should not forget those beyond the defeated Cymri. The Church was making separate inroads (with all the prestige of a passing civilisation) amongst those Celtic 'barbarians' who had never been truly conquered by Rome and who were seeking to up their own game as plunderers, the Irish and Scots. A significant figure in this respect is Columba who, based in Ireland, which had received a significant Roman missionary presence in the 430s under Palladius and Patrick, had moved, in 563, to Iona in Scotland to found an important monastery in the Scots Kingdom of Dal Riata. By 574, he is anointing Aedan mac Gebrain as King, showing the important political function of senior religious figures. It is hard not to see the history of Christianity in the British Isles, as it is elsewhere, as primarily the psychological business of creating cultural power for military and economic figures in return for shared control over the population and a slice of the action.

Dal Riata was important as an 'overlord' of the Western Isles, reaching across to the Irish mainland. Columba became Aedan's adviser. In 375, there is a Council Meeting at Druim Ceat in what is now County Londonderry obscure in intent but which seems to have involved a negotiation which weakened the hold of Dal Riata's Irish overlords without recourse to further war. The Church's backing seems to have given a sub-King significant advantage in those negotiations and it entered into its new historical role as consigliere to the bosses amongst the barbarians. Columba died in 597 just as Augustine was settling into Canterbury and within days pilgrims are arriving at Iona, indicating another facet of Catholicism, the popular devotion of items connected to its saints (an early example of the cult of relics and what is now the sale room prices that might be given for Elvis' toothbrush). This popular appeal will constrain Kings as the only power that the masses have left in an age of iron and slavery. It is probably true that the Church dies in proportion to Kings being no longer necessary or powerful.

Towards the end of the sixth century, Christianity has thus already established a magical and cultural role amongst the Irish and Scots (perhaps merely supplanting functionally that of the druidic priests) that the Pope now wants to have accepted by the much more challenging Germanic barbarians. The Church has made enormous headway amongst those barbarians who had been awed by the monuments and culture of Rome on the Continent. It was logical that Gregory should seek to extend that process by sending Augustine to the capital of Kent in 596, probably still the most culturally Roman-friendly of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms and no longer a frontier state. Augustine arrives the next year to persuade Aethelbert of Kent to embrace Catholicism which means if he does so, so does much of Southern England. Augustine becomes the first Archbishop of Canterbury in 597 (although he had probably already been ordained Bishop by the Frankish Church). Catholicism thus returns to Britain. The mission is a success. The Pope sends more resources in 601 in the form of assistants, bringing vital ritual tools (the whole business being not just one of claiming magic but of showing magic to be done). There is then a surge of pastoral activity - he revives the Bishopric of York (there is a strong institutional memory of the old provincial administrative structures within the Roman Church) and appoints Paulinus to it and consecrates two more assistants, Mellitus and Justus, as bishops for the East Saxons in 604. Mellitus gets Bishop of London and Justus Bishop of Rochester so we can see the mission steadily moving into enemy pagan territory.

This is not without its risks. The pagan Aethelfrith of Northumbria in that same year (604) had allegedly slaughtered 200 priests who, like their druidic forebears, had turned up at the battle of Chester to pray for the Cymric forces. We can see the challenge - on one side of the Island, the Church is promising the same sort of support for power granted to Aedan mac Gebrain only a few years before in Scotland to the sort of people who probably believed that Christians were employing their magical, political and religious powers against them on the other side of the island. The question was going to be whether the Church in Rome could guarantee the neutralisation of the magical power employed against the Saxons (not that it appeared to do the Cymry any good) by making it equally available to them and whether that magical power was more politically useful and efficacious than traditional pagan ways. Whether Scrocmail the priest who was one of the fifty who escaped the massacre at Chester would have appreciated Augustine's dealing with the enemy is not recorded by history.

Aethelbert of Kent is converted to catholicism. His son reverts to paganism on acquiring the throne (as we noted in the last posting) but reverts back quite quickly suggesting that there are powerful political motives for abandoning paganism in Kent by this date (616). Augustine's successor, Archbishop Laurentius, who oversees this hiccup, dies in 619. He is succeeded by Mellitus but London reverts to paganism on his departure which suggests that something is enforcing the religion and that its power waxes and wanes with the degree to which religious observance can be 'insisted upon'. History of course is with Christian power. The succession of Archbishops continues with Honorius (note the Latin name) in 624. As with the kings, we will not bother ourselves with episcopal successions, only being interested in those clerical figures who mark major shifts and changes in culture and power. By the end of our period, it is clear that, although Christianity may have only a formal foothold in just one Anglo-Saxon Kingdom and is the ramshackle religion of the defeated everywhere else and those who always were outside the Roman pale, it is to be taken seriously once again in British politics after 150 years in the wilderness.

560-624: The Kingdoms Establish Themselves

A king's leadership is not, however, always uncontested. Ceawlin himself seems to have been ousted, probably by Ceol, but he may just as likely have been killed at another significant battle, also obscure, with Aethelbert of Kent reversing the position of 568 in 591and replacing Ceawlin as capo di tutti capi or rather 'bretwalda' or overlord of the Anglo-Saxons, at least in Southern England.

The violence continues into the seventh century as you would expect (the arrival and early history of Christianity is covered in the next posting). Two kingdoms, Bernicia, which we have mentioned, and Deira merge to become a major force in the North of England called Northumbria under Aethelfrith who becomes a dominant figure in wars against the Cymry, with a great deciding battle at Chester in 607. He dies in 617 at the hands of Raedwald, King of East Anglia, another Anglo-Saxon Kingdom we have taken somewhat for granted in this series. We have also taken for granted Mercia in the Midlands through which Raedwald marched with impunity to 'take out' Athelfrith. Mercia will later become very important. Who is and who is not an overlord of the English is sometimes never very clear - Aethelfrith appears to have been one so Raedwald defeating and killing him in battle naturally made him his successor. Or did it? Although defeated by Raedwald, Aethelfrith is succeeded by a strong figure in Edwin under whom Northumbrian power continues to increase culturally and politically and he is widely seen as the natural 'bretwalda'.

What is actually going on is a story of personal and dynastic rivalries, greed and lust for power, of which Game of Thrones is merely the fictional version. Most of the detail is of no interest to us. What we are interested in are the grand themes and it is to be noted here that by the time we get to struggles between Athelfrith and Raedwald in the 610s, positions on Christianity and paganism have become part of the mix. For example, it is a material political fact that the son of Aethelberht of Kent, Eadbald, reverts to paganism for a brief period in 616 but is soon 'persuaded' back into the fold because it is becoming clear that Christian clerical support is an asset and loss of that support is a problem. The re-emergence of Christianity is what we have to turn to next.

The period closes with a number of kingdoms vying for leadership of Anglo-Saxon England. Traditionally these will come to be termed a heptarchy of four major players (Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria) and three small 'original' settler Kingdoms (Kent, Sussex and Wessex) but this belies the complexity of the situation with borders shifting, mergers (as with Bernicia and Deira into Northumbria), shifting power bases (with the South Eastern Kingdoms becoming less important over time in favour of the geographically bigger 'frontier' states) and some small settlement kingdoms simply becoming subsumed into others, such as Middlesex as contested territory. There are also viable small Cymric states surviving in the South West, Wales proper and Cumbria and, of course, there are Pictish and Scottish proto-states to the North.