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.
Showing posts with label Bede. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bede. Show all posts
Friday, 11 December 2015
Friday, 23 October 2015
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.
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
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] |
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
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