940-1035: The Church and Kingship from Edgar to Cnut

The last time we gave detailed consideration to the Church was back in the middle of the Eighth Century. Since Theodore's determination to ensure that the British Church was orthodox and operated well within the Catholic sphere of influence, its position as provider of administrative skills to a succession of warlords and petty kings vying for supremacy over England had borne fruit during the era of the Heathen Danish threat in a close identification between Catholicism and the fate of the English Kings. The identification of the Church, the Kingship and the Nation to this day provides the basis for classical British Country Toryism. The seeds of the modern Conservative Party were sown in the bloody battles of the Ninth Century.

As in the period of Theodore, the age is defined by a man, Dunstan (909-988), successively Abbot of Glastonbury, Bishop of Worcester, Bishop of London (957) and Archbishop of Canterbury (960). He refounded Glastonbury as a monastic house in 940 in his early thirties but his importance lies in the theatre of Edgar of Wessex's coronation as 'Emperor of Britain' in Bath on May 11th, 973. Zadok the Priest was sung for the first time (an institution that lasts to this day in Royal Coronation ceremonies). The coronation was followed by a second act in which eight sub-kings of Britain and Wales pledged fealty to Edgar at Chester and then symbolically rowed him on the River Dee while Edgar held the rudder.

Edgar, in fact, died the next year but the point was made - English overlordship is pre-sanctified by the Church in a complex set of ceremonies in which religious and political power are merged along Roman lines. The problem for the English Kings is that the Kingship that the Church sanctified need not necessarily be English if an alien King guaranteed Catholic cultural hegemony. The exploitation of this self interest or cynicism or realism (depending on your point of view) by Danes and Normans is part of the story of the next century.

This is also an era of foundations and so of royal patronage (the Church really does not seem to care who the patron is so long as the patronage follows through) - not only Glastonbury but Westminster Abbey (965), Crowland Abbey (c. 966), Oxford Cathedral (begun 1004) under English Kings and Gloucester Abbey (1017), Buckfast Abbey (1020), and Bury St. Edmund's (1032) under Cnut, the Dane. The original binding of Christianity and Kingship was closely linked to the external threat to the English presented by the invading Heathen Danes but the English Kings, in creating a Kingship detached from the people, also created a transferrable property.

In the first half of this period this would not have been an obvious problem. As far as English Kings, People and Church were concerned, there was one common enemy, the Heathen Dane, and the next round of raids played very much to type. From 980 the Danes return to Britain in force. They repeat the savage attacks on Northern Christianity that they perpetrated in the 790s: Iona is raided in 986, with the murder of the Abbot and six monks on the White Sands and, in 993, the Lindisfarne community is forced south to settle in 'a little church of wands and branches' in Durham.

The Danish wars of this period are for a later posting but Canterbury Cathedral was one casualty in 1012 with the then-Archbishop, Alphege captured and held at Greenwich where he was to be murdered by Danes at a drunken feast, apparently because he refused to sanction an attempt to redeem him with gold because (it is said) he did not want the English people burdened with the cost. To be charitable to the Church in its flip-flopping between ethnic Kings, there might have been merit in its intercessionary and protective role although this would have little effect on the Norman pogroms of the English North in the 1060s.

By the end of the Tenth Century, the Danes had become a complex melange of Heathens and Christians. The Danish Kings accepted Christianity, albeit at first superficially, even if their warlords were just as likely to be Pagan as not - at least until they had all smelt the way the wind was blowing. Harald Bluetooth was the first Danish King to be baptised some time in the 960s but it is clear that the raiders of the 980s had not followed his example. Naturally any Catholic acceptance of a Danish King in England would be contingent on the proven acceptance of Catholicism and the Church. By the 1010s the Church is perfectly happy to switch allegiance and give support to a Danish kingship on that basis.

Catholic approval of Cnut's overlordship of England, a valued province, is important enough that, by 1027, Cnut is making a pilgrimage to Rome to demonstrate his allegiance to the Pope in preference to his Heathen roots and those of his homeland. It is interesting in this context that not only are the later monastic foundations under Danish Kings (see above) but the new stone Bury St. Edmund's sponsored by Cnut exists to honour an East Anglian King murdered by the Great Heathen Army. Cnut also arranged in 1033 the transfer of the bones of Alphege (now a Saint) from St. Paul's Cathedral to Canterbury.

This succession of acts of homage to Catholicism must be seen in the context of the legitimacy that Cnut wished to have conferred on him by the Church in order to help rule a Kingdom that extended across a huge area of Scandinavian Europe and in which his homeland Heathens were now outnumbered by Christians. The Empire's pacification (and it is interesting to see how quickly it all fell apart after his death) required considerations not unlike those of Constantine so many centuries before. A lesson for all Early Medieval Kings has to be that the Church is only a very contingent ally: it will go where the power lies so long as power endorses the catholic vision, a strategy that would be followed with more conscious deliberation six centuries later by the Society of Jesus and may be being followed today by Pope Francis in his shift to populism. For Catholicism, the survival of the institution, the Church, is everything because it means the survival of the 'faith'.

Canterbury Cathedral in the Late Saxon Period (c. 1025) - Reconstruction by Canterbury Archaeological Trust [1]

 [1] Imaginative reconstruction of Canterbury Cathedral in the late Anglo-Saxon period (c.1025), based on archaeological and documentary evidence. Drawn by Ivan Lapper. © Canterbury Archaeological Trust Ltd.

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.