645-663:The Anglicisation of British Christianity

What we see now in English history is little more than perpetual conflict between relatively small Germanic states seeking overlordship in Southern Britain or seeking merely to survive, with the Church both tool and asset but one with powerful interests of its own. The three big players in the game are going to be Weseex, Mercia and Northumbria. Penda of Mercia drives Cenwalh of Wessex from his kingdom around 645, although nearly all dates are obscure at this time, yet Cenwalh is back in power to consecrate the precursor to the Cathedral in Winchester and found its Bishopric some time after 648.

Interestingly, Cenwalh arranges for the Bishop to be a Saxon having "grown weary of [Agilbert, the bishop of Dorchester's] barbarous tongue" suggesting a new phase for the Church in England, one of replacing foreign clerics with native clerics more in tune with the needs of courts handling people who spoke Anglo-Saxon dialects as their first language. The Church is still, however, an international corporation. Executives get moved around - the Frank Agilbert is neatly translated to become Bishop of Paris in 600. If there is a 'nationalisation' process, it seems not to be restricted to England. One suspects that Rome was having issues with Roman manpower as it expanded rapidly into barbarian territory.

A native 'spiritual sensibility' is also in evidence. On August 31st, 651, as Bishop Aidan is dying in the parish church at Bamburgh, a shepherd in the Lammermuir Hills, Cuthbert, sees a vision of angels which, connecting with the death of Aidan, he interprets as a call to religious service. Again, this 'shepherd' is not all he appears to be - he was almost certainly of noble origins and raised in the environs of Lindisfarne's sister Scottish establishment Melrose Abbey. This future patron saint of Northern England bears all the hall marks of a celebrity-driven propaganda operation but the outcome is still that the Church is no longer quite so reliant on outsiders for its maintenance.

The Church's symbiosis with royal power is beginning to nationalise it: in return for gaining royal protection, it gets political influence but it has to concede that the men who will run it in England will be of the same class and blood origins as their political allies. Though answerable to Rome, these men will interpret Roman ways according to the political, cultural and social needs of the local States. It is all very finely balanced. The unbalancing of the relationship will lead to periodic crises, excommunications and splits over the next thousand years that will lead ultimately to the breach with Rome of Henry VIII.

With exquisite timing in this context, Honorius, the aged Archbishop of Canterbury who had arrived to help introduce Christianity to Kent in 597 and was a Roman by birth, died in September 653. His successor in 655 was an Anglo-Saxon given the name Deusdedit, a transitional figure, a Romanised native, repeating the patterns of control of the old Roman Empire whose continuities have perhaps been underestimated.

Loyal natives can often be better governors of imperial systems than imposed foreigners after the first generation of charismatic leaders has passed - one might say that the entrepreneurs are being replaced by the managers and that the corporation is maturing. The fact that all this was achieved in only half a century suggests the degree to which the Church had provided some things very important to the small English states in their struggles with each other - legitimacy, administrative support, psychological management of the subject peoples and charismatic magical power.

Meanwhile kings come and go. Oswine of Deira dies in August 651 and is succeeded by Ethelwald son of Oswald. Anna, King of East Anglia dies in 654 and is succeeded by Aethelhere. The dynastic details are for antiquarians, The real action though is taking place in Middle England where Mercia's recent dominance comes under threat. Penda, the pagan mainstay of Mercia, is defeated and killed, along with a considerable number of allied royalty and nobles including Aethelhere of East Anglia (succeeded by Ethelwold), at the Battle of Winweaed (November 15th, 654).

Oswiu, King of Bernicia, brother of Oswald of Northumbria, seizes Mercia and holds it for three years as King. He follows up with the seizure of Deira in 655 and so becomes bretwalda. Peada of Mercia, brother of Penda, struggles on briefly but is murdered in 656 and succeeded by Wulfhere, son of Penda, who was king from 657 to 675. Wulfhere becomes bretwalda of at least the Southern English but not of the Northumbrians. It may not be unimportant here that Wulfhere converts to Christainity and abandons the ways of his father (Peada had also converted). His southern bretwalda role involved some support for his allies and attempts to clean up the anomalies existing on the borders between small states - in 661 he invaded the Jutish Isle of Wight (the Jutes seem to have been a problem for the dominant Saxons) and handed it over to Ethelwold, King of Sussex.

Nor should we forget the continued presence of the Cymry. King Cenwalh of Wessex is in battle with them at Penselwood in 658. Yet the real action is taking place in more prosperous England. The Cymry are largely an excluded side show to English state formation. The Church knows where power lies in that context. The monastery at Whitby is founded in 657 and an Augustinian foundation appears at Canterbury in 600.

Whitby becomes central to the history of British Christianity because it is here, in 663, that Oswiu of Northumbria holds the Synod of Whitby, ostensibly to deal with calendrical issues. In fact, it is an assertion of the dominance of Roman Christianity over Celtic Christianity. It sets the cultural seal on two hundred years of Saxon victories over the Cymry and half a century of the Roman Christianisation of the victors in the post-Roman struggle for Southern Britain. Rome is back but not as it was - not as 'top dog' but as devious and powerful junior partner to brute barbarian power.

625-644: Christianisation and Kingship

The last two posts gave a picture of two processes operating in tandem - the re-christianisation of England, now the appropriate name for the land of the Angles and Saxons who had only appeared in force in less than two centuries, and the transformation of the gangster warlord into a 'King'. The sacralisation of the King by the Church is the next natural step. It happens surprisingly quickly for all the reasons we gave in the previous posting.

Raedwald of East Anglia, overlord or bretwalda of England, who probably dies in or before 625 and is associated with the Sutton Hoo burial, is definitely pagan but the 'national' trend is now towards christianisation. The key statelet here is not Kent but Northumbria to whom the overlordship returns under Edwin. The story has it that Eomer, a West Saxon assassin, attempted but failed to kill Edwin. Paulinus, the seasoned missionary who became Bishop of Northumbria in 625, is promised (626) that his new-born daughter will be given to the christian god if Paulinus' prayers result in the defeat of the West Saxons. Cwichelm of Wessex is accordingly defeated and Wessex subjected to Edwin as bretwalda. Edwin's life had already been saved by Paulinus in exile in 616 so a certain personal bond is already in place, a fact made clearer when Paulinus is forced to leave the Kingdom on Edwin's death and return to Rochester (as Bishop) in Kent (633) where he was to die in 644. The baptism of Paulinus' daughter on Whit Sunday in York is a marker that christianity was now imperially associated with at least one bretwalda. The attempt to link overlordship with the christian faith is to be a key war aim of the Roman interest for the next few decades. The next year (Easter 627) Edwin himself is baptised into the Church.

The tide is never certain for Roman christianity though. Edwin's overlordship is clearly resented by some and in 622 or 633, at the Battle of Hatfield Chase, Edwin is defeated and killed by an alliance of the pagan Penda of Mercia and one of the last of the great Cymry leaders of the age, Cadwallon ap Cadfan, King of Gwynedd which was centred on North West Wales. Not only Edwin but his son Osfrith were killed in battle. His other son Eadfrith not long after. Penda becomes the dominant figure in England for the next thirteen years so we have a period when matters were in the balance between christianity and paganism. The pagans almost certainly did not reckon on the statecraft and diplomatic skills of the christian leadership.

Paulinus had fled Northumbria with good reason because Edwin's successor, Osric of Deira, reverted to paganism as did Eanfrith of Bernicia although their reigns lasted only a year. However, a christian heir to Northumbria, Oswald of Bernicia (later venerated by the Church as a saint), not only took the reins of power in 633 but added the previous year to his reign as if the pagans had never existed. Oswald becomes bretwalda in 634 as far as the christian faction is concerned. Northumbria becomes a safe haven for christianity once again after only a very brief gap and, as we shall see, Northumbrian royal legitimacy and the Church soon become intimately connected. It is at this time that christianised nobles such as Wilfred (later to be the key spokesperson for Rome at the Synod of Whitby in 664) are beginning to be educated at court to become potential clerical administrators in a much more formal way. Christian clerics of noble descent soon become as much a part of the machinery of the State in England as eunuchs in the Chinese empire, neutered by custom rather than physical force.

The christianisation of Northumbria is not just a court matter. An important initiative was the founding of the monastery at Lindisfarne (636) by Aidan, the Irish monk. Aidan also seems to have been influential in mediating between the Roman and Celtic branches of the faith. Lindisfarne was deliberately placed within sight of Oswald's Bamburgh Castle. Church and State are becoming separate but equal, each buttressing the claims of the other.

The Church's response to defeat elsewhere was to keep on trucking. It had Kent. It clearly had the dominant line of royalty in Northumbria and it could appeal to any Saxon Kingdom that disliked the tutelage of Mercia. It now mounted a clever game in which it would support a bretwalda that was christian (of the Roman persuasion) but also sought to appeal to those oppressed by a bretwalda when he was not - realpolitik has always been part of the clerical skill set. The obvious target was the hitherto powerful and ambitious but also divided West Saxons. Birinus, a Frank, was sent into Wessex as a missionary , successfuly converting the West Saxons to Roman christianity under King Cynegils. Cynegils was not King of all the West Saxons but rather someone who aspired to be from his smaller base in the upper Thames valley covering the modern counties of Somerset, northern Wiltshire, southern Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and western Berkshire. Birinus baptised Cynegils in 635 with Oswald of Northumbria as his sponsor (Oswald also married Cynegils' daughter) so we are already seeing the lineaments of a strategy of encirclement of Mercia by Roman (not Celtic) christianity. Clearly, the Church of Rome in Kent was heavily diplomatically engaged in bringing these two Kingdoms into alliance. Birinus becomes the first Bishop of Dorchester in that same year.

The death of Eadbald of Kent could have removed a lynchpin from this rapidly growing system of Roman influence but his son Earconbehrt proved even more firmly christian than his father - according to Bede, he commanded that pagan cult images be destroyed and that Lent be observed. This was a step further than any other Saxon King had taken to date. It showed confidence that paganism was no longer politically powerful enough to present a threat to the court. Until this point, kings were happy to see the court and nobility flourish as christian while the people continued with their 'pagan superstitions'. Court and the christian element amongst the masses and traders worked around and then crushed the world of the pagan settlers. English christian totalitarian rule proves a creeping paralysis from this day on. It is an object lesson in what happens when a people loses its power and ceases to be vigilant. Religion creeps in not only from below but is insisted upon from above.

Another marker is the canonisation of Oswald of Northumbria after his death at the hands of Penda in 641 (probably in battle at or near Oswestry). The King is sacralised by the Church and another step is taken towards the symbiotic total system of Church and King that would dominate the English people right up until the nineteenth century and even beyond. The political culture that was put in place in these few years would define the English in one way or another for another 1,300. On the other hand, the Cymry were allies of the pagans so what we are seeing is an alliance of Rome and the proto-English State against dissident christians and traditionalist pagans rather than simply a matter of conflict between christian salvation and pagan honour. The Church's problem now was how to pull the Celtic christians back into its orbit and encircle the English pagans as a prelude to their extinction but this is for the future.

Two new Anglo-Saxon kings, Oswiu in Northumbria (641) and Cenwalh in Wessex (643) change little. Both men were christians man and boy in what seems to be an unquestioning way as if their identity as kings were now bound up with the faith. However, there is one change to note - Northumbria splits into its two constituents in 644, Deira and Bernicia. The details are not of interest to us since Northumbria comes together again within a decade but it tells us something of the complexity of state formation in the first half of the seventh century - nothing could be taken for granted and the kings and clerics of the era were very well aware of that fact. A unitary state could still fragment and the Church was thus trying to corral many small warlord kingdoms as a federated system under Rome. Rome was no longer a military but a 'spiritual' (that is, a cultural) power. There was no objection to any future unification of military and administrative power (quite the contrary) so long as it was ultimately culturally answerable to the Papacy. Since the Church increasingly provided the administrators of this proto-state system, and drew part of the warrior nobility into its ambit as those administrators, the process was slowly moving towards the 'global' reinstatement of the Constantinian arrangements that had collapsed when the Roman State collapsed.