The conversion of England to Christianity took, from first to
last, some ninety years (A.D. 597 to 686), though during the last
thirty the ancestral heathenism was only lingering on
in remote comers of the land. The original missionary
impulse came from Rome, and Augustine is rightly
Conversion of England.
regarded as the evangelist of the English; yet only
a comparatively small part of the nation owed its Christianity
directly to the mission sent out by Pope Gregory. Wessex was
won over by an independent adventurer, the Frank Birinus, who
had no connexion with the earlier arrivals in Kent. The great
kingdom of Northumbria, though its first Christian monarch
Edwin was converted by Paulinus, a disciple of Augustine, relapsed
into heathenism after his death. It was finally evangelized
from quite another quarter, by Irish missionaries brought by
King Oswald from Columba’s monastery of Iona. The church
that they founded struck root, as that of Paulinus and Edwin
had failed to do, and was not wrecked even by Oswald’s death
in battle at the hands of Penda the Mercian, the one strong
champion of heathenism that England produced. Moreover,
Penda was no sooner dead, smitten down by Oswald’s brother
Oswio at the battle of the Winwaed (A.D. 655), than his whole
kingdom eagerly accepted Christianity, and received missionaries,
Irish and Northumbrian, from the victorious Oswio. It is clear
that, unlike their king, the Mercians had no profound enthusiasm
for the old gods. Essex, which had received its first bishop
from Augustine’s hands but had relapsed into heathenism after
a few years, also owed its ultimate conversion to a Northumbrian
preacher, Cedd, whom Oswio lent to King Sigeberht after the
latter had visited his court and been baptized, hard by the
Roman wall, in 653.
Yet even in those English regions where the missionaries from Iona were the founders of the Church, the representatives of Rome were to be its organizers. In 664 the Northumbrian king Oswio, at the synod of Whitby, declared his adhesion to the Roman connexion, whether it was that he saw political advantage therein, or whether he realized the failings and weaknesses of the Celtic church, and preferred the more orderly methods of her rival. Five years later there arrived from Rome the great organizer, Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus, who bound the hitherto isolated churches of the English kingdoms into a well-compacted whole, wherein the tribal bishops paid obedience to the metropolitan at Canterbury, and met him frequently in national councils and synods. England gained a spiritual unity long ere she attained a political unity, for in these meetings, which were often attended by kings as well as by prelates, Northumbrian, West Saxon and Mercian first learnt to work together as brothers.
In a few years the English church became the pride of Western Christendom. Not merely did it produce the great band of missionaries who converted heathen Germany—Willibrord, Suidbert, Boniface and the rest—but it excelled the other national churches in learning and culture. The English church. It is but necessary to mention Bede and Alcuin. The first, as has been already said, was the one true historian who wrote during the dark time of the 7th–8th centuries; the second became the pride of the court of Charles the Great for his unrivalled scholarship. At the coming of Augustine England had been a barbarous country; a century and a half later she was more than abreast of the civilization of the rest of Europe.
But the progress toward national unity was still a slow one.
The period when the English kingdoms began to enter into the
commonwealth of Christendom, by receiving the
missionaries sent out from Rome or from Iona, practically
coincides with the period in which the occupation
Formation
of the kingdoms.
of central Britain was completed, and the kingdoms
of the conquerors assumed their final size and shape. Æthelfrith,
the last heathen among the Northumbrian kings, cut off
the Britons of the North from those of the West, by winning the
battle of Chester (A.D. 613), and occupying the land about the
mouths of the Mersey and the Dee. Cenwalh, the last monarch
who ascended the throne of Wessex unbaptized, carried the
boundaries of that kingdom into Mid-Somersetshire, where they
halted for a long space. Penda, the last heathen king of Mercia,
determined the size and strength of that state, by absorbing into
it the territories of the other Anglian kingdoms of the Midlands,
and probably also by carrying forward its western border beyond
the Severn. By the time when the smallest and most barbarous
of the Saxon states—Sussex—accepted Christianity in the year
686, the political geography of England had reached a stage from
which it was not to vary in any marked degree for some 200
years. Indeed, there was nothing accomplished in the way of
further encroachment on the Celt after 686, save Ine’s and
Cuthred’s extension of Wessex into the valleys of the Tone and
the Exe, and Offa’s slight expansion of the Mercian frontier
beyond the Severn, marked by his famous dyke. The conquests
of the Northumbrian kings in Cumbria were ephemeral; what
Oswio won was lost after the death of Ecgfrith.
That the conversion of the English to Christianity had anything to do with their slackening from the work of conquest it would be wrong to assert. Though their wars with the Welsh were not conducted with such ferocious cruelty as of old, and though (as the laws of Ine show) the Celtic inhabitants of newly-won districts were no longer exterminated, but received as the king’s subjects, yet the hatred between Welsh and English did not cease because both were now Christians. The westward advance of the invaders would have continued, if only there had remained to attract them lands as desirable as those they had already won. But the mountains of Wales and the moors of Cornwall and Cumbria did not greatly tempt the settler. Moreover, the English states, which had seldom turned their swords against each other in the 5th or the 6th centuries, were engaged during the 7th and the 8th in those endless struggles for supremacy which seem so purposeless, because the hegemony which a king of energy and genius won for his kingdom always disappeared The “Bretwaldas.” with his death. The “Bretwaldaship,” as the English seem to have called it, was the most ephemeral of dignities. This was but natural: conquest can only be enforced by the extermination of the conquered, or by their consent to amalgamate with the conquerors, or by the garrisoning of the land that has been subdued by settlers or by military posts. None of these courses were possible to a king of the 7th or 8th centuries: even in their heathen days the English were not wont to massacre their beaten kinsmen as they massacred the unfortunate Celt. After their conversion to Christianity the idea of exterminating other English tribes grew even more impossible. On the other hand, local particularism was so strong that the conquered would not, at first, consent to give up their natural independence and merge themselves in the victors. Such amalgamations became possible after a time, when many of the local royal lines died out, and unifying influences, of which a common Christianity was the most powerful, sapped the strength of tribal pride. But it is not till the 9th century that we find this phenomenon growing general. A kingdom like Kent or East Anglia, even after long subjection to a powerful overlord, rose and reasserted its independence immediately on hearing of his death. His successor had to attempt a new conquest, if he felt himself strong enough. To garrison a district that had been overrun was impossible: the military force of an English king consisted of his military household of gesiths, backed by the general levy of the tribe. The strength of Mercia or Northumbria might be mustered for a single battle, but could not supply a standing army to hold down the vanquished. The victorious king had to be content with tribute and obedience, which would cease when he died, or was beaten by a competitor for the position of Bretwalda.
In the ceaseless strife between the old English kingdoms, therefore, it was the personality of the king which was the main factor in determining the hegemony of one state over another. If in the 7th century the successive great Northumbrians—Edwin, Oswald, Oswio and Ecgfrith—were Supremacy of Northumbria. reckoned the chief monarchs of England, and exercised a widespread influence over the southern realms, yet each had to win his supremacy by his own sword; and when Edwin and Oswald fell before the savage heathen Penda, and Ecgfrith was cut off by the Picts, there was a gap of anarchy
