| #### 3. THE CHURCH IN ROMAN BRITAIN: THE CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH, 313-735 |

| #### #### St. Gregory's labours for the Church in Gaul had borne little fruit. Owing to the increasing difficulty of communications, Spain was becoming more and more remote. In the third of the lands which had once formed the Roman West, the saint was, however, able to lay the foundations of the most papal of all extra-Roman Churches. This was in Britain, henceforward to be known as England, from the name of one of the barbarian tribes who now occupied it. The saint, in the same time that he began this far reaching work, also gave the Benedictine rule its first great mission, for it was to these monks, from his own monastery at Rome, that he entrusted the task. England, the most papal in its origin of all the Christian conquests, was also the first great stronghold of Benedictine monasticism. #### One of the most important of St. Gregory's works, from the point of view of his influence on the Catholicism of the whole Middle Ages, is undoubtedly The Dialogues. Its original object was to gather up the traditions of the saints of St. Gregory's own country, or, more exactly, to preserve the tradition of the miracles they had wrought. It was written after his election to the papacy, in the years 593-594, and his own title for it was The Miracles of the Italian Fathers. This is not the place to discuss the alleged credulity of St. Gregory as displayed in this collection, where he is so careful to give his reader the provenance of his information. It is the matter of the second book which is our concern, for this is the primary source of what we know of the life of the great monk who wrote the Benedictine rule. The pope, Gregory the Great, writing as pope the first life of St. Benedict, a panegyric of the thaumaturge and saint, giving thereby an extrinsic prestige to what of itself possessed incomparable value, laid the foundation of the later Benedictine conquest of western Europe. Whatever truth the conjecture may hold that St. Benedict wrote his rule at the bidding of a pope, it is true beyond all doubt that the later commendation of the first monk-pope was the beginning of the rule's opportunity. And the first scene of that opportunity was England. #### At the moment when England came into St. Gregory's thoughts it had ceased to be a province of the empire for a matter of nearly two centuries. Of what went on in the island in those centuries, of the details of the slow, hardly-won success of the pirates from Frisia, Jutland and the north German coast, of the breakdown of the system of Roman administration, of the relations between the newcomers and the more civilised peoples who resisted them, we know almost nothing at all. These centuries are truly, to us at least, the Dark Ages. #### Of the Church as it existed in the island in the last century of the imperial regime, that is, between Constantine's conversion in 312 and the withdrawal of the Roman garrisons in 410, we do not know much. There were bishops at London, Lincoln, York and Caerleon, for their presence is recorded at the Councils of Arles (314) and Rimini (359). Like the rest of the episcopate of the Western Church, their ecclesiastical life moved in subordination to the Roman Church, and with the majority of their brethren they fell victims to the manoeuvres of the Arian emperor, Constantius II. These few details, and the names of three martyrs, put to death in the time of Diocletian -- St. Alban at Verulam, SS. Aaron and Julius at Caerleon - - are all that has survived in literary record. #### Relations with the central government of the empire ceased in the reign of Honorius (410) and the next glimpse of the religious condition of the country is the anti-Pelagian mission of St. Germanus of Auxerre (429), at which time, it has been reasonably conjectured, the whole country was Catholic. Twenty years later came the first settlement, in the county of Kent, of the Barbarians who, for a century and a half already, had been the scourge of this most exposed province. With these invasions a period of wars began that lasted for a hundred years and more. The material achievement of the Roman rule was largely destroyed, and with it a great part of the Christian fabric too. St. Gildas, writing a century and more after the events he describes, hands on a tradition of churches destroyed, of priests massacred, of loot and sacrilege, and of a wholesale flight of the survivors. #### The century in which the troubles of this British Catholicism began, troubles from Pelagianism, troubles from the invasions, was apparently the century in which the monastic life was first introduced, and it is with visits of St. Germanus of Auxerre (429 and 447) that the event is generally associated. He is said to have founded the first monastery, for all that he himself was never a monk, and to have ordained St. Illtyd -- the first great abbot of the British Church. Illtyd was the master, possibly, of St. Gildas and of St. David -- the first of whom was the greatest influence in that monastic transformation which is the leading feature of the Irish Church's history in the next century. Another great name in British monasticism is that of St. Cadoc. His first master was an Irishman, but in the monastery which he himself later founded, at Llancarvan, there was formed the first of the great monastic founders of Ireland, St. Finian of Clonard. Such evidence as we possess of the interaction between the monasteries of Britain and Ireland throughout the sixth century goes to show that, despite the barbarity of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, the life of the Church was by no means wholly destroyed. Monasteries, clergy and bishops undoubtedly survived and flourished in the parts of the island still defended against the Barbarians. Even so late as 615 -- a hundred and sixty years after the appearance of " Hengist and Horsa " -- the great monastery of Bangor, near Chester, numbered a community of some 2,000 monks. Even in the parts of the island where the invaders ruled, there were still traces of what had been -- the Roman church, for example, which St. Augustine found at Canterbury. #### While in the east of what is to-day England the religion of Roman Britain had been practically destroyed, and while in the west it survived and, apparently, became more and more monastic in its organisation, in the north of the island Catholicism won new victories over the Celtic peoples hitherto pagan. The workers, here again, were monks and from Ireland. Voluntary exile was, with the Irish, a peculiar and favourite penitential discipline, the crowning exercise indeed of the ascetic life. As with St. Columbanus it led to the evangelisation of eastern France, of Switzerland, Bavaria and northern Italy, so, earlier in the same century, it had driven others to the north. It was, for example, from Irish solitaries that the Orkneys and the more distant Faroe Islands first learnt of the Gospel. The stories of St. Brendan's voyages are another testimony to the existence, and the popularity, of the practice. #### One of these pioneers, and one of the greatest, if we are to measure by his personality and the ultimate results of his achievement, was St. Columba -- or to use his own native monastic name, St. Columcille. He was a man close on forty years of age when, about 563, after a richly varied religious training at Moville and Clonard, and after founding the great monasteries of Derry and Durrow, he left Ireland for ever, "desirous to be a wanderer for Christ." He was a scholar as well as a saint, "of an excellent nature, polished in speech, holy in deed," and with his twelve companions founded his new monastery in the little island of I, seventy miles from Ireland and a mile or so from the great island of Mull in the modern county of Argyll. The kingdom of Dal Riada in which Iona lay (for, thanks to a scribe's mistake, it is thus that we call the island) was an Irish conquest and the people were nominally Christian. To the north lay the fierce pagan Picts; to the south, in Galloway, other Picts converted once by St. Ninian but who had long since lapsed into paganism. Iona was a centre from which other monasteries were formed and the monks undertook their apostolic work. For thirty-four years St. Columcille trudged and laboured, converting the king of the Picts and many of his people. #### The new conquest was organised after the monastic fashion then beginning to sweep all before it in Columcille's native land. The head of the vast whole, of the confederation of monasteries, the priests, the bishops, was -- to the surprise of St. Bede -- the Abbot of Iona, who was himself only a priest. Gradually from the isles of the west the new force spread to the south-west, the Galloway of St. Ninian, and to the eastern lowlands. Nearly forty years after the death of Columcille it crossed the frontier of the Celtic culture, and made its first contacts with the victorious Barbarians from the German coasts. #### St. Gregory's first recorded interest in the religious conditions of the distant island of Britain goes back to the years between his return from Constantinople and his election as pope (586-590), and it relates not to the desolated church of the Britons, but to their heathen conquerors. It is the well-known story of his sight of the English captives in the Roman slave market. He designed to be himself their apostle, but popular opposition, recognising in him Rome's coming salvation, compelled the pope of the day to recall him. Five years after his election as pope he had another scheme. The official in charge of the papal estates in Gaul was commissioned to buy young English slaves and to send them to Rome, there to be formed in the monasteries as missionaries and teachers. A second letter of the pope, of July, 596, to Brunhilda, makes known that the English themselves had asked for teachers and that, since the neighbouring bishops were utterly unconcerned, the pope himself would find a means. #### By the time this letter was written, the band of chosen missionaries had already left Rome. Its leader was the superior of St. Gregory's own monastic house on the Coelian -- Augustine. As the monks made their way into southern Gaul they heard terrifying reports of the savagery of the English, and, discouraged, they halted while Augustine went back to Rome for new instructions. St. Gregory consoled him, gave him new courage, letters to several of the Gallic bishops, to the kings of Austrasia and Burgundy and to Brunhilda their grandmother, and sent him north once more. From the Franks they were given interpreters, and finally, towards Easter, 597, they landed in Kent at Ebbsfleet. Here the king's wife was a Catholic, a Frankish princess and Brunhilda's niece. She already had her priests and a church. #### The king, Ethelbert, received the newcomers very hospitably and listened to their preaching. By Christmas of that same year, thanks to the preaching of the missionaries and to the miracles wrought at their prayers, the converts were to be numbered by the tens of thousands. Augustine was by this time a bishop, and soon a second party of missionaries arrived from Rome, while the pope, for whom this marvellous conversion was the great joy of his life, strove to interest in it the Frankish bishops too. In 601 he sent to Augustine the pallium, a new custom to mark the especial favour of the Roman See to subordinate bishops, and with it the plan of the new church's organisation. There were to be two provinces. The first should have the metropolitan see at London (Augustine had fixed his see at the Kentish capital Canterbury) and twelve suffragans. A bishop was to be placed also at York, and as the people were converted, York, too, was to become a metropolitan see with twelve suffragans. Augustine, for his lifetime, was to rule both provinces. Slowly, very slowly, the pope's great scheme began to take shape. London and Rochester received their bishops in 604, but Augustine remained at Canterbury. It is interesting to notice that the government set up by the pope is the normal system of metropolitan and suffragans. There is no provision for a special vicar of the Apostolic See such as St. Gregory had recently hoped to establish in France. Nor is any place whatever given to the royal authority. From the very beginning this English Church, the direct creation of the pope, is free of the State. #### St. Augustine of Canterbury lived only three years to enjoy his new pre-eminence. He died in 604, but not before he had attempted, and failed, to win for the mission the co-operation of the other bishops of the north and west, the successors of St. David and St. Ninian. How they regarded the heathens who had despoiled them, massacred their priests and sacrilegiously destroyed the holy places, we can only guess. How far had they refused to attempt their conversion, how far did they still mistrust the foes only recently so savage? St. Bede, an Englishman undoubtedly, saw in the slaughter of the monks of Bangor, in 613, the justice of God on a church that refused to spread the light. The Irish chronicler gives us the Celtic view when he speaks sorrowfully of the same event as "the massacre of the saints." Ethelbert's protection covered the new missionaries to the very confines of the conquest, and it was in the west, probably near Chepstow, that the celebrated conference between the two hierarchies took place. At first no one of the British bishops would consent to appear. The priests they sent to represent them saw little in the Roman apostle but the bishop who invited them to bless, and spiritually enrich, their bitterest enemies. Even a miracle did not move them. At a later conference, seven British bishops took part and with them the Abbot of Bangor and some of the most learned of his monks. The discussion was long and heated. The Britons reproached the Romans for their patronage of the English and, through the Abbot of Bangor, swore yet again that they would never preach the faith to the cruel and treacherous race who had deprived their ancestors of their native land. By comparison with this strongly worded declaration, the disputes on such liturgical differences as the date at which Easter should be kept, the shape of the clerical tonsure, the details of the rite of baptism, had little importance. Henceforward, for the best part of two centuries, the two hierarchies ignored each other, with what disastrous results who shall say? #### The Britons refused to share in the toil: they could not rejoice in the success it brought; and for the first few years the success was great indeed. Ethelbert's nephew was king in Essex. Augustine consecrated Mellitus as Bishop of London, and soon, with the church of St. Paul for its centre, a movement of conversion was working strongly throughout that kingdom, too. St. Augustine's own successor was Laurence, another monk from the Coelian. One of his difficulties, too, was the hostility of the British. It showed itself in an aggravated form when an Irish bishop, or abbot, passing through Canterbury refused to acknowledge the archbishop or even to lodge or to take a meal with him. Nor did a letter from the new hierarchy to the bishops of Ireland and Scotland have any effect. #### Meanwhile the king of East Anglia, too, had become a Catholic -- for political reasons apparently, for on the death of Ethelbert (616) he returned to his idols, compromising with his newer faith by erecting a Christian altar side by side with the one to the pagan gods. Ethelbert's own successor, his son, was a pagan and so, too, were the sons of the king of Essex who had died in the same year. A general restoration of paganism seemed inevitable. The Bishops of London and Rochester abandoned the seemingly hopeless task and fled to Gaul. The archbishop was preparing to follow them when, in a vision, St. Peter appeared to him, upbraided him, and scourged him so severely that the next morning he could show his pagan sovereign the bruises in testimony of the miracle. Apparently this, for Eadbald, was the turning point. He asked for baptism and for the rest of his life remained loyal to the Faith. Kent was assured if Essex had fallen away. The work of St. Augustine, threatened for a moment with extinction, was saved. It was scarcely more than saved, for outside Kent it had ceased to be, and from Kent it had for the moment ceased to spread. #### It was from Kent, nevertheless, that the next development came, through the marriage of the King of Kent's sister to the pagan King of Northumbria, Edwin, who now (624) occupied that position of preponderance among the seven kings which had been Ethelbert's in 597. With the new Queen of Northumbria there travelled to the north yet another of the Roman monks, Paulinus, newly consecrated a bishop. York was at last to have its bishop as St. Gregory, years before, had designed. For the moment, however, the new bishop's flock numbered no more than the new queen and her attendants. The king received him courteously and there the matter ended. Victory in battle which Edwin believed to be the result of the bishop's prayers, and the king's recognition in Paulinus of the man whom, years before, he had been mysteriously warned would appear in his life to be his guide, won him over. At the Christmas of 625 the king was baptised and with him many of his nobles and the high priests of the old religion. For eight years Paulinus and his priests were free to labour and, with the king's patronage and the prestige of his example, to reap a rich reward. But in 633 Edwin fell. An unnatural alliance of the Christian British king of North Wales and the pagan Saxon king of Mercia, Penda, was too much for him. He was defeated and slain at the battle of Hatfield Chase near Doncaster, and his army annihilated. His widow fled to Kent, with her children and Paulinus, while the British king laid waste Northumbria. Once more a political revolution had destroyed in a day the religious work of years. Restoration was however to follow, and speedily, but its agents were not the monks from Rome. It was from the north that the new missionaries came. They were monks of Iona. #### The family to which Edwin belonged was one of two rivals with claims to the Northumbrian throne. He had himself spent his youth in exile, and his death and the flight of his family were the signal for the return of the prince whose father Edwin had overthrown in 616. This prince was Oswald. He, too, was a Catholic, converted in his exile by the monks of Iona to whom now he offered a new field of work that stretched from the Forth to the Humber. The greatest figure of this new apostolate is that of the lovable St. Aidan, who established the monastic centre from which he worked his vast diocese, not in York, Edwin's old capital, but on the tiny island of Lindisfarne, two miles from the rock fortress of Bamburgh where Oswald resided. #### The work of Edwin and Paulinus was resumed, the preaching, the baptisms, the pious foundations and then, after another brief nine years, disaster came upon the nascent Church as it had come upon that of Paulinus. In 642 Oswald, too, fell a victim to the ruthless Penda. At the Maserfield he was slain and his army defeated. But Oswald's work did not die with him. His brother Oswin, who succeeded, shared his faith and assisted St. Aidan as Oswald had done. Oswin, however, reigned only in Bernicia, the northern half of Oswald's kingdom. The south had fallen to a kinsman of Edwin. Another nine years and the strained relations between the two ended in war, and once again St. Aidan's patron was slain (651). The saint's grief overwhelmed him and eleven days later he died. #### In the twenty-six years since the coming of St. Paulinus, Northumbria had been converted. Of the remaining Barbarians, the West Saxons had been won over by a third mission from Rome, led by the bishop Birinus whom Pope Honorius I (625-638) had himself consecrated. Mercia was the last of the kingdoms to be opened to the mission -- thanks to the intractable Penda. But in 655 Penda was slain in battle. His successor was already baptised, and in the next few years the people of the Midlands, too, were brought into the Church. A native clergy was already in being. The first bishop of English stock -- Ithma of Rochester -- was consecrated in 644, and in 655 the first English Archbishop of Canterbury, Frithonas, a West Saxon who took the name of Deusdedit. #### Thus, in a fashion very different from that he had planned, slowly, and with many vicissitudes, the hopes of St. Gregory were realised, within a lifetime from the first hardy expedition of 597. South of the Thames the conquest was due to the monks sent directly from Rome; in the north, the midlands, and the east it had been largely the work of the monks of Iona. It only remained to secure uniformity of religious practice where, indisputably, there was unity of belief, and to centralise the supervision of the different sees. This done, there would be a Church of the English people. Its founder in this sense was a monk of yet a third school of monasticism, the Greek Theodore of Tarsus whom, like Augustine in 597 and Birinus in 635, the pope consecrated and despatched to England. He arrived in 668 to find the most delicate part of the work -- liturgical uniformity -- already arranged. #### The liturgical differences between the Roman monks who came with St. Augustine and the British bishops have been noticed. As the double conversion of the English proceeded it could only be a matter of time before the age-long controversy began to divide the newly-converted. In Northumbria especially was the question acute where Roman and Celtic missionaries had both worked. Bernicia was entirely Celtic in its observance, Deira partly Celtic, partly Roman. The chief point of difference was the date at which Easter should be celebrated, and since the whole cycle of religious life depended on this, and since with this first generation of converts religious life was the foundation of social life, the question was by no means a mere matter of archaeology. Like the Irish Church from which they had originally come, and the still older British Church, the Celtic missionaries in England calculated the date of Easter according to a system devised in the early fourth century, which was, at that time, the system used also by the Roman Church. It was a faulty system and in 447 it was considerably modified. Ten years later the Roman Church gave it up entirely, and adopted the new system of Victorius of Aquitaine. This system it was which the mission of 597 brought to England, and which St. Augustine sought to impose on the British bishops. How they refused it has been told, and also how the Irish and Scottish Churches still held out for the older system in the time of Laurence, St. Augustine's successor. But twenty years later the situation had changed. Thanks to the intervention of Pope Honorius I, the southern Irish had, in 628, adopted the system of Victorius. The northern Irish, however, still stood firm, despite an admonition from Rome in 640. Nevertheless, even among the northern Irish, there were critics of this conservatism, and they began to make themselves heard in the foundations beyond the sea. The dispute soon spread to Iona, and thence to the Northumbrian foundation at Lindisfarne. In the time of St. Aidan's successor, Finan, it became especially bitter when one of the monks, an Irishman, returned from Rome with a new enthusiasm for the Roman practice. The question then was eminently actual, awaiting only the arrival of a strong personality whose insistence should force an open conflict and decision. That personage now appeared, an Englishman, Wilfrid, Abbot of Ripon, and Bishop of York to be. #### St. Wilfrid, at this time (664), was perhaps thirty years of age. He was of noble birth, handsome, educated, and he had travelled as few men of his time. He had lived as a monk at Lindisfarne, had been initiated into the clerical order at Lyons, and had gone thence to Rome along with a fellow noble turned monk, the scholarly Benet Biscop. At Rome his doubts on the Easter question were solved and he learnt, not merely that the Celts in Northumbria were in the wrong, but that the Roman Church had introduced yet further improvements into the elaborate system of calculation. He also, at Rome, made his first acquaintance with the rule of St. Benedict -- which since the flight of St. Paulinus thirty years before had disappeared from Northumbria. Wilfrid returned to Deira, to become a power at Court. It was possibly his influence that moved the king to suggest to the monks at Ripon that they should adopt the Roman use and when, refusing, they returned to Melrose, the king gave the abbey to Wilfrid. #### A year or two later, in 664, a conference was called to settle the whole question. It met at St. Hilda's abbey of Whitby. The two Northumbrian kings took part, Wilfrid of course, and, among the bishops who shared his views, Tuda, a southern Irishman then labouring in Northumbria, and Agilbert of Dorchester who had recently ordained St. Wilfrid. The Roman chaplain of the Bernician queen assisted and, venerable relic of a bygone time, the deacon James who had first come to Northumbria with Paulinus forty years before. On the other side were Oswy, the King of Bernicia, and St. Colman of Lindisfarne. The debate was decided as soon as the king learnt which was the system of the successor of St. Peter. He demanded if both parties agreed that it was to Peter that Christ had given the keys of heaven. Here they all agreed. Then said the king, "I cannot decide against him who holds the keys of heaven, or when I appear at the gate he may not open it to me." The majority submitted to the decision, but St. Colman with many of his monks, Northumbrians as well as Irish, made his way back to Iona and thence to his native land, to Inishboffin, a tiny island off the coast of Mayo. There ten years later he died. #### Whitby settled the dispute once and for all as far as it had affected the English. It was from an English abbey in Northumbria, Jarrow, that, in the next generation, the northern Irish were won over to the Roman calendar (688-704), the Picts (710) and even Iona itself (716). The British Church, too, ultimately came in: Cornwall about 705, thanks to St. Aldhelm, Bishop of Sherborne, and Wales from about 768. #### Within a year or so of the Synod of Whitby Tuda, the Irish champion of the Roman uses, was dead of the plague. Wilfrid was named in his place as Bishop of York and, declining to receive consecration from any prelate less Roman than himself, crossed to Gaul for the ceremony. It took place at Compiegne. Meanwhile Deira, Wilfrid's country, had passed again to the King of Bernicia, and since it had no bishop he named one of the Celtic monks, Chad, Abbot of Lastingham. Chad, who since the great synod had adopted the Roman uses, was himself in a difficulty to find a consecrator. Canterbury, to which he first went, was vacant and Agilbert of Dorchester was abroad (he had just assisted at the consecration of Wilfrid). It was the Bishop of Winchester who in the end performed the rite -- a bishop whom Agilbert would probably not recognise, since the diocese of Winchester had been carved out of Dorchester by the royal order and without Agilbert's consent. Worse still, as later events were to show, the assistant bishops at St. Chad's consecration were from the British hierarchy of the west. Chad returned to rule his see, and some time afterwards Wilfrid too returned, and finding himself thus dispossessed returned to his abbey of Ripon. Then, in 669, there arrived from Rome the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore, the direct nominee of Pope Vitalian. #### The new archbishop was reputed one of the most learned men of his time. With him he brought the abbot Hadrian, an African, and Benet Biscop, books, equipment, a plan of organisation, and a live tradition of culture. With Theodore of Tarsus the English Church passes very definitely out of its pioneer stage. His school of Canterbury was to be one of the springs whence flowed the culture of the next two hundred years. Hadrian was its chief, and thanks to the Greek archbishop and this African, the school was delivered from the intellectual sterility that lay over so much of the West. Its intellectual life was real, its mastery of the ancient tongues more complete. Latin was taught as a dead language by the ancient rules, and in the coming centuries English-trained scholars were to return to the continent and re-instruct the semi-barbarised descendants of Caesar and Cicero in the language of their ancestors. #### The new primate's first task was to end the chaos in the hierarchy Chad was asked to resign York, and Wilfrid was restored. Then, for Theodore recognised the man's saintliness, he appointed Chad to be the bishop of the Mercians, with a see fixed at Lichfield. In 673 the Church held at Hertford its first national synod. The bishops were henceforth to confine their zeal within geographical limits. The free and easy Celtic system was to go. The clergy were to be strictly subject to their proper diocesan bishop, the monks to their abbots. Neither monk nor cleric was, for the future, to wander about as his taste and zeal suggested. #### In that same year a second see was formed in East Anglia, and the Bishops of London and Rochester were deposed for various misdemeanours or disobedience to the archbishop. Next came the creation of five new sees in the midlands -- Worcester, Leicester, Stow, Dorchester and Hereford. In the north Benet Biscop founded the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow, under the Benedictine rule, and they speedily became the centres of a new intellectual life for the north as Canterbury for the south. Lindisfarne was by this "romanised," and ruled by the monk Cuthbert whose sanctity was later to make the northern see so famous. At York Wilfrid, with all his great energy, was introducing a systematic organisation into his vast territory and, inevitably, making enemies. One of these was his sovereign and when, with the king's assistance but without Wilfrid's consent, Theodore divided the diocese of York, the Bishop of York resisted. He appealed to the pope, and Theodore, once he had left for Rome, judged him to have resigned, and consecrated another bishop in his place. Dogged by the hired assassins of the Northumbrian king, Wilfrid made his way to the papal court. There he assisted at the synod preparatory to the General Council of 680. He won his case, but on his return the king first threw him into prison and then exiled him. Not for seven years was he free to return to York. He used the years of exile to convert the people of Sussex -- the one kingdom that still remained pagan. #### Four years after Wilfrid's return Theodore died (September 19, 690), an old man now, close on ninety. Of whatever unity English Catholicism possessed, of its scholarship and culture this learned Greek is the undoubted founder. To none of its saints is our country more indebted. That he treated his subordinates with undue rigour cannot be denied and although, before the end, he made his peace with Wilfrid, the mischief lasted. No more than Theodore himself was the prelate he had planted at York disposed to obey the Roman decision. A second appeal from Wilfrid to the Apostolic See, decided in his favour as was the first, was likewise ignored. A third, eleven years later, led to a lengthy investigation, and mandatory letters from the pope -- John VI to the different kings and bishops and to the new Archbishop of Canterbury ordering Wilfrid's reinstatement. This finally took place, after violent discussions, at a great council of Northumbrian notables at which the archbishop assisted. Five years later Wilfrid died (709). He had been born in the terrible time which saw the death of Edwin and, as it seemed, the definitive ending of the missionary achievement of St. Paulinus. Now, not only Northumbria, but the whole of the English conquest was Catholic, and not only Catholic but united in discipline as well as in belief, organised on the systematic Roman model. To that work of conversion, and of disciplinary unity, and especially to the extension of the prestige of the Roman See, Wilfrid had contributed more than most. He has a claim to stand here as the peer of Theodore who had done so much to thwart the even way of his episcopal life. #### There is hardly a better way of realising how much the initiative of St. Gregory the Great did for the heathen conquerors of England than by a consideration of the life and achievement of the Venerable Bede. Here, in an Englishman, born within seventy years of the great pope's death, and within twenty years of the defeat of the last pagan offensive, we are face to face with the greatest scholar of his age, and an original genius from whom much of our historical studies derive. The mere fact of St. Bede is witness to the power of the new monasticism as an agent of culture as well as religious devotion. #### St. Bede was born at Wearmouth or Jarrow in 673. His parents died while he was very young and from childhood to his death he lived in the great monastery of SS. Peter and Paul lately founded by St. Benet Biscop -- in St. Bede's time the latest product of the direct action of the Roman See in English affairs. He was a boy in the school, he became a monk. In 692 he was ordained deacon, in 703 priest, and in 735 he died, after a life of uninterrupted prayer and study. St. Bede's works, which fill five of Migne's closely printed tomes, are universal in their content. Like St. Isidore of Seville, almost a century earlier, one of St. Bede's achievements was to salvage and to store all he could find of the culture of antiquity and of the earlier Christian centuries. He writes on the theory of poetry, on modes of reckoning time, on the nature of things, something of philosophy, something of science; He is -- and in his own view it is the central point of all his studies -- a keen student of Holy Writ, and a careful commentator. We have forty-nine Or his sermons on the Gospels, and a smaller number of his letters. Also he wrote verse, and though most of this has perished a hymn has survived in honour of St. Audrey, one of the innumerable crowned saints who are the peculiar distinction of this early age of Anglo-Saxon Catholicism. Bede was an omnivorous reader. With the Fathers -- particularly St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Augustine and St. Gregory the Great -- with Cicero and Virgil too, he is thoroughly at home. As a theologian he does little more than hand on the tradition to the coming generation. For speculation he had, apparently, little taste. Philosophy had, by this time, almost disappeared from the equipment of the theologian, and Bede could say, truly enough if somewhat harshly, that there is no school of philosophy which has not been charged with lying by some other equally imbecile school. There is in the reference, and in others, something like a general impatience with merely human reasoning about things divine. #### But for all his immense importance as perhaps the most gifted of the band that salvaged so much from the wreck of the ancient world, St. Bede's ultimate importance is of another order. For, besides his innumerable theological and scholastic works, he wrote the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The character of this work, its literary grace, the even critical fairness of the treatment, make St. Bede the superior of any other historian for centuries yet to come. It is the one production of his century that is still alive, the only thing between St. Augustine and the twelfth century that is to-day more than an important piece of archaeology. Of itself it sets St. Bede in a class with the very greatest of the pioneers of scholarship. The scholarship with which, through Theodore, Abbot Hadrian and Benet Biscop, Rome in 668 endowed the English Church, was already producing something greater than its founders. The heritage was secure for yet another generation, for it was a living thing and no sterile pedagogy that Bede in turn handed down to Egbert of York, to Alcuin and through Alcuin to Carolingian Europe and the whole Church. ####  |