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November 2001
Parish History Episode 7
THE ROMAN MISSIONIn 570, Gregory, son of Gordian, was a young man of about thirty, a son of an ancient aristocratic family of Rome, of a pious upbringing (his great-grandfather had been Pope Felix III). He was employed successively in a number of administrative posts in the city of Rome, which was then a dependency of the Byzantine (or East Roman) Empire, and under threat from the Lombard tribes who had occupied much of Italy. He was possibly acting in the capacity of a market inspector, when he engaged in conversation with a merchant who was offering a number of barbarian slave children for sale. He learned from the slave trader that they came from a pagan land called Deira, which had once been part of the former Roman province of Britain.
In 575, Gregory resigned from the municipal service, to the disappointment of his family, and became a monk in one of the houses close to Rome recently established by the followers of Benedict, the patriarch of Western monasticism. Gregory then moved back into administrative work, in the service of Pope Pelagius II, and on that pope’s death in 590, Gregory was elected pope in his place - the first monk to receive that honour.
Pope Gregory the Great, as he is known, became a famous preacher and writer. In liturgy, he introduced various Greek features into the Roman Mass, but in politics he defended the independence of the Roman See from Byzantine interference. He despatched embassies to the Gothic Kingdom in Spain, which succeeded in “reconciling” the Arian faith of the Goths with the Catholic faith of their subjects, and also tried to persuade the Lombard chiefs, who also inclined towards Arianism, to accept the Catholic practices of the majority of Italians.
Further afield (and prompted, possibly, by the memory of those slave boys exposed for sale in the market at Rome), he despatched, in the year 596, a group of missionaries, led by Augustine, to the Isle of Britain. Early in 597 Augustine and his party landed in Kent, where King Ethelbert had married Bertha, a Frankish (Christian) princess, and she welcomed the arrival of the monks from Rome. Ethelbert was already interested in his wife’s religion, and before long he, together with many of his people, accepted Baptism.
He does not appear to have compelled, or even encouraged, any of his subjects to become Christian. Indeed, the new religion was slow to spread amongst the Jutish aristocrats who ruled Kent, and most of the “converts” were native Britons who probably already considered themselves Christians, but they had been deprived of the Sacraments of the Church as a consequence of the flight of the British clergy towards Wales, and other areas beyond the reach of the English invaders.
Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury, and during the next few years additional bishops were appointed for Rochester and London, but the Roman Mission was still confined to the South-Eastern corner of England, until 625, when opportunity was taken of the marriage of King Ethelbert’s daughter, Ethelburga, to King Edwin of Deira - the homeland, apparently, of Gregory’s slave boys - who had conquered Bernicia, and now styled himself King of Northumbria. A monk called Paulinus was consecrated as a bishop, and despatched from Canterbury to Edwin’s capital city of York.
His journey to the North was like a royal progress. He visited former Roman cities, such as Lincoln and Doncaster, and preached to multitudes who came forward for Baptism (again, these “multitudes” were probably mostly native Britons). The same scenes were repeated in York, and the King was baptised in 627. Later Paulinus accompanied King Edwin to a royal hunting lodge at Yeavering (near Wooler), where he held a five weeks’ mission, reaching out to the Celtic peasants of the Cheviot Hills.
On that journey, Paulinus must have crossed what was later known as County Durham, perhaps passing near the site of the future Houghton-le-Spring. But Bede tells us nothing about his journey, only his achievements when he reached Yeavering, so we don’t even know what people lived then between the Tees and the Tyne.
Then, in 633, the Roman Mission suddenly collapsed. King Edwin was trying to extend his power by conquering the Midland kingdom of Mercia. King Cadwallon of Gwynedd (North Wales) came to the aid of King Penda of Mercia, and the allies defeated and killed King Edwin. As soon as news of the King’s death in battle reached York, Queen Ethelburga, together with Archbishop Paulinus and, apparently, most of the other Roman clergy, abandoned the city, took flight for Brough on the Humber, where they found ships to take them to Kent, Ethelburga’s homeland. King Cadwallon, who was a Christian, then seems to have withdrawn from the fray, but the pagan King Penda went on to ravage most of Northumbria, destroying all traces of Paulinus’ work that he could find.
If it had been only in Northumbria that the Roman Mission had collapsed, we might see the disaster as being the accidental consequence of King Edwin’s defeat and death. But most of the other fields of the Roman Mission - Lincolnshire, East Anglia, Essex, Middlesex, everywhere except Kent - also relapsed at much the same time, so it does seem that the Mission had something lacking. How did it fail?
Well, to their credit, the Roman missionaries did not attempt to force a change of religion on the English. Although the missions in both Kent and Northumbria began with a royal wedding, of a pagan king to a Christian princess, and in both states the king was baptised, no-one was compelled to follow his example. The majority of the aristocracy remained pagan, and the bulk of the “converts”, outside the Royal Courts, were British peasants, already regarding themselves as Christians, but cut off from the ministrations of the Church by the flight, death or apostasy of their priests, and apparently unwilling to accept lay celebration of the Sacraments.
The flight of the Roman monks from every mission field save Kent (and they were, at one point, Bede tells us, even planning the evacuation of Kent) nullifies their criticism of their British predecessors for abandoning their flocks at the time of the English conquest. But the paralysis of the Church by their flight points to another of their failings: they had neglected to even begin the training of a native (British or English) clergy to replace them when they were gone. They assumed that, on their deaths, their charges would be inherited by another generation of Italian monks.
R.H.Hodgkin, in his “History of the Anglo-Saxons”, writes “the clergy of Augustine did their duty according to their lights, but, like some more modern missionaries, they did not easily mingle with their converts; and it appears that, some sixty years after the coming of Augustine, his Italian successors were still not able to speak the English language with any fluency.
They had tried, but they had failed. It remains to record, next month, a more successful mission.
For further reading :-
Bede’s History of the English Church and People
(on which I relied for the above account; but for an alternative Welsh view, see Nennius’ History of Britain)
R.H.Hodgkin, A History of the Anglo-Saxons
Dick Toy
