A background to Augustine's mission to Anglo-Saxon England

Abstract

As is well known, Bede gives a biased account of the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England. He highlights the role of the Roman mission, initiated by Pope Gregory the Great and led by Augustine, the first bishop of Canterbury. Almost as important in the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum is the effort made by the Irish to Christianize Northumbria. The Frankish contribution to the missionary process, however, is not mentioned at all, though Frankish clerics certainly played an important role in the conversion of England. This role is attested by later contacts between England and the Frankish church. The letters of Gregory the Great relating to the mission of Augustine, moreover, make it clear that this mission also benefited greatly from help supplied by the Frankish church. The continuity of the British church seems to have been stronger than Bede suggests and his statement that the Britons did nothing to convert the Angles and the Saxons should be regarded as an overstatement. It has been argued recently that Bede left out an account of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons living west and south-west of the Mercians, the Hwicce, the Magonsæte and the Wreocensæte, not because of a lack of information, but because of the part the Britons played in it.

The cleansing of the temple in early medieval Northumbria

“…However, these probably reflect not pagan taboos, but rather the influence of Insular forms of Christianity since British and Irish ecclesiastical sources reveal the very same issues concerning purity. 78 On the whole, Gregory's responses rejected any excessive concern with bodily purity -but, nonetheless, they did not display an entirely neutral attitude to the church-space. 79 Menstruation, childbirth and nocturnal emissions (the main 'defilements' Augustine asked Gregory to consider) did not involve a sinful will, the pope claimed, and therefore were not reasons sufficient to bar anyone from a church.…”

Early Medieval Christian Identity and Anti‐Judaism: The Case of the Visigothic Kingdom

“…On the other hand, it could be that the canons’ authors were employing the term ‘pagan’ to classify a new non‐Christian but also non‐Jewish religious identity. Either way, the experiment in redefinition speaks to the fluidity of early medieval perceptions of religious identities (Pohl 2000) – particularly ‘paganism’, which has been a topic of recent discussion among scholars of early Anglo‐Saxon England and the Merovingian and Carolingian kingdoms (e.g., Meens 1994; Wood 2000; Palmer 2007). It also illustrates the dynamic relationship between that conceptual fluidity and authorities’ efforts to rigidify identities and control boundaries – a dynamic that played out not only in processes of religious transformation, but also in other realms of identity construction as well (Hallsall 1998).…”