What the Italians did for us

Merry Christmas, and thank you

Today is Christmas Day, the date on which Augustine of Canterbury had thousands of Kentish men and women converted in 597 AD. It was a momentous moment in our country’s history, bringing the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms into the fold of the western church in Rome, ensuring it would be heavily influenced by Italian culture. Indeed, ever since then there has been something special about Anglo-Italian relations, from the works of Shakespeare to the 19^th craze for Garibaldi and Italian independence, to the obsessively Italophile fashions of 1960s London. But Augustine, and his patron Gregory, were perhaps the greatest Italian friends of England.

The story begins in sixth century Rome, once a city of a million people but now shrunk to a desolate town of a few thousand, no longer the capital of a great empire of even enjoying basic plumbing—a few decades earlier its aqueducts had been destroyed in the recent wars between the Goths and Byzantines, a final blow to the great city of antiquity. Under Pope Gregory I, the Church had effectively taken over what was left of the town, establishing it as the western headquarters of Christianity. 

Rome was just one of five major Christian centres. Constantinople, the capital of the surviving eastern Roman Empire, was by this point far larger, and also claimed leadership of the Christian world — eventually the two would split in the Great Schism, but this was many centuries away. The other three great Christian centres - Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch - would soon fall to Islam, a turn of events that would strengthen Rome’s spiritual position. And it was this Roman version of Christianity which came to shape the Anglo-Saxon world. 

Gregory was a great reformer who is viewed by some historians as a sort of bridge between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the founder of a new and reborn Rome, now a spiritual rather than a military empire. He is also the subject of the one great stories of early English history.

One day during the 570s, several years before he became pontiff, Gregory was walking around the marketplace when he spotted a pair of blond-haired pagan slave boys for sale. Thinking it tragic that such innocent-looking children should be ignorant of the Lord, he asked a trader where they came from, and was told they were ‘Anglii’, Angles. Gregory, who was fond of a pun, replied ‘Non Angli, sed Angeli’ (not Angles, but angels), a bit of wordplay that still works fourteen centuries later. Not content with this, he asked what region they came from and was told ‘Deira’ (today’s Yorkshire). ‘No,’ he said, warming to the theme and presumably laughing to himself, ‘de ira’—they are blessed. 

Impressed with his own punning, Gregory decided that the Angles and Saxons should be shown the true way. A further embellishment has the Pope punning on the name of the king of Deira, Elle, by saying he’d sing ‘hallelujah’ if they were converted, but it seems dubious; in fact, the Anglo-Saxons were very fond of wordplay, which features a great deal in their surviving literature and without spoiling the story, we probably need to be slightly sceptical about whether Gregory actually said any of this. 

The Pope ordered an abbot called Augustine to go to Kent to convert the heathens. We can only imagine how Augustine, having enjoyed a relatively nice life at a Benedictine monastery in Rome, must have felt about his new posting to some cold, faraway island, and he initially gave up halfway through his trip, leaving his entourage in southern Gaul while he went back to Rome to beg Gregory to call the thing off. 

Yet he continued, and the island must have seemed like an unimaginably grim posting for the priest. Still, in the misery-ridden squalor that was sixth-century Britain, Kent was perhaps as good as it gets, in large part due to its links to the continent.

Gaul had been overrun by the Franks in the fifth century, but had essentially maintained Roman institutions and culture; the Frankish king Clovis had converted to Catholicism a century before, following relentless pressure from his wife, and then as now people in Britain tended to ape the fashions of those across the water. 

The barbarians of Britain were grouped into tribes led by chieftains, the word for their warlords, cyning, eventually evolving into its modern usage of ‘king’. There were initially at least twelve small kingdoms, and various smaller tribal groupings, although by Augustine’s time a series of hostile takeovers had reduced this to eight — Kent, Sussex, Essex, and Wessex (the West Country and Thames Valley), East Anglia, Mercia (the Midlands), Bernicia (the far North), and Deira (Yorkshire). 

In 597, when the Italian delegation finally finished their long trip, Kent was ruled by King Ethelbert, supposedly a great-grandson of the semi-mythical Hengest. The king of Kent was married to a strong-willed Frankish princess called Bertha, and luckily for Augustine, Bertha was a Christian. She had only agreed to marry Ethelbert on condition that she was allowed to practise her religion, and to keep her own personal bishop. 

Bertha persuaded her husband to talk to the missionary, but the king was perhaps paranoid that the Italian would try to bamboozle him with witchcraft, only agreeing to meet him under an oak tree, which to the early English had magical properties that could overpower the foreigner’s sorcery. (Oak trees had a strong association with religion and mysticism throughout Europe, being seen as the king of the trees and associated with Woden, Zeus, Jupiter, and all the other alpha male gods.) 

Eventually, and persuaded by his wife, Ethelbert allowed Augustine to baptise 10,000 Kentish men on Christmas Day, 597, according to the chronicles. This is probably a wild exaggeration; 10,000 is often used as a figure in medieval history, and usually just means ‘quite a lot of people’. 

Although Ethelbert stood firm in his refusal to convert himself, he let the Christians settle in his capital Canterbury, which thereby became the headquarters of the English Church. Ethelbert told Augustine: ‘Your words and promises are fair indeed, but they are new and strange to us, and I cannot accept them and abandon the age-old beliefs of the whole English nation.’ 

That wasn’t enough for Bertha, and eventually Ethelbert agreed to be baptised, and Augustine became the first primate of England (the title would later be Archbishop of Canterbury). 

Various other Christian missionaries would follow St Augustine over to Britain, from southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, going up and down the island teaching the faith, as well as Latin, Greek, art, and literature.

Italian Christianity played a large part in spreading literacy, for with the new religion came other aspects of Roman civilisation; Ethelbert issued the oldest English coins and was the first Anglo-Saxon king to introduce law codes. The arrival of Christianity also meant the establishment of schools, and the six oldest functioning schools on earth all claim to date back to Anglo-Saxon England, from the King’s School Canterbury (597) to newcomer Beverley Grammar School (700) - although whether this continuity is genuine is a matter of opinion.

The very first act of written English law deals with theft from Church property, and that was probably because churchmen generally wrote the laws, since they were the only people who could read. 

But Augustine’s work fell apart when Ethelbert died and his son Eadbald took over and reverted to the old pagan ways, even marrying his stepmother, the sort of family values which the Christians disapproved of, although it made financial sense by keeping the inheritance together. 

Two of the three bishops in England, Mellitus of London and Justus of Rochester, ran off to France, but the other, Lawrence, stood his ground. Luckily Lawrence persuaded the new king to come back on board, convincing him that St Peter had physically attacked him because the king had forsaken God. Eadbald, afraid for his friend’s safety, left his wife/stepmother, who had in the meantime gone insane, as a monk recorded with some glee. 

Ethelbert’s sister had married the king of Essex, perhaps the weakest of the seven kingdoms, and their son allowed the Christians to settle in his capital, Lundenwic, where they built a church in honour of St Paul, close to the site of Lud Hill, a place with ancient religious significance. Ethelbert’s daughter Ethelberga, meanwhile, had married Edwin, king of Northumbria, the northern kingdom which was about to undergo one of the most remarkable cultural revivals of European history, the ‘Northumbrian renaissance’ which would produce Bede, the Lindisfarne Gospels and much else.

What is also significant about this story is how the faith was often spread by women. Even in antiquity various Roman writers complained that females were easy prey for any ‘foreign superstition’, and many Roman men, raised in the tough and unforgiving culture of their forefathers, could not understand the appeal of this strange new cult from the eastern Mediterranean with its obsessive focus on forgiveness and peace, and worshipping some sort of dead criminal. 

Indeed, as one analysis has it, they feared this was a subculture in which ‘women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large’. When St Paul wrote an Epistle to the Romans he issued ‘personal greetings to 15 women and 18 men,’ and since men tend to predominate at the head of such movements, this large number of women even among the leadership suggests that the Roman Christian community was already heavily female. 

An inventory of property taken from a Christian church in Cirta, North Africa, during the Diocletian persecution in 303 found ‘16 men’s tunics and 82 women’s tunics as well as 47 pairs of female slippers’. Both Christian and pagan accounts mention a sex imbalance and ‘ancient sources simply swarm with tales of how women of all ranks were converted in Rome and in the provinces… and that the percentage of Christian women, especially among the upper classes, was larger than that of men.’

Early Christian men were far more likely to be secondary converts, someone who joins a religion because a spouse had done so, whether out of zeal for life in the next world or an easy life in this one. Ethelbert was just one example, as was Clovis, leader of the Franks, whose conversion to Christianity at the behest of his wife Clotilde a century earlier was even more significant to European history.

It was not just Italians who helped bring our ancestors into this new fold. Among the most remarkable figures of the period was Theodore of Tarsus; born in Syria in 602 to a Greek family, Theodore had gone to Rome in his late fifties, which was extraordinary in itself, but then, aged sixty-six, he was sent off to run the Anglo- Saxon Church, without any knowledge of their language. 

The position had become available after the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, the unfortunate Wighard, had travelled to Rome in AD 667 in order to be consecrated by the pope, and almost immediately died of plague after a journey taking weeks.

Theodore had been taught a classical Greek education in Constantinople, and for someone raised in the antique culture of the Hellenic world, Britain must have seemed like something from Conan the Barbarian. But despite his lack of knowledge of the place, Theodore stayed for twenty-two years, totally reorganising the English Church. At the General Synod in Hertford in 672 Theodore ‘was the first of the archbishops whom the whole Anglo-Saxon Church consented to obey’, in the words of Bede. 

He was not the only churchman to make such a long journey; with him came Hadrian, a North African who became abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, and who lived for forty years in his new home. But the impetus for this cultural change came from Italy, an the Christian religion introduced the Anglo-Saxons to a more sophisticated Mediterranean world, and exposure to Roman culture, one that continued to have its focus in the heart of the former empire. I, for one, welcome our new Italian overlords.

Some of this is taken from Saxons versus Vikings: Alfred the Great and the Birth of England, which is now published in Britain. Buy it if you can, but either way, have a Merry Christmas!