With the coming of Augustine to Kent the darkness which for nearly two
centuries had enwrapped the history of Britain begins to clear away.
From the days of Honorius to those of Gregory the Great the line of
vision of the annalists of the continent was bounded by the Channel. As
to what was going on beyond it, we have but a few casual gleams of
light, just enough to make the darkness visible, from writers such as
the author of the life of St Germanus, Prosper Tiro, Procopius, and
Gregory of Tours. These notices do not, for the most part, square
particularly well with the fragmentary British narrative that can be
patched together from Gildas's "lamentable book," or the confused story
of Nennius. Nor again do these British sources fit in happily with the
English annals constructed long centuries after by King Alfred's scribes
in the first edition of the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_. But from the date
when the long-lost communication between Britain and Rome was once more
resumed, the history of the island becomes clear and fairly continuous.
The gaps are neither broader nor more obscure than those which may be
found in the contemporary annals of the other kingdoms of Europe. The
stream of history in this period is narrow and turbid throughout the
West. Quite as much is known of the doings of the English as of those of
the Visigoths of Spain, the Lombards, or the later Merovingians. The 7th
century was the darkest of all the "dark ages," and England is
particularly fortunate in possessing the _Ecclesiastica historia_ of
Bede, which, though its author was primarily interested in things
religious, yet contains a copious chronicle of things secular. No
Western author, since the death of Gregory of Tours, wrote on such a
scale, or with such vigour and insight.
[Illustration: Map--Anglo-Saxon Britain 597-825.]
Conversion of England.
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
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.
The English church.
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. 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.
Formation of the kingdoms.
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 of
central Britain was completed, and the kingdoms of the conquerors
assumed their final size and shape. AEthelfrith, 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.