THE CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH.
The history of the conversion of our heathen forefathers has happily been
told so often in recent times that it is not necessary to repeat it here.
It is sufficient for our purpose to recall to mind how when Augustine and
his Italian company came to Kent, they addressed themselves to King
Ethelbert, who had married a Christian princess of the House of Clovis,
and were permitted by him to settle and preach in his kingdom; how King
Oswald, on his recovery of his ancestral kingdom of Northumbria, sent to
the Fathers of Iona, among whom he had learnt Christianity during his
exile, for missionaries to convert his people; how Sigebert, King of the
East Saxons, and Peada, sub-King of the Middle Angles in Mercia, obtained
missionaries from Northumbria; how Sigebert, King of the East Angles,
invited Bishop Felix to give to his people the religion and civilization
which he had learnt in exile in Burgundy; how the Italian Bishop Birinus
came to the Court of King Cynegils, and converted him, and taught among
the men of Wessex; and, finally, how Wilfrid of York began the conversion
of the South Saxons.
[Illustration: The Ruined Cathedral, Iona.]
In the Apostolic Age, the conversion of people in a condition of ancient
civilization began among the lower classes of the people, and ascended
slowly man by man through the higher classes, and it was three hundred
years before the conversion of the Emperor Constantine made Christianity
the religion of the empire. In the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms,
the work began in every case with the kings and the higher classes of the
people; and the people under their leadership abandoned their old religion
and accepted Christianity as the national religion, and put themselves
under the teaching of the missionaries, as a general measure of national
policy.
The explanation of this probably is that their Teutonic kinsmen, Goths,
Burgundians, and Franks, who had carved for themselves kingdoms out of the
body of the Roman empire, having accepted the religion and the
civilization of the people they had conquered, were growing rapidly in
prosperity and the arts of civilized life. Christianity was the religion
of the new Teutonic civilization, and heathenism was a part of the old
state of barbarism. The Angles and Saxons, when they fastened upon this
derelict province of the empire, were too barbarous to appreciate
civilization, and destroyed it; but by the time that they had been settled
for some generations in their new seats they had outgrown their old wild
heathenism; and their kings had become sufficiently politic to desire to
learn how to raise the new kingdoms which they governed to an equality
with those of the kindred Continental nations. Hence, some of the
heptarchic kings sought for Christian teachers to help them, and others
were willing to receive them when they offered themselves.
Our previous study of the organization, religion, and customs of the
people will help us to understand the process of the revolution. The
kings, when converted, put the matter before the constitutional council of
chiefs and wise men, and with their assent, and perhaps after a reference
of the question to a folk-mote, formally adopted the new religion. The
history which Bede gives of the first acceptance of Christianity in
Northumbria, under the teaching of Paulinus, affords a profoundly
interesting example of the process--the long hesitation of the king, the
discussion in the witan, the general acceptance of the new faith, the zeal
of the chief priest in destroying the national temple, the flocking of the
people to the preaching of Paulinus, and their baptism in multitudes in
the neighbouring rivers.
In no instance were the missionaries persecuted; in no instance did the
kings coerce their people into the acceptance of the new religion.[14] In
such a wholesale transition from one religion to another, it is not
surprising that there occurred partial and temporary relapses, as in Kent
and Essex, on the death of King Ethelbert, 616, in Wessex on the death of
Cynegils, 643, and again in Essex, after the plague of 664; still less
surprising that old superstitions retained their hold of the minds of a
rude and ignorant people for centuries.[15]
If we are right in our conjectures that every kingdom had a national
temple at the principal residence of the king with a small staff of
priests, and a few smaller temples with their priests under the patronage
of some of the subordinate chiefs, and that these temples were resorted to
by the people for special acts of common worship at the great festivals
three or four times in the course of the year, then it would not be
difficult for the new religion to supply to the people all that they had
been accustomed to of religious observances. Churches on the sites of the
old temples, with their clergy, and services on the great festivals of the
Christian year, would satisfy the customs of the people; and, in fact, the
circumstances of the Christian missionaries led in the first instance to
arrangements of this nature.
In every kingdom the king, who had been the patron of the old religion,
took the new teachers under his protection, and made provision for their
maintenance by the donation of an estate in land with farmers and slaves
upon it; thus Ethelbert gave to Augustine a church and house in
Canterbury, and land outside the city for a site for his monastery, and
estates at Reculver and elsewhere for maintenance; Oswald gave to Aidan
the isle of Lindisfarne, under the shadow of his principal residence at
Bamborough; Ethelwalch gave Wilfred eighty-seven hides at Selsey, and
Wilfrid began his work, as probably the other missionary bishops did, by
emancipating his slaves and baptizing them; Cynegils, on his baptism, gave
Birinus lands round Winchester, and his son Coinwalch endowed the church
there with three manors; a little later, Wulfhere of Mercia gave Chad a
wild tract of a hundred thousand acres between Lichfield and Ecclesfield.
This was the “establishment” and beginning of the “endowment” of the
Church in England.
The bishop in every kingdom first built a church and set up Divine
service, then simultaneously set up a school, and invited the king and
chiefs to send their sons to be educated. Aidan took twelve youths of
noble birth as his pupils, and added slaves whom he purchased. The young
men of noble families showed themselves eager to avail themselves of the
teaching and training of the missionaries, and readily offered themselves
to training for Holy Orders. The ladies at first, before there were
monasteries for women in England, went to the monasteries at Brie and
Chelles near Paris, and at Andelys near Rouen, which were under the
government of members of the Frankish royal families. From his central
station the bishop went out and sent his priests on missionary journeys to
the neighbouring townships, to teach and baptize.
We know that all the first missionary bishops, except Felix and Birinus,
and perhaps they also, and most of their clergy, had been trained in the
monastic life of that time, so that it was natural to them to live in
community, under the rule of a superior, a very simple and regular life,
with frequent offices of prayer, and duties carefully defined, and
scrupulously fulfilled; a beautiful object-lesson on the Christian life
for the study of the king and his household, and the people round about
the bishop’s town.
Bede gives some interesting stories which illustrate this early phase of
the English conversion. He tells us how Paulinus preached all day long to
the people at Yeverin and Catterick[16] in Northumbria, and at
Southwell[17] in Lindsey, and baptized the people by hundreds in the
neighbouring rivers. He tells us how Aidan preached to Oswald’s Court and
people, and the King interpreted for him;[18] how Aidan travelled through
the country on foot, accompanied by a group of monks and laymen,
meditating on the scriptures, or singing psalms as they went;[19] not that
he needed to travel on foot, for King Oswin had given him a fine horse
which he might use in crossing rivers, or upon any urgent necessity; but a
short time after, a poor man meeting him, and asking alms, the good bishop
bestowed upon him the horse with its royal trappings.[20] We learn from
the same authority that the company which attended a missionary bishop in
his progress through the country were not always singing psalms as they
went. Herebald, a pupil of St. John of Beverley, relates how one day as
that bishop and his clergy and pupils were journeying, they came to a
piece of open ground well adapted for galloping their horses, and the
young men importuned the bishop for permission to try their speed, which
he reluctantly granted; and so they ran races till Herebald was thrown,
and, striking his head against a stone, lay insensible; whereupon they
pitched a tent over him.[21]
An “interior” picture is afforded by a sentence in the life of
Boniface,[22] who was afterwards to be the Apostle of Germany. When the
itinerant teachers used to come to the township in which Winfrid’s father
was the principal proprietor, they were hospitably entertained at his
father’s house; and the child would presently talk with them as well as he
could, at such an early age (six or seven years), about heavenly things,
and inquire what might hereafter profit himself and his weakness (A.D.
680).
Finally Bede sums up the work of this period. “The religious habit was at
that period in great veneration; so that wheresoever any clergyman or monk
happened to come, he was joyfully received by all persons as God’s
servant; and if they chanced to meet him on the way, they ran to him, and,
bowing, were glad to be signed with his hand, or blessed with his mouth.
On Sundays they flocked eagerly to the Church or the monasteries, not to
feed their bodies, but to hear the Word of God; and if any priest happened
to come into a village, the inhabitants flocked together to hear the word
of life; for the priests and clergymen went into the village on no other
account than to preach, baptize, visit the sick, and, in short, to take
care of souls.”[23]
So Cuthbert, a little later, not only afforded counsels and an example of
regular life to his monastery, “but often went out of the monastery,
sometimes on horseback, but oftener on foot, and repaired to the
neighbouring towns, where he preached the way to such as were gone astray;
which had been also done by his predecessor Boisil in his time. He was
wont chiefly to visit the villages seated high among the rocky uncouth
mountains, whose poverty and barbarity made them inaccessible to other
teachers. He would sometimes stay away from the monastery one, two, three
weeks, and even a whole month among the mountains, to allure the rustic
people by his eloquent preaching to heavenly employments.”[24]
It seems likely that the itinerating missionaries, on arriving at a
township, would seek out the chief man, first to ask hospitality from him,
and next to engage his interest with the people to assemble together at
some convenient place to hear his preaching. When the people were
converted, he would make arrangements for periodical visits to them for
Divine service, and the “convenient place” would become their outdoor
church; and there is good reason to believe that in many cases a cross of
stone or wood, whichever was the most accessible material, was erected to
mark and hallow the place.[25]
Even after a priest was permanently settled, and a church built at the
ville of the lord of the land, the scattered hamlets on the estate would
still, perhaps for centuries, have only open-air stations for prayer. It
is very possible that some of these were the places where the people,
while unconverted, had been used to assemble for their ancient religious
ceremonies.
[Illustration: Saxon Cross at Ruthwell, c. 680 A.D. (For its history and
description, see “Theodore and Wilfrid,” by the Bishop of Bristol.)]
Some of the Saxon churchyard crosses which still remain, as at Whalley,
Bakewell, Eyam, etc., possibly were station crosses. Possibly the well
which exists in some churches and churchyards, and the yew tree of vast
antiquity found in many churchyards, would carry us back, if we knew their
story, to pre-Christian times and heathen ceremonials.
[Illustration: Churchyard Cross, Eyam, Derbyshire.]
In time a church or chapel was built in this accustomed place of assembly,
as we shall find in a later chapter. But here we have to throw out a
conjecture as to an intermediate state of things between the open-air
station and the structural church. We have before us the curious fact that
usually the rector of a church is liable for the repair of the chancel,
and the people for the repair of the nave. This seems to point to the fact
that the forerunner of the rector built the first chancel, and left the
people to build the nave; and we suggest the following explanation; at
first in the worship of these stations, a temporary table was placed on
trestles, and a “portable altar” upon that, and so the holy mysteries were
celebrated. But in rainy weather this was inconvenient and unseemly; and
the rector of the parish provided a kind of little chapel for the
protection of the altar and ministrant; indeed, there is an ancient
foreign canon which requires rectors to do so. Then the parishioners, for
their own shelter from the weather, built a nave on to the chancel,
communicating with it by an arch through which the congregation could
conveniently see and hear the service.
[Illustration: Base of Acca’s Cross, c. 740 A.D., from “Theodore and
Wilfrid,” by the Bishop of Bristol. S.P.C.K.]