Importance of the anniversaries connected with the years
1894-1897.--Christianity in Kent immediately before Augustine.--Dates
of Bishop Luidhard and Queen Bertha.--Romano-British Churches in
Canterbury.--Who were the Britons.--Traditional origin of British
Christianity.--St. Paul.--Joseph of Arimathea.--Glastonbury.--Roman
references to Britain.
We are approaching an anniversary of the highest interest to all English
people: to English Churchmen first, for it is the thirteen-hundredth
anniversary of the planting of the Church of England; but also to all who
are proud of English civilisation, for the planting of a Christian Church
is the surest means of civilisation, and English civilisation owes
everything to the English Church. In 1897 those who are still here will
celebrate the thirteen-hundredth anniversary of the conversion of
Ethelbert, king of the Kentish people, by Augustine and the band of
missionaries sent by our great benefactor Gregory, the sixty-fourth bishop
of Rome. I am sorry that the limitation of my present subject prevents me
from enlarging upon the merits of that great man, and upon our debt to
him. Englishmen must always remember that it was Gregory who gave to the
Italian Mission whatever force it had; it was Gregory who gave it courage,
when the dangers of a journey through France were sufficient to keep it
for months shivering with fear under the shadow of the Alps; it was
Gregory who gave it such measure of wisdom and common sense as it had,
qualities which its leader sadly lacked. Coming nearer to the present
year, there will be in 1896 the final departure of Augustine from Rome to
commemorate, on July 23, and his arrival here in the late autumn. In 1895
there will be to commemorate the first departure from Rome of Augustine
and his Mission, by way of Lérins and Marseilles to Aix, and the return of
Augustine to Rome, when his companions, in fear of the dangers of the way,
refused to go further. An ill-omened beginning, prophetic and prolific of
like results. The history of the Italian Mission is a history of failure
to face danger. Mellitus fled from London, and got himself safe to Gaul;
Justus fled from Rochester, and got himself safe to Gaul; Laurentius was
packed up to fly from Canterbury and follow them[1]; Paulinus fled from
York. In 1894 we have, as I believe, to commemorate the final abandonment
of earlier and independent plans for the conversion of the English in
Kent, from which abandonment the Mission of Augustine came to be.
It is a very interesting fact that just when we are preparing to
commemorate the thirteen-hundredth anniversary of the introduction of
Christianity into England, and are drawing special attention to the fact
that Christianity had existed in this island, among the Britons, for at
least four hundred years before its introduction to the English, our
neighbours in France are similarly engaged. They are preparing to
celebrate in 1896 the fourteen-hundredth anniversary of "the introduction
of Christianity into France," as the newspapers put it. This means that
in 496, Clovis, king of the Franks, became a Christian; as, in 597,
Ethelbert, king of the Kentish-men, became a Christian[2]. As we have to
keep very clear in our minds the distinction between the introduction of
Christianity among the English, from whom the country is called England,
and its introduction long before into Britain; so our continental
neighbours have to keep very clear the difference between the introduction
of Christianity among the Franks, from whom the country is called France,
and its introduction long before into Gaul. The Archbishop of Rheims,
whose predecessor Remigius baptized Clovis in 496, is arranging a solemn
celebration of their great anniversary; and the Pope has accorded a six
months' jubilee in honour of the occasion. No doubt the Archbishop of
Canterbury, whose predecessor Augustine baptized Ethelbert, will in like
manner make arrangements for a solemn celebration of our great
anniversary. It would be an interesting and fitting thing, to hold a
thanksgiving service within the walls of Richborough, which is generally
accepted as the scene of Augustine's first interview with King Ethelbert,
and has now been secured and put into the hands of trustees[3]. The two
commemorations, at Rheims and at Canterbury, are linked together in a
special way by the fact that Clotilde, the Christian wife of Clovis, was
the great-grandmother of Bertha, the Christian wife of Ethelbert.
In the year 594, two years before the arrival of Augustine, there was, and
I believe had long been, a Christian queen in pagan Kent; there was, and I
believe had long been, a Christian bishop in pagan Canterbury, sent there
to minister to the Christian queen. An excellent opening this for the
conversion of the king and people, an opening intentionally created by
those who made the marriage on the queen's side. But, however hopeful the
opening, the immediate result was disappointing. If more of missionary
help had been sent from Gaul, from whence this bishop came, the conversion
of the king and people might have come in the natural way, by an inflow of
Christianity from the neighbouring country. But such help, though
pressingly asked for, was not given; and as I read such signs as there
are, this year 594, of which we now inaugurate the thirteen-hundredth
anniversary, was the year in which it came home to those chiefly concerned
that the conversion was not to be effected by the means adopted. Beyond
some very limited area of Christianity, only the queen and some few of her
people, and the religious services maintained for them, the bishop's work
was to be barren. The limited work which he did was that for which
ostensibly he had come; but I think we are meant to understand that his
Christian ambition was larger than this, his Christian hope higher. I
shall make no apology for dwelling a little upon the circumstances of this
Christian work, immediately before the coming of Augustine. It may seem a
little discursive; but it forms, I think, a convenient introduction to our
general subject.
Who Bishop Luidhard was, is a difficult question. That he came from Gaul
is certain, but his name is clearly Teutonic; whence, perhaps, his
acceptability as a visitor to the English. He has been described as Bishop
of Soissons; but the lists of bishops there make no mention of him, nor do
the learned authors and compilers of _Gallia Christiana_. This assignment
of Luidhard to the bishopric of Soissons may perhaps be explained by an
interesting story.
The Bishop of Soissons, a full generation earlier than the time of which
we are speaking, was Bandaridus. He was charged before King Clotaire, that
one of the four sons of the first Clovis who succeeded to the kingdom
called "of Soissons," with many offences of many kinds; and he was
banished. He crossed over to England--for so Britain is described in the
old account--and there lived in a monastery for seven years, performing
the humble functions of a kitchen-gardener. Whether the story is
sufficiently historical to enable us to claim the continuance of Christian
monasteries of the British among the barbarian Saxons so late as 540, I am
not clear. There was a little Irish monastery at Bosham, among the pagan
South-Saxons, a hundred and forty years later. It is easy, I think, to
overrate the hostility of the early English to Christianity. Penda of
Mercia has the character of being murderously hostile; but it was land,
not creed, that he cared for. He was quite broad and undenominational in
his slaughters.
About A. D. 545, a great plague raged at Soissons, and the people begged
for the return of their bishop. He went back to his old charge, and there
is no suggestion that he ever left it again. This legend of a Bishop of
Soissons coming to our island, may well have given rise to the tradition
that Bishop Luidhard, who certainly was living in the time of Bandaridus,
had been Bishop of Soissons. In any case, the incidental hint the story
gives us of the skill of our neighbours on the continent in the
cultivation of vegetables, even at that early time, makes the story worth
reproduction. The Bishop of Soissons, at the time of which we are
speaking, was Droctigisilus (variously spelled, as might perhaps be
expected). Of him Gregory of Tours tells that he lost his senses through
over-drinking. Gregory adds a moral reflection--if we can so describe
it--which does not give us a very high idea of the practical Christianity
of the times. It is this:--"Though he was a voracious eater, and drank
immoderately, exceeding the bounds which priestly caution should impose,
no one ever accused him of adultery[4]." If we must choose a bishop of
Soissons to be represented by Luidhard, we may fairly prefer the
vegetable-gardener to the immoderate drinker.
We read, again, in fairly early times, that our first Christian bishop in
England had been bishop of Senlis. The authors and compilers of _Gallia
Christiana_ insert the name of Lethardus, or Letaldus, among the bishops
of Senlis, quoting Sprot and Thorn. He was said to have come over with
Bertha as early as 566, and they insert him accordingly after a bishop who
subscribed at the third Council of Paris in 557. Jacques du Perron, bishop
of Angoulême, almoner to Queen Henrietta Maria, took this view of his
predecessor, the almoner of Queen Bertha, that he had been Bishop of
Senlis. The parallel which he drew between the two cases of the first
Christian queen and her almoner, and the first Romanist queen after the
final rupture and her almoner, was much in point. "Gaul it was that sent
to the English their first Christian queen. The clergy of Gaul it was that
sent them their first bishop, her almoner." But the sacramentary of
Senlis, the calendar of commemorations, and the list of bishops, all are
silent as to this Bishop Lethardus. Let me note for future use that these
places, Soissons and Senlis, were in Belgic Gaul, that part of the
continent which was directly opposite to the south-eastern parts of
Britain.
I have said more about the diocese to which Luidhard may have belonged
than I think the question deserves. This is done out of respect to my
predecessors in the enquiry. The idea that a bishop must have had a see is
natural enough to us, but is not according to knowledge. A hundred and
fifty years later than this, there were so many wandering bishops in Gaul,
that a synod held in this very diocese of Soissons declared that wandering
bishops must not ordain priests; but that if any priests thus ordained
were good priests, they should be reordained. And a great Council of all
the bishops of Gaul, held at Verneuil in 755, declared that wandering
bishops, who had not dioceses, should be incapable of performing any
function without permission of the diocesan bishop. There is no suggestion
that these were foreign bishops; and it was before the time when the
invasions of Ireland by the Danes drove into England and on to the
continent a perfect plague of Irish ecclesiastics calling themselves
bishops. I think it is on the whole fair to say that the more you study
the early history of episcopacy in these parts of Europe, the less need
you feel to find a see for Bishop Luidhard.
There is one very interesting fact, which deserves to be noted in
connection with this mysterious Gallican bishop. The Italian Mission paid
very special honour to his memory and his remains. There is in the first
volume of Dugdale's _Monasticon_[5] a copy of an ancient drawing of St.
Augustine's, Canterbury. This is not, of course, the Cathedral Church,
which was an old church of the British times restored by Augustine and
dedicated to the Saviour; "Christ Church" it still remains. St.
Augustine's was the church and monastery begun in Augustine's lifetime,
and dedicated soon after his death to St. Peter and St. Paul, as Bede (i.
33) and various documents tell us precisely. This fact, that the church
was dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul, was represented last June, when
"the renewal of the dedication of England to St. Mary and St. Peter" took
place[6], by the statement that "the first great abbey church of
Canterbury was dedicated to St. Peter." In the preparatory pastoral,
signed by Cardinal Vaughan and fourteen other Roman Catholic Bishops,
dated May 20, 1893, the statement took this form[7]:--"The second
monastery of Canterbury was dedicated to St. Peter himself." Not only is
that not so, but I cannot find evidence that Augustine dedicated any
church anywhere "to St. Peter himself." Of the two Apostles, St. Peter and
St. Paul, who were united in the earliest of all Saints' days, and still
are so united in the Calendar of the Roman Church, though we have given to
them two separate days, of the two, if we must choose one of them, St.
Paul, not St. Peter, was made by Augustine the Apostle of England. To St.
Paul was dedicated the first church in England dedicated to either of the
two "himself," that is, alone; and that, too, this church, the first and
cathedral church of the greater of the two places assigned by Gregory as
the two Metropolitical sees of England, London and York.
The "dedication of England to St. Mary" has a similar difficulty to face.
There is no evidence that Augustine assigned any dedication to the Blessed
Virgin. The first church mentioned with that dedication was built by
Laurentius and dedicated by Mellitus. But if twenty churches had been
dedicated by Augustine to the Virgin and to St. Peter, England would have
been the richer by twenty churches, and that would have been all.
The ancient drawing to which I am referring was made after 1325, when St.
Ethelbert was added to the Apostles Peter and Paul and St. Augustine in
the dedication of the high altar. It was copied for Sir William Dugdale's
purposes in 1652, at which time it had passed into the safe hands of one
of the Cambridge Colleges, Trinity Hall. The altar is shewn as deeply
recessed into a structural reredos. A large number of shrines are shewn,
ranged in semi-circles behind the reredos. On either side of the altar
there is a door, as in our reredos at St. Paul's. They are marked "north
door" and "south door," "to the bodies of the saints." On the shrines,
shewn in the apse to which these doors lead, are written the names of
those whose relics they contained, and the roll of names is illustrious.
In the centre, at the extreme east, is Augustine, with Laurentius and
Mellitus north and south of him: then, on the north, Justus, Deusdedit,
Mildred, Nothelm, and Lambert; on the south, Honorius, Theodore, Abbat
Hadrian, Berhtwald, and Tatwin. Besides these shrines in the apse, behind
the reredos, there is shewn immediately above the altar itself a
prominent shrine, marked Scs. Ethelbertus, the relics of the first
Christian king. Then, behind that, a number of books--manuscripts, of
course--with a Latin description stating that they are "books sent by
Gregory to Augustine"--one or two of which are still in existence. Above
these, on either side of a great vesica enclosing a representation of our
Lord, are two shrines, one marked "Relics," the other, which stands on the
side of greater honour, is marked Scs. Letald(us). Thus the Canterbury
monks at St. Augustine's, the great treasure-house of early Canterbury
saints, put in the places of highest honour the relics of Bertha's husband
and of Bertha's Gallican bishop. It is a pleasant thought in these days of
ecclesiastical jealousies--and when were there days, before Christ or
since, without ecclesiastical jealousies?--it is a very pleasant thought
that the successors of Augustine paid such honour to Augustine's Gallican
precursor, whose work they might almost have been expected, considering
the temper of the times, to be inclined to ignore. The shrine with
Luidhard's relics no doubt represents the golden chest in which--as we
know--they used to carry his relics round Canterbury on Rogation Days.
It is not easy, indeed it is not possible, to make sure of the dates
connected with Luidhard's work among the English at Canterbury--to give
them the general name of "English." It is of some importance to make the
attempt. The indications seem to me to point to a ministry of some
considerable duration; but I am aware that among the many views expressed
incidentally in the books, some names of great weight appear on the other
side. When Ethelbert died in 616, Bede tells us that he had reigned
gloriously for fifty-six years; that is, he began to reign in 560, a date
earlier than that assigned by the Chronicle. Matthew of Westminster thinks
Bede and the rest were wrong. With the Chronicle, he puts Ethelbert's
accession later, as late as 566; but he keeps to Bede's fifty-six years'
reign, and so makes him die in 622, much too late. If, as is said[8], he
was born in 552, he was eight years old at his accession--rather an early
age for an English sovereign in those times--and sixty-four at his death.
His wife Bertha, whose marriage dates the arrival of Luidhard, was the
daughter of Charibert, king of that part of the domains of his grandfather
Clovis which gave to its sovereign the title of King of Paris. Her mother
was Ingoberga; and if the statement of Gregory of Tours, that king
Charibert married Ingoberga, is to be taken strictly, i.e. if he married
her after his accession, Bertha was born about 561. But I much doubt
whether Charibert had time for all his many marital wickednesses in his
short reign, and I am inclined to think that he married a good deal
earlier. He was the eldest son of his father Clotaire, who died in 561,
and the known dates of Clovis make it probable that Charibert was of
marriageable age a good many years before he succeeded his father.
So far as these considerations go, Bertha may have been of much the same
age as her husband Ethelbert, and their marriage may have taken place
about the year 575. I find nothing in the notices of Gregory of Tours
inconsistent with this. Indeed, it may fairly be said that Gregory's facts
indicate a date quite as early as that I have suggested. Ingoberga put
herself under Gregory's own special charge. He describes her admirable
manner of life in her widowhood, passed in a religious life, without any
hint that her daughter was with her; and when she died in 589, Gregory
guessed her age at seventy.
The chief reason for assigning a later date to the marriage is that King
Edwin of Northumbria married Ethelberga, Bertha's daughter, in 625. Edwin
was then a middle-aged widower, but that does not quite decide for us what
sort of age he was likely to look for in a second wife. If Ethelberga was
thirty when she married Edwin, Bertha would be about forty, or a little
more, when her daughter was born.
There is one argument in favour of Bertha's marriage having been long
before the coming of Augustine, which has, I think, generally escaped
notice. In the letter which Gregory sent from Rome to Bertha,
congratulating her on the conversion of her husband, Gregory urges her,
now that, the time is fit, to repair what has been neglected; he remarks
that she ought some time ago, or long ago, to have bent her husband's mind
in this direction; and he tells her that the Romans have earnestly prayed
for her life. All this, especially the "some time ago," or "long ago,"
looks unlike a recent marriage. It is interesting to notice, in view of
recent assertions and claims, that Gregory does not make reference to St.
Peter in this letter, as Boniface did in writing to Bertha's daughter. In
his letter to Ethelbert, Gregory remarks at the end that he is sending him
some small presents, which will not be small to him, as they come from the
benediction of the blessed Peter the Apostle. Boniface, his fifth
successor, considerably developed the Petrine position. Writing to Edwin
of Northumbria, curiously enough while he was still a pagan, he says:--"We
have sent to you a benediction of your protector the blessed Peter, prince
of the Apostles, that is to say, a chemise embroidered with gold, and a
garment of Ancyra." Probably Boniface did not know how nearly related the
Galatian workers of the garment of Ancyra were to the Gallo-Britons whom
Edwin's ancestors had expelled. And his letter to Ethelberga ended in the
same way:--"We have sent to you a blessing of your protector the blessed
Peter, prince of the Apostles, that is to say, a silver mirror and an
ivory comb inlaid with gold." It is a significant note on this difference
of language, that in the ordinary lists, where a distinction, more or less
arbitrary, is made between bishops and popes, the break comes between
Gregory and Boniface.
On the whole, then, I believe that Ethelbert and Bertha had been married
many years when Augustine came, and, by consequence, that Luidhard had
been living among the English many years. Though his work was in the end
barren, there had been times when it was distinctly promising. His
experiment had so far succeeded, that only more help was wanted to bring
the heathen people to Christ. That help he had sought; perhaps especially
when he felt old age coming upon him. Gregory distinctly states, in more
than one of his letters, that the English people were very ready, were
desirous, to be converted, and that applications for missionary help had
been made, but made in vain, to the neighbouring priests. The tone and
address of the letters imply that this meant the clergy of the
neighbouring parts of Gaul. There certainly would be no response if they
applied to the very nearest part they could reach by the ordinary route,
namely, their landing-place, Boulogne. We Londoners are accustomed to say,
no doubt with due contrition, but at the same time with some lurking sense
of consequence, as having been actors in a striking episode, that after a
few years of Christianity we went off into paganism again in a not
undramatic manner, and from 616 to 654 repudiated Christianity. This fact
is indicated by an eloquent void on our alabaster tablets of bishops of
London in the south aisle of this church. At the time of which I am
speaking, 594 or thereabouts, the Gauls of Boulogne were having the
experience which the English of London were so soon to have. In London we
turned out our first Italian bishop, our first bishop, that is, of the
second series of bishops of London, after the restoration of Christianity
on this site. In Boulogne and Terouenne, where the first bishop they ever
had was sent to them after the year 500, they relapsed into paganism in
about fifty years' time, and in 594 they had been pagans for many years.
Pagans they remained till 630, when Dagobert got St. Omer to win them
back. St. Omer died in 667, the year after Cedd died, who won us back. It
is clear, then, that the appeals from the English to the Gauls for
conversion, at any date consistent with the facts, must have gone beyond
Boulogne.
It has been thought that the appeal was made to the British priests, who
had retired to the mountainous parts of the island, beyond the reach of
the slaying Saxon; but there would be no point in Gregory's remarks to his
Gallican correspondents if that were so. And how Gregory was to know that
appeals had been made by the English to the Britons for instruction in
Christianity, appeals most improbable from the nature of the case, no one
can say. On the other hand, he was distinctly in a position to know of
such application to the Gauls, for his presbyter Candidus had gone to
Gaul, and there was to purchase some pagan English boys of seventeen or
eighteen to be brought up in monasteries. This had taken place a very
short time before the mission set out, as is clear from Gregory's letter
to the Patrician of Gaul.
The facts suggest that Luidhard was now quite an old man, and had failed
to get any Gallican bishop to take up the work he could no longer carry
on. And accordingly, tradition makes him die a month or two after
Augustine's arrival. If we look to the language of Bede, we shall see, I
think, that Luidhard had become incapable of carrying on his work when
Augustine and his companions arrived. For they at once entered upon the
use of his church. "There was on the east side of the city a church
erected of old in honour of St. Martin[9], when the Romans were still
inhabiting Britain, where the queen used to pray. In this church they met
at first, to sing, pray, celebrate masses, preach, and baptise; till the
king, on his conversion, gave them larger licence, to preach anywhere, and
to build and restore churches."
Now, quite apart from Luidhard's long and faithful work, we have seen that
there was in Canterbury the fabric of a Christian church remaining from
the time before the English came; and that there was in Canterbury the
fabric of another church, out of which they made their Cathedral church.
There was a church in existence at Canterbury when our bishop Mellitus was
archbishop there, between 619 and 624, dedicated to the Four Crowned
Martyrs of Diocletian's persecution, the Quattro Santi Incoronati, whose
church is one of the most interesting in Rome. But this Canterbury church
may have been built by the Italians.
Again, there is very unmistakable and interesting Roman work at St.
Pancras, in Canterbury; and this was, according to tradition, the temple
which Ethelbert had appropriated for the worship of his idols, and now
gave for Christian purposes. The tradition further says that it had once
been a Christian church, before the pagan English came; and the remains of
the Roman building still visible are believed to point in that direction.
The church of St. Pancras at Rome was built about 500. In connection with
this idea of a pagan temple being used by the Christian clergy for a
church, we may remember that the Pantheon at Rome was turned into a church
seven or eight years after this, the dedication being changed from "all
the Gods" to "St. Mary of the Martyrs," and this was the origin of the
Festival of All Saints[10]. Bede adds an important fact, that Ethelbert
gave the Italians a general licence to restore churches.
How did it come about that when the Italians came to heathen England, they
found here these remains of Christian churches, needing only repair? Who
built them? Was it an accidental colony of Christians, that had been
settled in Canterbury, or had there been what we may call a British
Church, a Christian church in Britain, long before the Saxons came, longer
still by far before the Italians? The answer to those questions is not a
short or a simple one, when we once get beyond the bare "yes" and "no."
Many other questions rise up on all sides, when we are looking for an
answer to the original questions. It is my aim to take those who care to
come with me over some parts of the field of inquiry; rather courting than
avoiding incidental illustrations and digressions; for I think that in
that informal way we pick up a good deal of interesting information, and
get perhaps to feel more at home in a period than by pursuing a more
formal and stilted course. Indeed a good deal of what I have said already
has evidently been said with that object.
The first question I propose for our consideration is this:--Who were the
people who built the churches? It is not a very explanatory answer, to
say "The Britons." There is a good deal left to the imagination in that
answer, with most of us. With the help of the best qualified students, but
without any hope that we could harmonise all the diverse views if we went
far into detail, let us look into the matter a little. It may be well for
all of us to remember in this enquiry that our foundations are not very
solid; we are on thin ice. Nor is the way very smooth; it is easy to trip.
We need not go back to the time of the cavemen, interesting and indeed
artistic as the evidence of their remains shews them to have been. Their
reign was over before Britain became an island, before a channel separated
it from the continent. It is enough for our present purpose to realise,
that when the great geological changes had taken place which produced
something like the present geographical arrangements, but still in
prehistoric times, times long before the beginning of history so far as
these islands are concerned, our islands were occupied by a race which
existed also in the north-west and extreme west of Europe. Herodotus knew
nothing of the existence of our islands; but he tells us that in his time
the people furthest to the west, nearer to the setting sun than even the
Celtae, were called Kynesii, or Kynetes. Archaeological investigations
shew that, though he did not know it, his statement covered our islands.
The people of whom he wrote were certainly here as well as on the western
parts of the continent. As some of us may have some of their blood in our
veins, we may leave others to discuss the question whether the names
Kynesii, Kynetes, mean "dog-men," and if so, what that implies. St. Jerome
in the course of his travels, say about 370 years after Christ, saw a body
of savage soldiers in the Roman army, brought from a part of what is now
Scotland--if an Englishman dare say such a thing; they were fed, he tells
us, on human flesh. The locality from which they came indicates that they
were possibly representatives of these earlier "dog-men," if that is the
meaning of Kynetes. Secular historians, long before Jerome, have an
uncomfortable way of saying that the inhabitants of the interior of
Britain were cannibals, and their matrimonial arrangements resembled those
of herds of cattle. As we in London had relations with the centre of the
country, we may argue--and I think rightly--that by "the interior" the
historians did not mean what we call the Midlands, but meant the parts
furthest removed from the ports of access in the south-east, that is, the
far west and the far north.
Next, and again before the history of our islands begins, an immigration
of Celts[11] took place, a people belonging--unlike the earlier race of
whom I have spoken--to the same Indo-European family of nations to which
the Latins, and the Teutons, and the Greeks, and the speakers of Sanskrit,
belonged. Of their various cousin-nations, these Celts were nearest in
language to the Latins, we are told, and, after the Latins, to the
Teutons. They came to this island, it is understood, from the country
which we call France.
Thirdly, the Gauls, who on the continent had both that name and the name
of the older Celts[12], and must be regarded as the dominant sub-division
of their race, impelled in their turn by pressure from the south and east,
came over into these islands, and here were called Britons[13]. They
squeezed out the earlier occupants from most part of the larger island,
driving them north and west and south-west, as the Celtic inhabitants
long before had driven the earlier race. When the Romans came, fifty years
before Christ, these Britons occupied the land practically from the south
coast to the further side of the Firth of Forth. There had been for some
time before Caesar's arrival a steady inflow of Belgic Gauls, people from
the eastward parts of what we call France; and these people, the most
recent comers among the Britons, were found chiefly on the coasts, but in
parts had extended to considerable distances inland. The Celts, to
distinguish the preceding immigrants by that name, though in fact it does
not properly convey the distinction, occupied Devon and Cornwall, South
Wales, the north-west corner of North Wales, Cumberland, and the
south-west of what we now call Scotland, that is, Wigton, Kirkcudbright,
Dumfries, and part of Ayr. They occupied also a belt of Caledonia north of
Stirling. They occupied at least the eastern parts of Ireland. Anglesey
and Man were in their hands. The parts of Scotland north of Perthshire and
Forfar may be regarded as the principal refuge of the remnant of the
people whom we have described as the earlier race, before the Celts; and
there were traces of them left in almost all the parts occupied by their
immediate successors the Celts. The name by which we ought probably to
call these latter, the Celts, in whatever part of the islands they might
be, has been familiarly used in a sense so limited that it might cause
confusion to use it now in its larger sense. I mean Gael, and Gaelic.
Now we gather from the records that before the Jutes and the Angles and
the Saxons came, and in their turn drove the Britons north and west, the
religion of Christ had spread to all parts of the territory occupied by
the Britons, that is, to the towns in all parts. It may very well have
been that in the country parts there were many pagans left even to the
last, perhaps in towns too. Putting the commencement of the driving out of
the Britons at about the year 450 after Christ, we know that less than a
hundred years before that time the pagans were so numerous in Gaul, that
when Martin became Bishop of Tours, the pagans were everywhere, and to
work for their conversion would have been sufficient work for him. As for
the towns in Gaul, Hilary, the Bishop of Poitiers, was a leading official
in that town, and only became a Christian in the year 350, when he was
about thirty-five years of age. Martin of Tours, too, was born a heathen.
We may be sure that in Britain, so remote from the centres of influence,
and so inaccessible by reason of its insular position, that state of
things continued to prevail a good deal longer than in the civilised parts
of Gaul. We must not credit our British predecessors with anything like a
universal knowledge and acceptance of Christianity.
It is not necessary to dwell on the familiar fact of the intermixture of
the Romans and the Britons. In the more important towns there was much
blending of the two races, and the luxurious arts of Rome produced their
effect in softening the British spirit. The Briton gave up more than he
gained in the mixed marriages, and it seems clear that the Romano-Britons
who were left to face the barbarous Picts and Scots, and the hardy Angles
and Saxons, were by comparison an enervated race. In the parts further
remote from commercial and municipal centres, and from the military lines,
it is probable that the invaders found much tougher work. It is only fair
to the later Romano-Britons, to remember that all the flower of the youth
of Britain had been carried away by one general and emperor after another,
to fight the battles of Rome, or to support the claims of a usurper of the
imperial purple, in Gaul and Spain and Italy; and when the imperial
troops were finally withdrawn, the older men and the less hardy of the
youths of Britain were left to cope with enemies who had baffled the Roman
arms.
So much for the Britons. As for the Celts, we have sufficient evidence
that the message of Christ was taken to them and welcomed by them in the
later parts of the period ending with 450. During the years of the
struggle between the Britons and their Teutonic invaders, say from 450 to
590, this Christianising went on among the Celts. About the end of that
period it reached even to the furthest parts of the north, the parts
which, in the early times of the Roman occupation, were probably held by
descendants of the earlier race, and it more or less covered Ireland.
Thus the knowledge of the Christian faith had, before the English came,
extended over the whole of that part of this island which the English
invaders in their furthest reach ever occupied. It had covered--and it
continued to cover, and has never ceased to cover--very much that they
never even touched. To convert the early English to Christ, which was the
task undertaken by Augustine, a very small part of it being accomplished
by him or his mission from first to last, was to restore Christianity to
those parts from which the English had driven it out. It was to remove
the barrier of heathendom which the English invaders had formed between
the Church universal and the Celtic and British church or churches. It
proved in the end that the undertaking was much beyond the powers of the
Italian missionaries; and then the earlier church stepped in from its
confines in the West and did the work. It was so that the great English
province of Northumbria--meaning vastly more than Northumberland, even all
the land from Humber to Forth--was evangelized. It was so that the great
English province of Mercia--the whole of the middle of the
island--received the message of Christ. It was so that Christianity was
given back to Essex and to us in London, by the labours of our Bishop
Cedd, consecrated, as the crown of his long and faithful labours among our
heathen predecessors, by the Celtic Bishop Finan of Lindisfarne. Cedd is
an admirable example of the careful methods of the Celtic Church. He was
not a Celt himself, he was an Angle. When the English branch of the Celtic
Church, settled at Lindisfarne and evangelizing Northumbria, had succeeded
in converting the son of the Mercian king, they sent him four priests as
missionaries to his people, a people who were in large part Angles. Of
these four priests, trained and sent by the Celtic Church for the
conversion of the English, only one was a Celt; the other three, including
Cedd, were themselves Angles. To send Anglian priests to convert Anglian
people was indeed a wise and broad policy; and it was, as it deserved to
be, eminently successful. It is a striking contradiction of the prevalent
idea that the Celtic Church was isolated, narrow, bigoted; unable and
unwilling to work with any but those of its own blood.
There are, then, these two main divisions before us, of the people who
occupied these islands when the Romans came, and still occupied them when
the English came, the Britons and the Celts[14]. We are not to suppose
that this is nothing more than a mere dead piece of archaeology. It is a
very living fact. A large proportion of those who are here to-day have
to-day--possibly some of them not knowing it--kept alive the distinction
between Briton and Celt. Every one who has spoken the name Mackenzie, or
Macpherson, or any other Mac, has used the Celtic speech in its most
characteristic feature. Every one who has spoken the name Price, that is,
ap Rhys, or any other name formed with ap[15], has taken the Briton's side
on this characteristic point. When you speak of Pen(maen)maur and the king
Malcolm Ceanmor you are saying the same words; but in Penmaenmaur you take
the Briton's side, in speaking of Ceanmor you take the Celt's. You will
not find a better example than that which we owe to our dear Bede. The
wall of Antonine abuts on the river Forth at Kinnell, a name which does
not seem to have much to do with the end of a wall. But Bede tells us that
the Picts of his day called it Penfahel, that is, head of the wall,
"fahel" being only "wall" pronounced as some of our northern neighbours
would pronounce it, the interesting people who say "fat" for "what." He
adds that the English, his own people, called it Penel, cutting the
Penfahel short. The Britons called it Penguaul. The modern name Kinnell is
the Celtic form of Penel.
Those being the people, and that the extent to which Christianity had in
the end spread among them, how did Christianity find its way here?
The various suggestions that have from time to time been made, in the
course of the early centuries, as to the introduction of Christianity to
this island, were collected and commented on in a searching manner
twenty-five years ago by two men of great learning and judgement. One of
them was taken away from historical investigations, and from his canonry
of St. Paul's, to the laborious and absorbing work of a bishop. The other
was lost to historical study by death. I need scarcely name Dr. Stubbs and
Mr. Haddan. Their work has made darkness almost light.
We cannot wonder that the marvellous apostolic journeys and missionary
work of St. Paul so vividly impressed the minds of the early Christian
writers, that they attributed to him even more than he actually performed.
Clement of Rome, of whom I suppose the great majority of students of the
Scripture and of Church History believe that he actually knew St. Paul,
says that Paul preached both in the West and in the East, and taught the
whole world, even to the limits of the West. Chrysostom says that from
Illyricum Paul went to the very ends of the earth. These are the strongest
statements which can be advanced by those who think that St. Paul himself
may have visited Britain. He may have reached Spain. There does not
appear to be any evidence that he ever reached Gaul; still less Britain.
One of the Greek historians, Eusebius, writing about 315, appears to say
that Britain was Christianised by some of the disciples; and another,
Theodoret, about 423, names the Britons among those who were persuaded to
receive the laws of the Crucified, by "our fishermen and publicans." This
is evidence, and very interesting evidence, of the general belief that
Britain was Christianised early in the history of Christianity, but it
practically amounts to nothing more definite than that[16].
But a very curious connection may be made out, between the Britons and the
great apostle of the Gentiles.
In speaking of the relations, real or fairly imaginable, between Soissons
or Senlis and the English in the parts of the island which lie opposite to
that part of Gaul, I asked you to note that this was Belgic Gaul. We have
seen that for some time before Julius Caesar's invasion a change had been
going on in the population of those parts of Britain to which I now refer.
The Belgae had been crossing the narrow sea and settling here, presumably
driving away the inhabitants whom they found. They so specially occupied
the parts where now Hampshire is, that the capital city, Went, was named
from them by the Latins Venta Belgarum, Belgian Venta; to return in later
times to its old name of Caer Went, this is, Went Castle, Winchester.
Indeed, the Belgae are credited with the occupation of territory up to the
borders of Devon. The British tribe of the Atrebates, again, were the
same people as the Gauls in the district of Arras; and they occupied a
large tract of country stretching away from the immediate west of London.
Caesar remarks on this fact that the immigrant Gauls retained the names of
their continental districts and cities. The Parisii on the east coast,
north of the Humber, afford another illustration.
Now when Jerome, about the year 367, was at Trèves, the capital of Gaul,
situate in Belgic Gaul, he learned the native tongue of the Belgic Gauls;
and when later in his life he travelled through Galatia, in Asia Minor, he
found the people there speaking practically the same language as the Gauls
about Trèves. Thus we are entitled to claim the Galatians as of kin to the
Belgic division of the Gauls, and therefore as the same people with those
who from before Caesar's time flowed steadily over from Belgic Gaul to
Britain. That the Galatians were Gauls is of course a well-known fact in
history; the point I wish to note is that they were Belgic Gauls. We may
therefore see in St. Paul's epistle to the Galatian churches a description
of the national character of the Britons of these parts of the island.
Fickleness, superstition, and quarrelsomeness, are the characteristics on
which he remarks. The very first words of the Epistle, after the preface,
strike a clear and forcible note:--"I marvel that ye are so quickly moved
to abandon the gospel of him that called you, for another gospel." Again,
"O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you!" "Ye were in bondage to them
which are by nature no gods;... how turn ye back again to the weak and
beggarly rudiments, whereunto ye desire to be in bondage over again!" "If
ye bite and devour one another." Without at all saying that these national
characteristics are traceable in any parts of our islands now, it is
evident that they are in close accord with what we hear of the early
inhabitants. As also is another remark made in early times, "the Gauls
begin their fights with more than the strength of men, they finish them
with less than the strength of women."
The line taken by a recent writer, Professor W. M. Ramsay, in his most
interesting and able book, "The Church in the Roman Empire," traverses
this argument about the Galatian Epistle. In opposition to the great
divine who for eight years spoke from this pulpit, and made this Epistle a
special study for a great part of his life, Professor Ramsay maintains, by
arguments drawn from geographical and epigraphical facts not known thirty
years ago, when Dr. Lightfoot first wrote, that the Epistle was addressed
to the people in the southern part of the Roman province called Galatia,
who were not Galatians at all; and was not addressed to those in the
northern part, who were Galatians proper, and occupied the whole of the
country named from them Galatia. But I use the illustration,
notwithstanding this. The controversy is not quite ended yet; and I do not
feel sure that the difficulties of the Epistle itself, from Professor
Ramsay's point of view, are very much less considerable than those which
Dr. Lightfoot's view undoubtedly has to face. In any case the Galatians
proper were of close kin with the more civilised of our British
predecessors--ancestors we may perhaps say--and this at least gives us a
personal interest in what at first sight would seem to be a very far-off
controversy.
The tradition which used to find most favour was that Joseph of Arimathea
came over with twelve companions, and received from a British king in the
south-west a portion of land for each of his companions, and founded the
ecclesiastical establishment of Glastonbury. There is certainly some very
ancient history connected with the "twelve hides" of Glastonbury. Go as
far back as we will in the records, we never come to the beginning of the
"xii. hidæ." The Domesday Survey tells us, eight hundred years ago, that
the twelve hides "never have been taxed." Clearly they take us back to
some very early donation; and I see no reason--beyond the obvious
difficulty of its geographical remoteness--against the tradition that here
was the earliest Christian establishment in Britain. At the Council of
Basle, in 1431, when the Western Church was holding councils with a view
to reforming from within the enormous abuses of the Roman Court, a prelude
to the "Reformation" into which we were driven a hundred years later, the
precedence of churches was determined by the date of their foundation. The
English Church claimed and received precedence as founded in Apostolic
times by Joseph of Arimathea. Those were not very critical days, so far as
historical evidence was concerned, and I should not have mentioned this
legend, or should only have mentioned it and passed on, but for a recent
illustration of a part of the story. The more we look into early local
legends, the more disinclined we become to say that there is nothing
substantial in them. The story has from early times gone, that the first
British Christians erected at Glastonbury a church made of twigs, of
wattle-work. This wattle church survived the violent changes which swept
over the face of the land. Indeed, it is said, and with so much of
probability that Mr. Freeman was willing to accept it as a fact, that
Glastonbury was the one place outside the fastnesses to which the British
Christians fled, where Christian worship was not interrupted when the
English came. This wattle church survived till after the Norman invasion,
when it was burned by accident[17]. Wattle-work is a very perishable
material; and of all things of the kind the least likely would seem to be,
that we, in this nineteenth century, should, in confirmation of the story,
discover at Glastonbury an almost endless amount of British wattle-work.
Yet that is exactly what has happened. In the low ground, now occupying
the place of the impenetrable marshes which gave the name of the Isle of
Avalon to the higher ground, the eye of a local antiquary had long marked
a mass of dome-shaped hillocks, some of them of very considerable
diameter, and about seventy in number, clustered together in what is now
a large field, a mile and a quarter from Glastonbury. The year before
last he began to dig. Peat had formed itself in the long course of time,
and its preservative qualities had kept safe for our eyes that which it
enclosed and covered. The hillocks proved to be the remains of British
houses burned with fire. They were set on ground made solid in the midst
of waters, with causeways for approach from the land. The faces of the
solid ground and the sides of the causeways are revetted with wattle-work.
There is wattle-work all over, strong and very well made. It clearly was
the main stand-by of the Britons, whose fortress this was, and their skill
in making it and applying it was great. The wattle when first uncovered is
as good to all appearance as the day it was made. The huts are oval and
circular, and some are of large dimensions. The largest of all are not yet
opened, but already a hut covering about 450 square feet has been found.
All have a circular area of white stones in the middle, carried from far,
for a hearth, &c., and all have been destroyed by fire. But though the
fire has destroyed the huts completely, it has preserved for us the
account of the material of which they were made, as clearly as if it were
inscribed on the brick cylinders of an Assyrian king. It has baked the
clay with which the huts were covered, and the baked clay shews the
impress of wattle-work. The houses of the Britons at Glastonbury were, as
a matter of fact, as long tradition tells us their church was, made of
wattles[18].
Julius Caesar speaks more than once of the skill of the British in this
respect. He tells us of the plaiting together of the branches of growing
trees to form barriers in the woods, which his soldiers found unpleasantly
effective. We read also of the wattle-work erections of various shapes in
which human victims were enclosed to be burned. And, from a more peaceful
side, we learn that the tables of ladies in Rome were not completely in
the fashion if they had no examples of British baskets. "Basket," as you
know, is one of the best examples of the survival of a British word among
us, a word used also by the Romans[19], their word _bascauda_ and our
"basket" representing the Welsh _basgawd_ and _basget_.
There is abundance of evidence of the interest taken by the Romans in
Britain and its people, and of the esteem in which Britons were held at
Rome. Martial, who settled in Rome in the year A. D. 66, perhaps one year
or two years before St. Paul's death, speaks of a British lady in Rome,
Claudia, the newly-married wife of Pudens. Of her he says[20], in terms as
he believed of the highest personal praise--
Though Claudia from the sea-green Britons came,
She wears the aspect of a Roman dame.
And, again, he mentions, not without pride, that he was read in Britain:
'Britain, too, is said to sing my verse.' It is a little difficult to
resist the tendency to see in this Pudens and Claudia the Pudens and
Claudia of the last sentence before the final blessing in the last letter
of St. Paul, where their names are linked together by that of Linus, the
first Bishop of Rome. We are told, however, that the severe historian
ought to resist this tendency of the natural man.
Again, Seneca, the brother of Gallio, whom we meet in the Acts, had a
great deal of money invested in Britain. Juvenal brings a British king
into his verse, and Richborough oysters. Josephus[21] tells us that Titus
made use of the Britons, as a telling illustration in his final speech to
the desperate Jews:--"Pray what greater obstacle is there than the wall of
the Ocean, with which the Britons are encompassed? And yet they bow before
the arms of the Romans."
Those are probably sufficient indications of the kind of evidence we have.
We know, too, that the Roman troops came and went; and we may be sure that
they made Britain and the strange things they had seen here a frequent
subject of conversation. We cannot doubt that St. Paul, in his enforced
intercourse with the soldiery at Rome, learned all he could about the
distant parts of the world, which only the Roman armies had visited. Nay,
we in London may go further than that. Seeing that Nero recalled from
Britain the victorious Suetonius in 61, and that St. Paul lived with Roman
soldiers in all probability from 61 to 63, we may imagine that some
soldier or other described to St. Paul that terrible day on which
Suetonius made up his mind that he must leave London to its fate. You
remember the account of Tacitus[22], so telling in its studied brevity. It
is, I think, the first definite appearance of London on the stage of
history. The occasion was the revolt of Boadicea, to retain the familiar
incorrectness of the name. Colchester had fallen, all the Romans there
being slaughtered. The ninth legion had been attacked and routed by the
Britons, and all the infantry killed. Many a gallant fight no doubt in the
thick woods, like that which Wilson and his comrades fought last
month[23]. The governor of the province fled to Gaul. Verulam fell, with
great slaughter. There was no taking captive, no selling into slavery. The
Britons made sure work; they burned, they tortured, they crucified. One
man of the Romans kept his head, or all would have been massacred. With a
constancy which made men marvel, Suetonius marched through the midst of
foes to the relief of London--London not then illustrious as a colony, but
more famous than any other city in the land for the number of its
merchants and the abundance of its merchandise. Should he make London his
centre of defence? He looked at the small number of his soldiers: he
thought of the destruction of the ninth legion. He determined to leave
London to its fate. Tears and prayers could not move him. He gave the
signal to march. Those of the citizens who accompanied him his soldiers
protected. All who remained behind, unable or unwilling to leave their
homes, all were overwhelmed in one great slaughter. The Romans calculated
that at Colchester, Verulam, and London, from seventy to eighty thousand
of Romans and their allies were slain by the enraged Britons[24]. We may
imagine how St. Paul would listen to that tale of woe, then quite fresh,
the most tragic event of the time; and how he would long for an
opportunity of softening the disposition of the Britons by the gentle
doctrines of Christ.
To no such source as that, however, are we to look for the beginnings of
the faith among us. There is no sign of any one great effort, by any one
great man, to introduce Christianity into our land. It came, we cannot
doubt, in the natural way, simply and quietly, through the nearest
continental neighbours of the Britons and their nearest kinsfolk, the
people of Gaul. That will form the main subject of my next lecture.