HOW ENGLAND BECAME CHRISTIAN
All Europe, we may say, west and south of the Rhine and of the
Danube, had become Christian before the barbarians broke through the
wall. And when we say "all Europe," it includes even Ireland, out in
the north-west. When the Angles and the Saxons came invading Britain
and driving the Britons westward, they destroyed Christianity and
brought in their own northern religion with its gods, Odin, god of
War, and Thor, god of the Hammer, and the rest of them. But their
invasion and their disturbance never reached as far west as Ireland.
There, the Christian religion continued, while it was destroyed in
England.
The Anglo-Saxon conquerors were constantly fighting with each other,
as well as with the Britons, in England. The three big kingdoms of
these Anglo-Saxons were Northumbria, in the north; Wessex, in the
south-east and stretching westward along the southern part of
England; and Mercia, between the two. These fought with varying
success, and somewhere about 600 came an invasion into Kent of a
tribe closely allied to the Angles and the Saxons, and actually
included sometimes under either of these names--the Jutes, from the
northern end of that Sleswig peninsula from which they all came.
They landed in Kent, and perhaps because they were so close of kin
with the conquerors already there, {61} or perhaps because they came
in very great force, it was a Jute king who soon became master of all
the east of England from the south of Kent as far north as the Wash.
And one of his first acts of importance, as king of all this country,
was to ask, and to receive, as his wife, the daughter of the King of
the Franks. The Franks by that time were masters of Gaul.
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[Illustration: WHITBY ABBEY. _Photo by F. M. Sutcliffe. Whitby._]
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[Sidenote: St. Augustine]
You see what the effect, of that was--to bring England and the
Continent of Europe together, into close relations with each other.
They had been thus close together under the Romans, but the
intercourse had been severed by the barbarians. Now it was resumed;
and the Pope of Rome took advantage of it at once. The Franks were
Christians. The Frank king's daughter, whom the Jute king of East
Anglia had married, was a Christian. The Pope sent St. Augustine
into Kent to preach Christianity; and he was so successful, as a
missionary, that Christianity was admitted by the East Anglian king
and by his people generally. Thence it made its way again info
Northumbria.
So that seems entirely to contradict what I told you at the end of
the last chapter, about Christianity being brought back into England,
and so to some of the northern parts of Europe, not from Rome, but
from Ireland.
The explanation of that apparent contradiction is that this
conversion which was brought about by St. Augustine was not lasting.
The Mercians, who had been tributary, that is had paid tribute, to
the Northumbrian king, allied themselves with the Britons of Wales
and claimed independence. Their king Penda was the last of the great
champions in England of the heathen gods, and his long reign was a
continuous struggle against the new religion. By 650 he had defeated
all his rivals except the {62} Northumbrians. Northumbria still held
out against him, but St. Augustine's envoy, who had brought
Christianity again to Northumbria, had departed after a victory
gained by Penda over the Northumbrian king. Even in the south people
relapsed in numbers into heathenism. The zeal for Christianity was
kept alive in the north by influences that had come in through
Ireland.
From the Irish churches, untroubled by the incursion of barbarians,
missionaries had come westward. A famous monastery had been
established on the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland.
Thence the missionary monks had passed on into Scotland, still, at
that time, called Caledonia and inhabited by the people called Picts.
They had passed, too, across the northern part of England and had
settled on the island which even now is called Holy Island, off the
east coast of Northumberland. That was the centre from which the new
King of Northumbria and his people were inspired with a zeal for the
Christian religion which made them continue the struggle against the
Mercian king whose lordship was at this time acknowledged over most
of the rest of Britain. Oswi, the Northumbrian king, had received
some of his education at the monastery of Iona. In 655 he met and
utterly defeated the Mercian forces, under the aged king Penda, near
the modern town of Leeds.
[Sidenote: Synod of Whitby]
That battle gave heathenism in England its death-blow, and the
inspiration for that blow had come from the Irish Church. But then,
England being thus again united to Rome by religion, and its
intercourse with Gaul renewed, the envoys of Rome reappeared, and
pleaded for the supremacy of the Pope of Rome over the English. The
Irish Church differed in opinion from the Pope of Rome, as we are
told, about the date at which Easter should be kept {63} and about
the fashion in which the priests' heads should be shaved. The
English Christians had to adopt the one opinion or the other, and
Oswi, the Christian champion, summoned a great meeting, called a
Synod, at Whitby, to settle which of the two England should follow.
The envoys of the two claimant Churches, the Romish and the Irish,
pleaded the case before him, and it is asserted that he gave his
decision in favour of Rome on being told that St. Peter was both the
founder of the Romish Church and also that he held the key of the
gate of Heaven. Oswi feared that he might offend St. Peter if he
declared for Ireland rather than for Rome, and that St. Peter in
consequence might not admit him through the heavenly gate. Thus
England passed again under the spiritual rule of the Pope, and the
Irish monks left their monastery on the Holy Island. But, both
before and after this, some of them travelled into Northern Europe
and preached Christianity among the German tribes, even so far north
and west as the southern shores of the Baltic where the most numerous
and most powerful people were the Frisians.
They do not enter very importantly into the making of the great
story, but they were a great force along that Baltic coast. Very
occasionally we find the name Frisians used for all those who were
much more commonly called Saxons, and it is possible that they were
of the same original stock; but that is a question which we need not
try to settle.
In this manner, then, it was determined for England that she should
be Christian, and no longer heathen; and it was determined also that
she should follow the Romish way, in strict obedience to the Pope of
Rome, rather than the Irish. But though all the English kingdoms
became Christian, that religion common to them all did not for very
long bring them at peace together. For the whole length of another
century {64} they were fighting among themselves, now one and now the
other having the advantage, but never so decisively that any one of
them could call himself king of all the English, or of England.
All this while the Frank kings were very powerful in Gaul, and though
they never seem to have had any idea of attempting the conquest of
Britain, they kept their eyes attentively fixed on what went on
there; and their purpose seems to have been to keep the country in a
state of division and disturbance. This they did by helping, or at
least by promising to help, the one that was the weakest.
Thus affairs went in Britain down to the time of the great King
Pepin, of the Franks, and again, after him, of his yet greater son
Charles, who was known as Charlemagne, or Charles the Great--that is
to say until about the year 800. And at about that time there came
down upon the English the invasion of another nation of sea-rovers
like themselves--the Danes.
[Sidenote: The Pope]
All this while, too, the power of the Pope of Rome had been
increasing, by no means at a steady rate of progress, but at times
gaining greatly and at others losing, but on the whole going forward
like the incoming tide.
Doubtless the fact that the Western Empire no longer looked on Rome
as its capital city, gave the Bishop of Rome opportunity for
increased power. So long as Rome was the home of the Emperor and his
court, there was a greater and more powerful person in Rome than its
bishop. But the Emperor, as we saw, removed his court to Milan and,
later, to Ravenna. That left the Pope as certainly one of the chief
men, if not absolutely chief, in Rome. We have also seen that about
halfway through the seventh century--that is, about 650--the Saracens
had turned out from their seats three of the five {65} patriarchs of
the Church, namely those of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch.
There remained the Patriarch at Constantinople and the Patriarch, the
Pope, at Rome. The regulation of religious matters in the Eastern
Empire fell naturally therefore to the former and the latter became
head of the Church throughout the Western Empire.
The authority of the Pope depended largely on the belief that when
Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, made Constantinople the
seat of his power, he gave, or donated, to the Bishop of Rome his
authority over all the Western Empire. This "donation of
Constantine" became very famous. It is generally thought that the
deed, that is to say the parchment with the words on it which were
supposed to make the gift good, was all made up--that the signature
was a forgery, and the whole story of the donation an invention. But
if it was so, it was an invention which had a great effect. It
helped the Pope to establish his supremacy over all the churches in
the West.
Nevertheless it seems that when there was trouble in any of the
churches of Spain, where the Visigothic kingdom was established, the
trouble used to be referred for decision to the capital city of that
kingdom. Likewise in France, trouble in any of the Frankish churches
was settled, if possible, by bringing the case up before the bishop
in the capital of the Franks. But, for all that, both Visigoths and
Franks looked on Rome, the city of St. Paul and St. Peter, as a
place--we might say as the place--especially sacred and its bishop as
a personage holding an authority superior to all others in
Christendom. The feeling was the same in those churches yet farther
from the Roman centre, the churches of Germany and of England.
The Western Empire, we have to realise, was no {66} longer Roman; it
was Frankish. Rome itself was included within the Empire of which
the Emperor was Charlemagne. It was the Pope, you may remember, who
had called in the aid of the Frankish, or French, kings--first Pepin
and then Charlemagne--to aid him against the Lombards. They had
given such effectual aid that the Lombard kingdom was overthrown and
Charlemagne himself was crowned with the Iron Crown which was the
sign of the Lombard monarchy.
The name of Lombardy remained, and remains to this day, as that of a
part of Northern Italy. It remains also in our Lombard Street, in
London. This was so called from the Lombard merchants and goldsmiths
and bankers who came thither from Lombardy. The arms of Lombardy
were three balls, and you may sometimes see three balls now as a sign
over the door of a pawnbroker's shop. The first banking operations
of the Lombards in London were very like modern pawnbroking; for they
would lend money to people who gave them security for its repayment
by handing over jewels or golden chains or ornaments. Thus curiously
is the richest street, as it has been reckoned, in the richest city
in the world, called after those long-bearded barbarians, of
unusually savage manners, who came away from somewhere near where the
Elbe goes out into the sea and who founded a kingdom for a while in
Italy. A strange story which you may recall whenever you see that
sign of the three golden balls.
After the fall of Lombardy the Empire of Charlemagne included not
only all Gaul, which had come to him by succession from Pepin, but
also what we may describe as all Germany, and Italy as far down as
the Tiber and southward of it again. The Pyrenees had for years
formed the boundary between the Frankish Empire and the Visigoths'
kingdoms. The {67} Emperor would have had no authority over the
Goths, had they still been there in 800 or so; but in the early half
of the eighth century, beginning as early in that century as 710,
that Visigothic kingdom had begun to go to pieces under the attacks
of the fierce Arabs, inspired by the fighting religion of Mahomet,
who in course of the previous century had fought their way to the
mastery of Asia Minor and of Egypt.
[Sidenote: The Saracens]
They came, working eastward along that strip of Africa fringing the
Mediterranean, along which we saw the Vandals working westward. And
just as the Vandals, who conquered all that African strip, were
invited into Africa, from Spain, in order to help the master, as he
then was, of that Africa against his enemies, so now these Saracens
and Moors were invited, in the early part of the eighth century, into
Spain, from Africa, to help one of the rival parties who were
disputing about the succession to the throne. They, like the
Vandals, stayed a good deal longer than their hosts had intended, and
with a far different position in the country than those hosts had
designed for them. But they were a people so important in the making
of this greatest of great stories that we must give them a new
chapter to themselves and to their own particular story.
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