‘He therefore again asked, what was the name of that nation? And was answered, that they were called Angles. “Right,” said he, “for they have an Angelic face, and it becomes such to be co-heirs with the Angels in heaven. What is the name,” proceeded he, “of the province from which they are brought?” It was replied, that the natives of that province were called Deiri. “Truly are they De ira,” said he, “withdrawn from wrath, and called to the mercy of Christ. How is the king of that province called?” They told him his name was Ælla: and he, alluding to the name said, “Hallelujah, the praise of God the Creator must be sung in those parts.”’
Bede, History of the English Church and People.1
This famous anecdote records the moment when Pope Gregory, inspired by the sight of pagan Anglo-Saxon slave boys in the Roman forum, decided to send a mission to convert the nation to Christianity. Clearly a lover of puns, Gregory was motivated to send a group of Continental Christians to the very edges of the known world in order to save these ‘Angels/Angles’. During his sixty-four years Gregory ‘the Great’ certainly earned his epithet. He was seen both by his contemporaries and every generation since as a light in the Dark Ages. A prolific writer, he is renowned as one of the four great Latin Fathers of the Western Church, alongside Augustine, Ambrose and Jerome. The writings of these four men have influenced Christian theology in the Western World more than any others. He reformed the Church liturgy, rebuilt the papacy after years of famine and hardship had all but destroyed Rome, and was the first pope from a monastic background. Even protestant reformers like John Calvin acknowledged his virtues, perceiving him as the last good pope.2
But to the English he was particularly significant. In the eyes of the first Anglo-Saxon converts, it was he who brought their souls to salvation – something we might find difficult to grasp today. As far as the early converts were concerned, Gregory was offering the pagan Anglo-Saxons a chance to sign up for the opportunity of a lifetime and beyond. They were guaranteed a place in paradise for all eternity – a pretty exciting prospect! His mission was to have varying degrees of success over the next few decades, but the fact that he sent his fellow monk and evangelist Augustine to the Isle of Thanet in AD 597 would ultimately transform the religious complexion of England.
This one man changed English history, and he was acknowledged a saint immediately after his death, especially among those Anglo-Saxons filled with evangelical enthusiasm through his efforts. The ‘saviour of English souls’, he is the first saint covered by this book that we can access with any degree of certainty. We know where he lived, what he thought, what he valued and how he operated. There is one place in England where his efforts were most effectively realised, and it remains at the beating heart of the English Church today: Canterbury.
The cities of England are founded on layers of history, each of which has been replaced by subsequent expressions of taste, transformation and power, leaving many strata of lost worlds under basements and in sewerage systems. In locations where little development has taken place over the centuries, it’s often easier to sense the past in a tangible way. But in the bustling cities of London, Southampton, York or Oxford, it can be hard to access the layers of history between the reams of Starbucks coffee shops and high-street stores. However, these places all resound with the footsteps of thousands of long-dead inhabitants, and reward the intrepid explorer. Within the thriving contemporary metropolis of London, for example, Roman ruins and medieval priories sit virtually hidden behind tower blocks, on the edge of busy road junctions. The evidence is still there, but it takes effort to find it.
Canterbury veritably teems with history, from beyond the medieval past right up to the present. There are few locations in England whose story has been told so thoroughly and fascinatingly across the ages. One of the central poems at the heart of English culture, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, emphasises the importance of this place in drawing people towards it over the centuries. Great dramas have occurred here; most notably the death of the Archbishop Thomas Becket on the sacred ground of the Cathedral. Canterbury is the powerbase of the Archbishop today, and to the many who have come before him, and the city has played a central role in the religious spirit of a nation. But despite its magnificent cathedral and monumental gatehouses, its origins are remarkably humble. The story of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity begins with a small, brick-built church on the edge of the old Canterbury to Richborough road, alongside the modern buildings of the university. Almost hidden from view, the Church of St Martin is extremely humble in appearance, and at first sight seems an unlikely place for the emergence of Christianity in England.
St Martin’s Church may well be designated a World Heritage Site, but unlike Fountains Abbey or Blenheim Palace, it commands little in the way of awe and magnificence. It is a simple church that could barely accommodate a hundred people, which has been rebuilt over the years so it now appears like a patchwork quilt of bricks from different ages. But at the chancel end some interesting features indicate why this church is so important. Small red Roman bricks, held together with pink mortar, have been incorporated into the fabric, revealing that this building has a history stretching back beyond the coming of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes to the Romano-British past.
There is a round-headed doorway in the south wall of the chancel, and a similar arch above the windows in the west wall of the nave, both of which are now blocked up yet hint at the Roman roots of this building. The original bricks in the wall are laid in horizontal lines between bands of stone blocks, so act as ‘string courses’. It isn’t clear whether the original Roman building was a church, or if it served some other function, perhaps as a mausoleum. But it was certainly in use as a church by the AD 590s, and this makes it the oldest church in continuous use anywhere in the English-speaking world. Bede records that it served the Frankish princess Bertha, wife of Kent’s powerful king, Aethelberht:
There was on the east side of the city a church dedicated to the honour of St Martin, built whilst the Romans were still in the island, wherein the queen, who, as has been said before, was a Christian, used to pray.3
Bertha has been canonised a saint for her part in the conversion of the English. She married King Aethelberht in a politically expedient union, perhaps as early as AD 567 (when her parents were alive), or more probably by about AD 580. A condition of this marriage between a Christian and a pagan was that the Frankish princess was allowed to bring a bishop with her, and to be given a suitable church building in which to hear Mass. The bishop who came with her was called Luidhard, and a fortunate piece of evidence survives to support the claim that he was preaching the Christian faith among the pagan Anglo-Saxons more than a decade before Augustine’s mission in AD 597.
The Luidhard medalet was found near St Martin’s Church in Canterbury around 1844. It is a small coin or medal that has been turned into a necklace through the addition of a gold loop. It has a bust wearing a diadem on one side, and an exotic cross with two arms on the other.
The Luidhard medalet, reportedly discovered in the early nineteenth century near the graveyard at St Martin’s, is in the form of a coin with a mount attached to enable it to be worn as a pendant. It was found along with seven other items, now known collectively as the Canterbury-St Martin’s hoard. The items were probably strung together on the necklace of a sixth-century woman, and among the other coins were an Italian tremissis (equivalent to one third of a solidus), two Frankish tremissis, and a solidus. This was a valuable collection of booty, despite the fact that the Anglo-Saxons were still a barter society in the sixth century, so didn’t use the coins as money. But the Luidhard medalet is particularly important, since it is the oldest surviving coin minted in Anglo-Saxon England.4
The medalet displays the bust of a man wearing a robe with a diadem on his head. On the other side is a Patriarchal cross, which has two arms, the topmost one representing the inscription that was nailed above Christ, proclaiming him King of the Jews. Both sides display exotic imagery, which would have been largely unfamiliar to pagan Anglo-Saxon metalworkers. It is the inscription, however, that reveals the embryonic nature of this first minted English coin. It is the abbreviated form of ‘Leudardus Episcopus’, which means ‘Bishop Luidhard’, and it’s believed that the medalet was created to honour the arrival of Bertha and her bishop to Canterbury. However, the words appear on the coin in reverse.
There may be an explanation for this. The Anglo-Saxon goldsmith charged with creating the coin would have been looking at a foreign example from which he could copy the text and images. When creating the mould for the medal he copied the letters over verbatim, but the gold was then poured into the mould to create a reflected version. Because the smith was almost certainly illiterate, he would not have understood his mistake, and so this medal survives to give us a glimpse of Anglo-Saxon England on the edge of the literate Christian world. This was a world poised between pagan and Christian, and the driving force towards change was Gregory.
The quote at the beginning of this chapter comes from Bede’s account of the moment Gregory felt motivated to send a Christian mission to the pagan Anglo-Saxons. That this event ever actually happened is dubious. Gregory was not ignorant of the Anglo-Saxons, and would certainly have already known of the pagan race inhabiting a previous domain of the Roman Empire: Britannia. But he would also have known that this non-Christian outpost on the edge of the world was ripe for conversion. The arrival of Bertha and her Frankish bishop Luidhard in Canterbury a decade or two earlier would not have gone unnoticed by the papacy.
The profiles of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were rising on the Christian continent, and their rulers were increasingly putting feelers out towards the Christian world.5 They were compelled, as later the Vikings would be, to draw themselves closer to the networks of trade, power and political allegiances this world offered. But in addition to these links being forged between increasingly powerful Anglo-Saxon kings and Christians in Europe, Gregory would also have been aware that the pagan Germanic tribes were coming under the influence of Christianity from a different direction to Rome. On the coast of Dál Riata, from his powerbase on the island of Iona, a fervent missionary was beginning to influence the royal houses of Anglo-Saxon England.
Saint Columba and his Celtic form of Christianity posed a threat to the Pope. If the pagans were to be converted, they were to be converted to the Roman way. Pope Gregory envisaged a Roman Empire reunited as a Christian Roman Empire, with the founding fathers Romulus and Remus replaced by saints Peter and Paul. The timings were essential, for if his mission did not succeed then the island could become a heretical outpost, disconnected from Rome. Gregory was sending a missionary army to conduct an ideological conquest as significant as the coming of the Romans or the Normans.
Although not an Anglo-Saxon saint, Pope Gregory the Great had a hugely important role to play in transforming the religious and social complexion of England, and establishing the nature of sanctity throughout the nation from the sixth century onwards. He certainly deserves his epithet of ‘Great’, given the situation he inherited when he became pope in AD 590. Rome was in the most dire state. Despite its ancient heritage and the idea of imperial power it still exercised in the minds of rulers across Europe and beyond, the city itself had been stripped of most of its influence and population by the end of the sixth century. The imperial court had moved to Constantinople on Constantine’s instructions, and the majority of the ruling families in Rome were drawn there. The influence of Gothic occupiers in Italy following the migration period, and the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in AD 410, and later by Ostrogoths in AD 546, meant that there was little wealth left in the city.
The neglect of the aqueduct system and the deliberate cutting of water supplies by the Goths had led to flooding in the areas outside the city, creating an infested swamp. The population had dropped from 800,000 in AD 400 to just 30,000 by AD 550, and the Pope at this time was impoverished, having to beg for clothing.6 It is no wonder that Gregory did not want the position of pope. However, his aristocratic family were one of the few that had remained in service of Church and city. His great-grandfather was Pope Felix III, so there was an expectation that he would go into the Church. Gregory had intended a life of monastic seclusion, although his early adulthood was spent as Prefect, one of the highest secular positions in the city.
A number of his family had gone into the monastic life, and it seems Gregory grew tired of politics around AD 575, so he turned his family holdings between the Palatine and Caelian Hills into a monastery and retired there. In the next five years he lived an extreme life of prayer, fasting and meditating, writing his famous work Dialogues, which in particular stressed the virtues of the recently deceased St Benedict of Nursia, author of the Benedictine Rule. The monastic ideals set out in this document were to have wide-reaching effects across the Christian world, and particularly in Anglo-Saxon England.
Gregory was a brilliant mind at a time when the Church most needed one, and so he could not simply retreat into monastic seclusion, but was instead ordained as deacon against his wishes. He was relocated to Constantinople, where his conservative streak shone through; he recreated his own monastery of St Andrew’s in Rome at the Roman embassy in Constantinople. Despite spending seven years in the East, he refused to learn Greek, and firmly identified himself as Roman. It was the dramatic events of AD 589 that saw Gregory finally elevated to pope. The Tiber flooded, dragging infested water through the churches of Rome and destroying their winter supplies. Plague followed, and carried off Pope Pelagius, so Gregory was elected by the people to lead them through the most dismal of times. Far from the glorious, bejewelled, all-powerful figures that later generations of popes would cut, Gregory was head of a beleaguered, small church in a rotten and run-down city, with little in the way of wealth and power.
He needed an action plan, something that would set the Eternal City of Rome back on a firm footing and bring much-needed income and prestige back to the papacy. He was a pragmatist and a realist, and he relished order in the Roman manner. He was also hard-headed and brutal at times. A monk from his monastery confessed on his deathbed to stealing some coins, so Gregory ordered for him to die alone and then be thrown on the rubbish pile.7 It seems he did this to ensure that the monk’s ignominious death acted as penance for his sins, but it looks like a particularly harsh treatment of a fellow monk and brother.
Early on in his papacy he sought a solution to Rome’s current predicament – to return the city to the great heights of its imperial past. Against the ever-burgeoning power of the Eastern Church, he now wanted to recreate the Western Roman Empire, but instead it would be a Holy Roman Empire. All roads would once again lead to Rome, and this would be achieved not by a marching army of soldiers, but with a marching army of missionaries.8
When Gregory set his mind to the Anglo-Saxon mission, he had to find a willing and pliable individual to take the long, dangerous and arduous journey across Europe to the point where the known world ended. Within Rome, Tacitus’ accounts of Germanic warriors, their bodies painted black so they could stealthily destroy their enemies, would have filled any potential missionary with dread. Traversing Italy, the Alps, Gaul and then crossing the Channel towards the unknown threat of a pagan warrior king would have been an unpleasant prospect for many settled within the relative comfort of a Roman monastery. Add to that the promise of a northern climate, cold, dank and uninviting to a Mediterranean Christian, and the idea of Gregory’s mission must not have seemed attractive. The lucky man chosen to head this most unpleasant of missions was a Sicilian monk: Augustine.
He is celebrated across England in the dedications of churches, schools and parish halls. His is one of the names most closely associated with English Christianity, and if students learn any dates from the early medieval period, one of the first they encounter is AD 597 – the date Augustine arrived on the Isle of Thanet to bring Roman Christianity to the Anglo-Saxons. Fortunately, alongside many later hagiographical texts and fanciful legends that grew up around his name, there is also a good deal of primary evidence to reveal information about the man himself, and both the time and place in which he preached to the English. He was already a right-hand man to the Pope, as prior of the monastery of St Andrew on the Caelian Hill, where Gregory himself was abbot. With Augustine at the head of a band of monks, sent by their Pope and abbot, this was an evangelical mission with its heart rooted in monastic ideals.
Augustine seems to have dragged his heels from the off. But Gregory coordinated his highly disciplined Roman monks and they embarked, relatively unprepared, for England. It took two years for Augustine and his missionaries to finally reach Kent. This is an inexplicably long time to traverse from Rome to England, and from Bede’s records of the mission it is clear that Augustine turned back along the way. He states that they were:
on their journey, seized with a sudden fear, and began to think of returning home, rather than proceed to a barbarous, fierce, and unbelieving nation, to whose very language they were strangers; and this they unanimously agreed was the safest course. In short, they went back.9
Dogged in his determination to continue with the mission, Gregory made Augustine return to the monks, and exhorted them all to continue to England. The Pope sent letters with him addressed to bishops and the royal houses of Frankish Gaul, requesting support for the missionaries. The Franks finally seemed to answer the call, and provided safe haven and interpreters to see the missionaries on their way. Augustine was made abbot of the group, and had the promise of an archbishopric dangled before him, something many early churchmen would have embraced gratefully. But he was clearly worried by the work he was undertaking. The consolation Gregory provides has a distinctly condescending tone, as he encouraged the monks: ‘Inasmuch as, though I cannot labour with you, I shall partake in the joy of the reward, because I am willing to labour.’10
Augustine’s journey to England tells us much about the man. He was clearly inexperienced and anxious with regards to conducting papal business along the route through Frankish territories. So Gregory sent him equipped with documents that would assure those throughout Gaul that he was acting on behalf of the papacy. His correspondence with the Pope, fortunately preserved in the archives of early medieval Canterbury and, more fortunately still, consulted and documented by Bede, shows that he was also insecure in imparting the wisdom of the Church to those in need of papal guidance. He constantly deferred to the Pope, whose strong guiding hand is clear in the tone of his letters. This was Gregory’s mission, and Augustine was his mouthpiece.
Augustine landed with his missionaries on the Isle of Thanet, and then set about persuading the king to allow him to spread his Christian mission throughout the kingdom of Kent. The fact that he came with Frankish interpreters, and with the support of bishops and royalty from the queen’s family in Gaul, may have helped ease his passage into the Kentish kingdom.11 At first Aethelberht was suspicious of Augustine, instructing him to meet with his representatives in the open air so he could not perform any magic tricks. The Roman missionaries must have seemed distinctly exotic and unusual to the Anglo-Saxons, and the objects they brought with them were similarly strange. They brought the symbol of the cross, whose meaning was shrouded in mystery to the majority of pagan Anglo-Saxons. They brought relics, which were also bound up with ideas of magic and miracles, and they brought books – small, box-like objects, filled with indecipherable symbols, which promised eternal life. The idea that Augustine needed a stone church in which to perform his sacred rituals must also have been unusual to the Anglo-Saxons, whose dwellings, palaces and temples were constructed in wood.
Aethelberht gave them access to the ancient city of Canterbury. The name of the city comes from the Old English ‘Cantwareburh’, or ‘stronghold of the Kentish people’, but the Jutish timber buildings were established on the ruined remains of an older settlement, which the British called Durouernon and the Romans renamed Durovernum Cantiacorum. When settlers from the Danish region of Jutland came across the North Sea and arrived on the coast of Kent, at first they avoided moving within the walls of the older Roman town. It is an interesting phenomenon that the timber-dwelling Anglo-Saxons avoided the older stone buildings of the Romans. It would have been expedient to move inside the defensive areas designated by Roman walls, and the stones could have been used to provide decent protection from the elements. Yet across England, Anglo-Saxon villages grew up away from earlier Romano-British settlements.
An Old English poem, written down in the eleventh century but probably composed centuries earlier, hints at why the Anglo-Saxons may have avoided old Roman ruins:
Wondrous is this stone-wall, wrecked by fate
the city-buildings crumble; the works of the giants decay.
Roofs have caved in, towers collapsed,
barred gates are broken, hoar frost clings to mortar,
houses are gapping, tottering and fallen,
undermined by age. The earth’s embrace,
its fierce grip, holds the mighty craftsmen;
they are perished and gone. A hundred generations
have passed away since.
‘The Ruin’, from The Exeter Book, lines 1–10.12
This poem describes the Roman ruins as ‘the labour of giants’, and suggests that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes felt the stone structures they encountered in Romano-British cities were somehow supernatural. The settlers had come from Scandinavian and Germanic territories that the Romans had not conquered, and where traditional methods of building revolved around wood, not stone. But this poem, and the evidence from Canterbury, suggests that the memory of Rome was never fully erased. There was a presence of both the Roman Empire and the Christianity it had brought in its wake throughout the land. Augustine had this firmly in mind as he met with the native British Christians, and he expanded the Church of St Martin alongside the ancient Roman walls.
To understand what Augustine encountered when he began his missionary work with the Anglo-Saxons, it is essential to understand more about the unique situation England was in by the sixth century. No longer a story of the Romano-British or Celts, the Anglo-Saxons take centre stage, and theirs is a world at first entirely lacking in Christian saints. Yet, as the lives of Alban, Brigid, Patrick and David suggest, there was clearly a historical echo of Christianity throughout the British Isles that stretched back to the third century. After the Romans withdrew their armies from Britannia, their most northern frontier, to defend territories closer to the core of the Empire from barbarian attacks, the complexion of Britain changed permanently. The native British tribes, descended from Celtic settlers of the Iron Age, moved their strongholds to the western edges of the British Isles, while what we know as England today was populated by incoming Germanic tribes: the Angles, Saxons and Jutes.
England in the late sixth century, when Gregory sent over his mission, had undergone radical changes with the arrival of a new and influential ruling elite. As the conquest by the Normans brought with it the use of French by the upper classes, so the Adventus Saxonum ushered in the new language – Old English. This meant a dramatic change from the Celtic tongues that had previously been spoken in this area. The people in England literally began to speak a different language, and this was the one that would be preserved down the centuries, rather than the native mother tongue that had been established for over a thousand years. Not only were the Romano-British and Anglo-Saxons linguistically separate, they had different social structures, artistic tastes and religious beliefs too.
Their religion also revolved around a pantheon of gods and goddesses, and prized sacred sites on the landscape, like rivers, woods and hills. However, their culture was founded on heroic values, and their divinities often displayed military attributes. Indeed, the ultimate goal for a Germanic warrior was to be received into Valhalla after death, where he could feast and fight for eternity. The primary god of the pantheon was Odinn, known as Woden in England. There may have been substantial differences between Scandinavian and English interpretations of the god, but in the Old Norse myths he embodies a number of powerful characteristics, primarily associated with battle, poetry and wisdom. In England he is also cited as a founding father, or high king, by a number of the ruling dynasties.13 He is portrayed on the early seventh-century Finglesham buckle, found in Kent. The naked figure has been identified as Woden, due to the two spears he holds, and the hook-beaked birds on his head, which may be an abbreviated version of his two ravens, Huginn and Muninn. The figure’s head is teardrop shaped, to perhaps suggest Woden’s ability to metamorphose.
The pre-Christian Germanic religious belief system is hard to access, particularly since the spiritual beliefs were not committed to writing. Although they were proto-literate in relation to the Christian Roman-Britons, they did have a written script – runes – that was used from about the first century AD. The three main runic alphabets were the Elder Futhark (around AD 150–800), the Anglo-Saxon futhorc (AD 400–1100) and the Younger Futhark (AD 800–1100). The angular form of the symbols is due to the fact that they were designed to be carved into stone or wood. The name ‘rune’ comes from the Germanic word ‘rūn’, which means ‘secret/whisper’, and the symbols served a different function to the Latin alphabet.
The component letters in the Latin script have to be combined unit by unit to create words. So the letters ‘T’, ‘A’ and ‘R’ are composed in specific orders to give words with different meanings in each case: ‘A-R-T’, ‘T-A-R’, ‘R-A-T’. In the runic alphabet the specific units can be used in the same way, so certain symbols can be combined to spell out words. However, each symbol also has a word connected to it, and beneath this are further layers of meaning. So they can stand as letters, as words or as cyphers to another set of associated ideas. An Old English rune poem survives which gives the meaning of each letter and some of the sayings connected with them. For example, the rune 
means Oak:
The oak fattens the flesh of pigs for the children of men.
Often it traverses the gannet’s bath,
and the ocean proves whether the oak keeps faith
in honourable fashion.14
This poem delves into the separate associations that the oak tree could carry: it provides nourishment; it is the main component for building ships, which in turn protects mankind against the hostile ocean. There is not a single set of associations, but a web of connected ideas. This propensity for riddling is something that seems to define the early medieval Germanic people, and visual riddles can be discerned in artefacts that survive from this time.15 One of the finest riddling pieces comes from a collection which dates to within a couple of decades of Gregory’s mission, and was discovered just a few hours’ sailing up the coast from the Isle of Thanet,16 in East Anglia: the great gold buckle from the Sutton Hoo ship burial.
The great gold buckle from Sutton Hoo is one of the finest finds from the burial. It is actually a hollow box, which opens on a hinge, and the mechanism is still in perfect condition despite being buried in the earth for around 1,400 years. It weighs 400 grams and the surface decoration is picked out with niello – a mixture of copper, silver and lead which allows the outline of the decoration to be picked out in black.
Writhing across the surface of this gold buckle are thirteen separate birds and beasts. There are serpents interlacing on the tongue, in the main boss and across the centre. Two hook-beaked birds sit on the shoulders of the buckle, while five quadrupeds circle around the sides. This object encapsulates many features of Anglo-Saxon art: it is not figurative, but zoomorphic, with animals forming the main component of the decoration. It plays on surface texture and chiaroscuro, the contrast between light and dark. It is symmetrical and centres on perfectly balanced, intricate interlacing patterns.
This is art that requires a keen eye and an understanding of visual play in order to unpick it. Furthermore, it is art that revels in the animal world, rather than the human, and senses order in chaos. This object and others like it reflect the tastes, interests and, possibly, personalities of those who commissioned and wore them. Gregory and his missionaries – Christians born and raised in bustling European cities, exposed to an entirely different aesthetic and world view – would have to adjust to the uniqueness of Anglo-Saxon society and culture.
The finds that continue to appear from this period rarely depart from the basic tastes outlined above. When the Staffordshire hoard was discovered in 2009 by detectorist Terry Herbert, some 3,500 separate pieces were found.17 They are all military in character, and while the weapons themselves (swords, shields, helmets, chain mail etc.) are not included, the personalised fittings have been hacked off and collected together, perhaps as a physical manifestation of a particularly successful war band’s victories. The discovery was heralded with trepidation by some scholars, in that it could have rewritten what was known about Anglo-Saxon artistic taste. However, the designs used across the many thousand pieces were remarkably conservative.
The artefacts feature zoomorphic interlace, and there is a predilection for gold and garnet cloisonné throughout. This discovery testifies to a shared aesthetic that stretched across centuries, and was bound up with the very identity of the Anglo-Saxons. Given that neither the gold nor garnet that Anglo-Saxons favoured were found in sufficient quantities in England, these materials must have been imported from as far afield as Sri Lanka.18 This suggests a symbolic connection perhaps with the style of objects that had evolved nearer the original homelands of the Germanic people many centuries earlier. By making and wearing this sort of jewellery, the Anglo-Saxons were harking back to a bygone age, in a way that Scottish kilts do today. These tastes continue throughout the finds from Sutton Hoo, and the fact that they were expressed with such exuberance in this East Anglian burial suggests that the mission of Gregory would make the pagan Anglo-Saxons of this region even more entrenched. It can be seen as a reaction against the alien, exotic and unsettling group of Romans that had worked their way into Kent.
The Sutton Hoo ship burial is one of the greatest single collections of treasure found in this country. It is like an English version of Tutankhamen’s Tomb, complete with all the items that one of the most high-status individuals in the country required for an active and real existence in the afterlife. The way in which the ship was found is almost as dramatic as the objects themselves. It was discovered among a set of burial mounds in East Anglia on the eve of the Second World War by the remarkably insightful local archaeologist Basil Brown, on the instructions of the prosaically named landowner Mrs Edith Pretty. Alluring tales of ghosts wandering into the mound and divination rods detecting activity at the exact location of the burial have surrounded the dig with further allure, but the hoard speaks for itself in terms of its beauty and significance.
The burial can be dated to between AD 610 and AD 635 due to the collection of gold Frankish coins placed together within a purse.19 This means that it was deposited shortly after Gregory the Great’s mission to Kent, along the opposite coast, near Woodbridge in East Anglia. The person memorialised in the burial would have lived through the arrival of the missionaries from Rome, and as a member of the Anglo-Saxon elite, would have had to respond to the changes this new relationship with the Christian Continent ushered in.
While the pouch containing the coins, which was presumably make from leather, has deteriorated, the lid with its complex patterns and images of conflict between humans, birds and beasts has survived. Although the coins from Sutton Hoo can’t be narrowed down to a specific year, they were minted within a relatively limited time period. The other fascinating thing about these coins is that they form a very clear collection. Each coin has been selected from a different mint across Frankish Gaul.
Even with the resources we have today, numismatists can find it difficult to track down a specific coin and complete a collection. But for such a definite selection process to have been introduced to this set of coins in the early seventh century indicates that this was not simply gold bullion, but rather a carefully contrived and symbolically loaded diplomatic gift.
Further still, the fact that the coins have been rounded up to the number 42 through the inclusion of three blanks and two ingots suggests that there may be an association here with the payment made for passage to the afterlife. The payment of Charon’s Obul, a coin placed within a burial to pay the ferryman to take the deceased across the river from the land of the living to the land of the dead, was a practice going back to ancient Rome and Greece.20 The Sutton Hoo purse could be a particularly elaborate form of Charon’s Obul, with forty coins to pay the ferrymen, and two ingots to pay the steersmen. So the collection has significance symbolically, but it also indicates that the individual interred in the ship burial had strong political links with Christian Frankish Gaul. The Anglo-Saxons were putting feelers out to the Continent, and Gregory the Great wanted to ensure that their exposure to Christian ideas and the hierarchical organisation of the Church was as orthodox as possible.
The argument over who is buried at Sutton Hoo will never fully abate, but scholars are being more assertive in the connections they draw between the ship burial and the King of East Anglia who died around AD 625, Raedwald. The argument that it’s Raedwald who is buried at Sutton Hoo is borne out by examining the wide range of objects interred, as well as the form of the burial itself. Ship burial is attested to among the royal burial grounds of the Scandinavian kings, for example at Vendel in Sweden. Connected to East Anglia across the sea, and possibly through ancestry, the Swedish links with Sutton Hoo are strong. The shield and helmet both seem to have been Swedish-made heirlooms that were like regalia in terms of their significance within the burial goods. In later genealogies, Raedwald’s dynasty links back to the Wuffingas of Sweden, so the presence of such items within the goods, as well as the form of burial inside a 27-metre long ship, suggests that the individual and his family were declaring affiliation with pagan royal families across the North Sea.
Other items buried with the deceased, however, indicate wide-reaching connections across Europe and with Christians. Three hanging bowls were placed within the central burial chamber. These elusive objects are often found in Anglo-Saxon graves, although their exact use remains difficult to discern. In terms of their decoration, they display features most commonly found in Irish metalwork. The largest example from Sutton Hoo has a small three-dimensional bronze fish that would have sat in the centre. The fish was on a loose socket and would move about if water were poured in. For it to be visible it is most likely that a clear fluid was held in the bowl. The most persuasive explanation is that sacred water, perhaps from a spiritual well or river, could be kept in these for ritual purposes. Their presence in the Sutton Hoo ship burial testifies to contacts between the pagan Germanic Anglo-Saxons and the Christian Irish.
Among the objects discovered at Sutton Hoo, a few in particular testify to the arrival of Gregory the Great and his mission from the Christian Continent. The burial contained a range of bowls, including a bronze Coptic bowl, the largest surviving silver Byzantine dish in the Western world and a stack of ten silver bowls.21 The style and decoration of all these items is very different to the rest of the objects in the ship burial. Bronze and silver rather than gold and garnet, they feature life-like animals such as hares and bears, floriated designs, a female bust and cross-shaped motifs.
Nestled beneath the stack of silver cruciform bowls, and placed one upon the other, are perhaps the most suggestive pieces in the burial – two silver spoons. Their arms are inscribed in Greek with the words ‘Saulos’ and ‘Paulos’. These names connect the spoons with the accounts from Acts of the Apostles of St Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus [Acts 9:1–19]. After the Roman soldier Saul saw a divine revelation and chose to embrace Christianity, he changed his name to Paul. This suggests that the spoons may have been baptismal gifts, for a convert who has accepted Christianity.
This implies a further connection between the individual commemorated at Sutton Hoo and the East Anglian king, Raedwald. Bede records the importance of this ruler within the national politics of Anglo-Saxon England in the sixth and early seventh centuries. He was bound to the King of Kent, Aethelberht (husband of Bertha and recipient of the Gregorian mission), through a complicated system of overlordship. The term ‘bretwalda’ was employed to refer to one king of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms who possessed greater power and influence than the others. This is a slippery term, but the bretwaldship could shift from one kingdom and ruler to another. Great things were at stake for the pagan king of East Anglia, and during his life he found himself abutted by the Kentish kingdom, complete with its Christian princess, Frankish bishop and Continental affiliations. At one point, it seems, Raedwald had to appeal for protection to Kent, and the condition by which he secured support was his acceptance of Christianity, with Aethelberht most probably his baptismal sponsor:22
Raedwald had long before been admitted to the sacrament of the Christian faith in Kent, but in vain; for on his return home, he was seduced by his wife and certain perverse teachers, and turned back from the sincerity of the faith; and thus his latter state was worse than the former; so that, like the ancient Samaritans, he seemed at the same time to serve Christ and the gods whom he had served before; and in the same temple he had an altar to sacrifice to Christ, and another small one to offer victims to devils.
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People.23
This description fits almost too comfortably with the finds from Sutton Hoo. Here was deposited all a pagan warrior king would need for his journey to Valhalla, including food, clothing, weapons and his regalia, complete with gold and garnet fittings. His Swedish helm and shield, along with enigmatic items such as fittings for a possible wand, a ceremonial whetstone and a standard, chime with an impression of the deceased as the most influential of Anglo-Saxon pagan rulers. His interment in a massive ship beneath a burial mound that would rise up against the East Anglian coast was a permanent reminder to all who sailed into the kingdom of its powerful heirs – an extreme expression of a pagan ruler’s potency at a moment when their world was potentially poised on the brink of collapse.
What Bede’s quote and the other finds from the burial emphasise is that the Christian world – its power and its politics – was at the door of this Anglo-Saxon pagan overlord. The hanging bowls indicate that the British-Christian world was never fully redundant within Anglo-Saxon England and should not be underestimated, while the baptismal spoons, silver bowls and Frankish coins suggest that the deceased was connected economically, politically and possibly (in a nominal way) religiously with the Christian Continent. The Sutton Hoo ship burial presents a view of the Anglo-Saxon world at a moment of great change. This change would be accelerated through the powerful personality of Pope Gregory and his charge, St Augustine, who decided in 597 that it was time to convert the pagans on the edge of the known world.
Augustine and his missionaries faced a tough job in converting the pagan Anglo-Saxons. The exuberant expression of individuality, power and tribal pride expressed in the Sutton Hoo ship burial was just one response to the threat of change posed by these unusual men dressed in monastic habits, wielding books and crosses. Once Augustine had secured the support of King Aethelberht, and was given safe haven in Canterbury, he then had another challenge to deal with: the native British Christians. Suppressed, but not eradicated, there were still practising Christians throughout England, and they sought the guidance of this most remarkable of visitors: a papal legate.
Augustine’s tense relationship with the native British Christians is clear from the tantalising example Bede cites, in which he sought advice on how to deal with the little-known cult of a native saint: Sixtus. Almost nothing survives about this saint apart from a reference to him in a letter from Augustine to Gregory. This reference occurs as one in a long line of questions the nervous missionary has for the Pope. In this case, Augustine wants to know if he should allow the continuation of practice at the site of St Sixtus’s cult. Gregory rather condescendingly writes that:
Things are not to be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things. Choose, therefore, from every church those things that are pious, religious, and upright, and when you have, as it were, made them up into one body, let the minds of the English be accustomed thereto.
Gregory the Great’s letter to St Augustine, from Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History of the English People.24
The Pope’s next act is more derogatory, for rather than seek to understand the origins of the British saint’s cult, or the foundations for his veneration, he instead sends over relics of a similarly named saint, Pope Sixtus II, from the catacombs in Rome, to replace the native relics. This should speak volumes about how sanctity was seen as less concerned with a specific individual than with the spiritual potency of a particular place, relic or memory. Sixtus may have existed in Britain, and he may have been significant to those Christians that had preserved stories of his life and death. But to the papacy he was another local saint who could be superseded by a papally sanctioned alternative. The Pope and his missionary treated the resident Romano-British Christians with a disdain that stemmed from a distrust of their potentially outdated and disconnected understanding of orthodox Christian belief. This was to be their modus operandi throughout the conversion period.
Augustine and his missionaries did meet with representatives from the British Church at a place known from then on as Augustine’s Oak, on the borders of the Wiccii and West Saxons. Although the exact location has been lost, it was probably between Gloucestershire and Somerset.25 According to Bede, Augustine rebuked the British Christians for not seeking to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons themselves, and for the fact that they kept Easter at the wrong time. The question of dating Easter obsessed later Anglo-Saxon Christians like Bede to the point where he wrote a definitive work on how it should be properly calculated. True, the British Church did use a different dating system to establish the movable feast of Easter, but there was more at play in this meeting between British and Roman Christians. It was about establishing orthodoxy and stamping out possible heretical practices.
In a fascinating episode that reveals a good deal about British Christian practices and the personality of Augustine, the decision of the British bishops rested on their consultation with a local wise man or hermit. They had sought his advice on whether to bend their views to the Roman missionaries, and were told that, if Augustine rose to meet them when they reconvened their meeting, then he was honouring them and they should follow his guidance. However, Augustine did not get up, preferring to stay seated in the presence of bishops. This single act of apparent arrogance set the Christian mission back by many decades, and may have coloured relations between native and Continental Christians long-term. This says much about both Augustine and the Gregorian mission. In their interaction with the British Christians they acted like the Roman invaders of centuries before, entering what they saw as a barbarian nation and imposing their more civilised and correct ideas upon the natives.
The rather anxious and lengthy letter Augustine wrote to Gregory, seeking guidance, also highlights the complex situation the missionary found himself in with regards to both the tribal rulers and Romano-British Christians.26 He directs a number of pertinent questions to the Pope that had arisen as part of his attempts to persuade the Anglo-Saxon rulers away from their pagan beliefs and towards Christian ones. They include asking whether two brothers can marry two sisters they are not related to, and how long after birth a woman must wait before her husband can have carnal knowledge of her again. These questions give a tangible link with the concerns of the Anglo-Saxon ruling class, whom Augustine was seeking to convert.27 It is possible to imagine the men of the court asking such questions about marrying sisters, and Augustine promising to write to Rome to ensure he gets an entirely correct response.
However, these statements also hint at the continued Christian presence and a set of British priests and bishops clinging to Old Testament guidance on such matters. They may have sought the support of a papal legate to endorse their established (by this point, outmoded) approach. At times in his letters Gregory has to admonish the missionary and tell him to use his own judgement. Augustine was determined to run all parts of his programme past his superior, and in these letters the Pope is firmly in control, while the English saint is his puppet.
Gregory continues to support Augustine in the first years of his mission, instructing the Bishop of Arles to help the new Archbishop of the English keep a stern approach and a strong hand in his conversion. In AD 601 he sends more men and resources to Canterbury, including the missionaries Mellitus, Justus, Paulinus and Rufinianus:
and by them all things in general that were necessary for the worship and service of the church, viz., sacred vessels and vestments for the altars, also ornaments for the churches, and vestments for the priests and clerks, as likewise relics of the holy apostles and martyrs; besides many books.28
There may be a rare survival of one of these books, sent by Pope Gregory to Augustine. Now known as the St Augustine Gospels it is still used to swear in new Archbishops, and has even been venerated by the present pope, Pope Francis. It is a small and unassuming volume, a sixth-century manuscript, made around Naples, perhaps specifically for the purposes of the Gregorian mission. It contains just the Gospels, and its decoration, content and visual material all provide a fortunate link with Gregory the Great himself.
It is Italianate in style, as is clear from the arrangement of the Evangelist and his setting within an architectural structure, complete with marbled columns and Corinthian capitals. The Evangelist Luke has been treated with a degree of naturalism, with shading used to give his skin a lifelike hue, and gradations in colour indicating the folds in his robes. All around him, in both the space between the columns and on the facing page, are small images presenting episodes from the Gospels, including the Last Supper, where the Apostles and Christ are shown around a semi-circular table in the manner of late-antique portraits of philosophers feasting. The way in which the scenes have been broken up and set sequentially to unfold a narrative is similar to how biblical stories were treated on late-antique sarcophagi. The mid-fourth-century sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, for example, has precisely this ‘comic-book’ treatment of events, from Adam and Eve to Daniel in the lions’ den. The St Augustine Gospels, however, includes only stories relating to the life of Christ, and in this respect it presents the basic narratives at the heart of Christianity.
It is very possible that this manuscript was designed as a teaching aid for converting the Anglo-Saxon pagans. Gregory the Great was a firm believer in the power of images at a time when iconoclasm was sweeping away depictions of God, Christ, Mary and the saints in the Eastern Church. He was of the opinion that non-literate people needed educating in the stories underlying Christianity, and images could be the means of teaching those who could not read for themselves. In this respect, it is partly down to Gregory that Christianity remains a religion with a lasting commitment to representing the divine in art. This stands in opposition to Islam and Judaism, which took the message at the heart of iconoclasm – ‘thou shalt set up no false idols’ – as a premise for excising depictions of holy people from their art.
The St Augustine Gospels, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Lib. MS. 286, was made in the sixth century around Naples. This is the oldest surviving Latin illustrated gospel book and is still used to swear in new Archbishops of Canterbury.
As far as converting the pagans of Britain was concerned, Gregory appears in equal measure as the suppressive tyrant and the conciliatory convertor. As with the other saints covered by the book, Gregory is not clear-cut, but displays a complex mix of characteristics. A famous passage from Bede records a letter Gregory wrote to Bishop Mellitus, one of the missionaries that followed Augustine in AD 601, encouraging him to take a moderate approach to conversion:
The temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed. For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God, may the more familiarly resort to the places to which they have been accustomed.
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People.29
This seems remarkably tolerant in terms of gradually bringing the native population round to an understanding and appreciation of Christianity. Indeed, it is incongruous when considered against the backdrop of forced conversion that was used by later Western Christian rulers like Charlemagne, who slaughtered many thousands of pagan Saxons to bring them round to his religious and political views.
Gregory appreciated the difference between giving advice on the most expedient way to win over converts to his representatives on the ground versus firing up the fervour of secular rulers. In a letter to King Aethelberht, the pope contradicts explicitly his seemingly tolerant advice to Mellitus, encouraging the king to be forceful in the conversion of his people, and win fame and reputation through his suppression of the pagan religion. He states that Aethelberht should ‘suppress the worship of idols; overthrow the structures of the temples; edify the manners of your subjects by much cleanness of life, exhorting, terrifying, soothing, correcting, and giving examples of good works.’ Gregory utilised all these efforts in his missionary work – terrifying and soothing in equal measures.30
Both Gregory and Augustine drove a form of Christianity into the pagan kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England that was founded on Benedictine monasticism, Roman administrative structures and papal dogma. This was in sharp contrast to the Christianity that had been established for many centuries throughout Britain, and the efforts of the Roman missionaries would have a lasting effect on the next wave of saintly activity that emerged within Anglo-Saxon England. However, the British Church was not going to silently submit to the changes wrought by the papal mission without fighting for what made their form of Christianity unique and enduring. Entering the ring to challenge Gregory for the salvation of pagan Anglo-Saxon souls was a formidable opponent: Saint Columba of Iona.