The Conversion of Europe

Thus far, the antecedents of Ethelbert’s conversion are reminiscent of those of Clovis’s. A Germanic king, ruling a sub-Roman kingdom in which a little Christianity survives, enjoying close relations with Christian neighbours, married to a Christian wife, becomes a Christian. Yes, but with regard to Ethelbert there was an additional personage involved – Pope Gregory the Great, of whom we have already caught a fleeting glimpse offering robust advice to Sardinian landlords about how to convert their peasantry (above, p. 59).

Gregory was born into an aristocratic Roman family in about 540, into circles accustomed to wealth and authority. His relatives included two recent popes. An excellent traditional education was followed by a few years (c. 572–4) of high administrative experience as praefectus urbi, prefect of the city, the supreme civic official in Rome. Converted to the monastic life in 574–5, Gregory turned the family palazzo on the Caelian Hill into a monastery dedicated to St Andrew. He installed in it the magnificent library of Christian writers assembled by his kinsman Pope Agapetus I (535–6), who had envisaged founding a school of advanced Christian studies in Rome. Gregory also founded monasteries on some of the family estates in Sicily. In 579 he was sent by Pope Pelagius II to Constantinople as the papal apocrisarius, ambassador or nuncio, where he served until 585. It was a time of critical importance in the relations between Rome and Constantinople, during which the imperial government was striving to concert measures against the expansion of Lombard power in Italy. It was while he was en poste in Constantinople that Gregory met Leander of Seville, the elder brother of Isidore the etymologist, who was there on a diplomatic mission from the Catholics of Spain. From their discussions together there was born Gregory’s greatest work of biblical exegesis, the Moralia, a commentary on the book of Job. Returning to Rome he was retained as the pope’s secretary until Pelagius’ death in 590. To his dismay, Gregory was chosen to succeed him. He accepted with genuine reluctance and served as pope until his death in 604.

Rome, Constantinople, Seville: Gregory’s world was Roman, imperial, Mediterranean. Within that world Gregory’s career was, on a superficial view, a glittering one. He was one of those rare multitalented persons who are successful in all they undertake: administrator, diplomat, organizer, negotiator, writer. But Gregory would have been dismayed at the prospect of being remembered in this fashion. His priorities were different. He believed that God’s Day of Judgement was imminent. This conviction gave edge to his overmastering concerns, which were pastoral and evangelical. These concerns gust like a mighty wind of spiritual force through all his writings: the Moralia, the Dialogues, in which he commemorated St Benedict and other saints, his sermons, many of his 850-odd surviving letters, and the book he composed for the guidance of those who exercise the cure of souls, the Liber Regulae Pastoralis (Book of Pastoral Care). The pastoral impulse in Gregory surfaces in some unlikely places. It can be seen in some of his dealings with the Lombards, ‘that abominable people’ (in his own words) whose invasion of Italy had brought hardship which he devoted much time and energy to relieving. It even shines through his hard-headed instructions for the management of the papal estates. It can be glimpsed in his correspondence with Queen Brunhilde, the Spanish wife of Clovis’s grandson Sigibert (and aunt, by marriage, of Bertha).

Gregory’s pastoral impulse was translated most memorably into action in his sending of a mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. The earliest biography of Gregory, composed at Whitby about a century after his death, contains the first version of the story of his encounter with English boys in Rome before he became pope.7 The meeting moved Gregory to the most famous series of puns in English historical mythology. Of what nation were the boys? They replied that they were Angles. ‘Not Angles but angels.’ What was the name of their king? Alle. ‘Alleluia! God’s praise must be heard in his kingdom.’ What was their kingdom called? Deira [the southern half of Northumbria, roughly equivalent to the Yorkshire of today]. ‘They shall flee from the wrath [de ira] of God to the faith.’ According to the anonymous author Gregory himself tried to set out on this mission during the pontificate of Benedict I (575–9) but was prevented from going more than three days’ journey from Rome. It is highly unlikely that Gregory would have wished to leave Italy at that time, when he was busy founding and nurturing his monasteries. The story as told by the anonymous author and subsequently (in a slightly different form) by Bede was an oral tradition which had been circulating for some time among the Anglo-Saxons before it was committed to writing at Whitby in the early eighth century. The puns which Gregory is said to have made probably tell us more about the taste of the eighthcentury Anglo-Saxons for punning wordplay than they do about the gift for verbal repartee of a sixth-century Italian cleric.

Bede’s telling of the story sets it in the market-place of Rome and alleges that the English boys were up for sale as slaves. There is nothing intrinsically implausible about this. We need to remember that the slave trade was probably the most widespread business activity of the early medieval world. It is not inconceivable that some of the Frankish luxury objects excavated from the cemeteries of Ethelbert’s Kent were paid for with English slaves. In this connection it is of great interest to find that Pope Gregory wrote in September 595 to his agent Candidus, who was on his way to administer the papal estates in southern Gaul, ordering him ‘to buy English boys of seventeen or eighteen years of age in order that they may, dedicated to God, make progress in monasteries’.8 The context makes it clear that the pope had in mind his own or other monasteries in Italy, because he requests that the boys be sent to him: ‘and because they are pagans who are to be found there, I wish a priest to be sent with them so that, should illness strike in the course of the journey, he may baptise those whom he sees to be at the point of death.’ It is not easy to interpret this letter. Some have assumed that the pope’s intention was to train the boys as missionaries who could then be sent back to evangelize the Anglo-Saxons: but there is not a hint of this in the text. A commonsensical reading might suggest that the pope simply wanted Candidus to get a supply of domestic slaves for use in his monasteries, though this is not an interpretation that commends itself to the pope’s admirers. It is unwise to use this letter in support of the view that Gregory was planning a mission to the Anglo-Saxons as early as 595 – though he may have been. In a letter to Bishop Syagrius of Autun written in July 599 Gregory said that he had been thinking about the mission to England ‘for a long time’ (diu).9 At the least we may safely say that the letter shows that in the late summer of 595 the pope’s mind was busy with thoughts of the English and their paganism.

He will also have been aware that the Anglo-Saxons inhabited an island that had once been part of the empire. Gregory was a Roman through and through. He came from a family with a proud tradition of public service, he had respect for Roman order and administration, and – despite his strong Augustinian leanings – he had been trained to familiarity with ideas about the providential role of the empire in the divine scheme. His was a world in which it was inconceivable not to take the empire for granted. It is worth recalling that still in Gregory’s day and for much of the century to come Constantinople continued to cast long shadows of influence across the western provinces. We should remember too that after the Justinianic reconquests of Gregory’s childhood the empire still governed Sicily, north Africa as far as the Straits of Gibraltar and a sizeable chunk of south-eastern Spain. Furthermore, Gregory looked out upon a world in which, by the 590s, all the barbarian successor-states had adopted Christianity excepting only the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England.

Combine this with Gregory’s sense of pastoral urgency and we have a context, what could be termed a temperamental context, for the initiative he took with regard to England. That initiative was the despatch in 596 of a party of missionaries to the court of King Ethelbert of Kent. Bede, our prime narrative source, tells us that Gregory did this ‘on the prompting of divine inspiration’. It may have been so; but we must beware of ascribing the initiative solely to the pope or to God, even though this has been the received interpretation of the origins of the mission from Bede’s day onwards. But even Bede’s account is not without its difficulties. He tells us – and the information certainly came to him from Canterbury – that Ethelbert died twentyone years after he had received the faith. Now since Ethelbert died on 24 February 616 it is evident that this ‘reception’ (whatever it may have consisted of) occurred in the year 595; or, to be pedantically accurate, between 24 February 595 and 23 February 596. If this piece of information is accurate it may fittingly be considered alongside a remark made by the pope himself. Writing to the royal Frankish brothers Theudebert and Theuderic in July 596 – it is the letter in which he referred to Frankish influence in Kent – Gregory put it on record that ‘we have heard that the people of the English wishes to be converted to the Christian faith.’10 One could not ask for a more explicit, authoritative and of course strictly contemporary statement that some approach had been made from the English side. It looks as though Gregory was responding to an appeal rather than launching a mission into the unknown. We might care to cast our minds back – as perhaps Gregory did also – to earlier such responses: the sending of Ulfila to the Christian communities of Gothic Dacia, for example, or of Palladius to the Christians of Ireland.

If an approach was made to the pope in 595 or early 596 one must ask how it was transmitted, and our thoughts turn at once to Queen Bertha and Bishop Liudhard. Bertha would have known of her greatgrandmother’s part in the conversion of her husband Clovis. She may well have received a hortatory letter reminding her of it, like the one which Chlodoswintha got from Nicetius of Trier, when she went off as a bride to Kent. Her assistance in the conversion of Ethelbert was acknowledged by Pope Gregory in a letter he sent to her in 601. When something happened in 595 which made it clear to Bertha that the king was ripe for conversion – perhaps it was a victory in battle, as in the case of Clovis – she turned – to whom? Not to the pope directly, for surely we should have heard of this in Gregory’s correspondence. Most likely it was to her royal relatives in Francia. After all, it was in a letter to Theudebert and Theuderic that Gregory said that he had heard of the English desire to be converted.

Theudebert and Theuderic were children. The regent for them was their grandmother Brunhilde, the most powerful presence in Frankish Gaul in the 590s. Her ghastly end – torn apart by wild horses on the orders of her nephew-by-marriage King Chlothar II after a prolonged struggle for power – and the subsequent blackening of her reputation must not blind us to both her political skill and her piety. When Columbanus arrived in Gaul in about 590 it was Brunhilde and her son Childebert who gave him land and royal protection for his early monastic foundations in Burgundy. (Brunhilde later quarrelled with Columbanus, but that is another story.) Columbanus came from an Irish church where the memory of Patrick was kept green; he had his own vivid sense of mission. He touched the minds of his royal patrons. They in their turn were in contact with Pope Gregory. Childebert and the pope exchanged letters in the summer of 595. Gregory wrote to Brunhilde and Childebert again in September, commending to them his agent Candidus (to whom he was writing at the same time about purchasing English youths). They were again in touch in 596 when Brunhilde’s priest Leuparicus passed between them, bringing relics of St Peter and St Paul as a present from the pope for the queen on his return journey. In 597 she asked for a book which Gregory sent her. Brunhilde founded a monastery at Autun to which the pope granted privileges at her request in 602. The bishop of Autun, Syagrius, was close to the queen: Gregory rewarded his services to the English mission with a special mark of papal favour in 599. The scene was thus more complicated than Bede’s narrative suggests: there was an English king who wanted to become a Christian and a pope with an overwhelming desire to save souls. Linking them was the Frankish royal court, provider of information and later, through the bishops, of practical help.

We know very little of the earlier life of the man chosen by Gregory to head the mission of King Ethelbert. Augustine of Canterbury – named after the great Augustine of Hippo – was a monk and by 596 prior of the monastery founded by Gregory in Rome. Although the prior is formally second-in-command of a monastery after the abbot, in this instance he would have been effectively running the community because its abbot would have been too busy with his duties as pope to supervise the day-to-day life of the house. Gregory was a shrewd judge of men and we must assume that he thought very highly of Augustine to have appointed him to a position of considerable spiritual and administrative responsibility. Gregory commended Augustine’s knowledge of scripture in a letter to Ethelbert in 601. It is not surprising, given Gregory’s priorities, that he should have picked a man of distinguished intellect in that particular field of study to head the mission. That is all we know of Augustine before the departure of the mission in 596. We are left wondering what additional talents or experience he might have possessed which commended him to Gregory for the task of barbarian evangelization. Had he, for instance, assisted or advised the pope in his dealings with the Lombards? Possibly: as so often, we simply do not know. But we do know one thing for certain about the mission: it was big and it was well equipped. Canterbury tradition recalled that Augustine’s companions had numbered ‘about forty’ – a prodigious number. We do not know what they brought to England on the initial journey, but we do know that Gregory reinforced them in 601 with at least four more men, together with vestments, altar cloths, church plate and ornaments, relics and ‘numerous books’. Gregory could command resources well beyond the capabilities of, say, Patrick.

Augustine reached Kent in the spring or early summer of 597. Ethelbert was hesitant at first but did in time consent to be baptized. (We are as uncertain of the exact date of his baptism as we are of that of Clovis.) On 20 July 598 Gregory wrote to the patriarch of Alexandria: in his letter he reported, among other matters, that he had heard from Augustine that ‘at Christmas last more than 10,000 Englishmen had been baptised’.11 Whether or not we wish to take the figure with a pinch of salt, we can surely accept that a large number of converts had been made. The scale of the thing is what is significant. It is incredible that so many could have been baptized had their king not given a lead. Therefore we may infer that Ethelbert had been baptized a Christian before 25 December 597. What did it mean for him as a king?

Flattering letters arrived from the pope, skilful as ever in handling barbarians.12 Ethelbert was numbered among the ‘good men raised up by almighty God to be a ruler over nations’. Gregory played on a Germanic king’s lust for fame. ‘For He whose honour you seek and maintain among the nations will also make your glorious name still more glorious even to posterity.’ (How right he was.) Let Ethelbert be zealous for the faith ‘like Constantine … [who] transcended in renown the reputation of former princes.’ In his letter to Bertha he compared her to Helena, mother of Constantine, and assured her that her fame had come even to the ears of ‘the most serene emperor’ in Constantinople.

Ethelbert gave Augustine a church in Canterbury – another survivor – to restore as his cathedral church, which it still is. He provided Augustine with land on which to found a monastery dedicated to the apostles Peter and Paul just outside the Roman walls. This was also to be the royal mausoleum wherein he and his queen would lie entombed, prayed for and remembered until the approaching Day of Judgement about which the pope had written to him. And something started to happen at Canterbury in the wake of Ethelbert’s conversion: a Roman city began to come back to life. Bede called it, rather grandly, ‘the metropolis of his [Ethelbert’s] whole empire’. It was now a Christian city and, in Bede’s words again, ‘a royal city’.

Ethelbert’s generous endowments of his churches may have been recorded in documents drafted in Latin according to the norms of Roman conveyancing. The matter is contentious because the surviving documents are copies of a much later date whose texts have evidently been tampered with: but genuine originals probably lie behind them, the first deeds of this sort ever issued by an English ruler. What is not in doubt is that Ethelbert promulgated a code of law. In Bede’s words, much discussed and therefore translated here as literally as possible, ‘following models of the Romans he established decrees of judgements for his people with the advice of his wise men which were written down in the language of the English’.13 These survive (in a late but reliable copy), the earliest piece of English prose. Ethelbert’s code of law is a simple tariff of offences and compensations: ‘If a man strike another on the nose with his fist, 3 shillings [shall be paid as compensation].’ There was little here that Justinian’s great jurist Tribonian would have recognized as Roman. But it was written down; it was in the king’s name; and it made new law as well as simply declaring existing custom – churchmen and church property, new arrivals on the Kentish scene, were woven into the social network of protection and compensation. The coming of Christianity gave the first impulse to the process by which the custom of the folk became the king’s law. The implications for royal authority were far-reaching.

Royal authority helped to diffuse Christianity both within Ethelbert’s kingdom of Kent and beyond it. Bede tells us that though the king did not compel any of his subjects to accept the faith, nevertheless he showed greater favour to those who did. Quite so. At another point in his narrative he let fall the information that some of Ethelbert’s subjects became Christians ‘through fear of the king or to win his favour’. A second Kentish bishopric was founded at Rochester and provided with endowments by the king. Ethelbert was also able to influence other Anglo-Saxon rulers. He might have appeared insignificant in Frankish eyes but in England Ethelbert was a considerable force, ‘a most powerful king whose supremacy reached as far as the river Humber’. Among his subject-kings was Saeberht, king of the East Saxons (i.e. Essex), who was also his nephew, the son of his sister Ricula. The East Saxons accepted Christianity and a bishopric was founded for them at London in 604. The next kingdom to the north was that of the East Angles. Its king, Redwald, was converted on a visit to Ethelbert’s court but on his return home was talked out of the sincerity of his faith by his wife. He tried to have the best of both worlds by putting up a Christian altar in his pagan temple. Ethelbert was able in addition to help the missionaries in their negotiations with the Christian clergy of neighbouring British kingdoms to the end of securing their collaboration in the work of evangelization; even though in the event these negotiations failed disastrously.

Our third princely barbarian convert was Edwin of Northumbria, baptized at York on Easter Day in the year 627, as we saw in the opening pages of this book. Here it is necessary only to emphasize that the background to Edwin’s conversion, and its aftermath, bore some likeness to the circumstances surrounding the conversions of Clovis and Ethelbert. Edwin knew something of the faith of his Christian bride before she reached him, accompanied by Paulinus – her Liudhard – in about 619. Before fighting his way to power in Northumbria in 616 Edwin had spent many years in exile; it is very probable that he had had encounters with Christians in the course of it. Later Welsh tradition claimed that part of that exile had been spent under the protection of the British King Cadfan of Gwynedd, or north-west Wales, ‘wisest and most renowned of all kings’, as his tombstone at Llangadwaladr in Anglesey described him, and certainly a Christian. Part of his exile had been spent with King Redwald of East Anglia, at whose court Edwin might have met Paulinus, as is related by the anonymous monk of Whitby in his life of Pope Gregory. Edwin’s subjects certainly included Christians, for at some date unknown he had conquered the British kingdom of Elmet, that area of south-west Yorkshire whose earlier history is still commemorated in the placenames Barwick-in-Elmet and Sherburn-in-Elmet. British tradition would claim that Edwin was actually baptized a Christian by a British bishop named Rhun, the son of King Urien of the northern British kingdom of Rheged, or Cumbria. This is unlikely. On the other hand it is highly probable that there would have been clerics among the delegations from Edwin’s sub-kingdoms who paid tributary visits to his court. Bishop Rhun could have been a not unfamiliar figure among the revellers at Edwin’s palace of, shall we say, Yeavering.

As in Ethelbert’s case there was also papal encouragement. There survive two letters from Pope Boniface V (619–25) addressed to Edwin and his consort.14 The king was urged to abandon paganism and embrace Christianity. The pope made the point early on that Christianity was the faith of ‘all the human race from the rising to the setting of the sun’ – with verbal reminiscence of a key missionary text in Malachi i.ll: because God has melted ‘by the fire of His Holy Spirit the frozen hearts of races even in the far corners of the earth’. Patently mendacious though the writer must have known these words to be – one need look no further than the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean world – the sort of effect that they were intended to have on Edwin is plain. The king was being encouraged to come in, literally, from the cold. Diplomatic presents of rich apparel, gold embroidered, cunningly hinted at the splendid trappings of Christian civilization. Queen Ethelburga was firmly reminded of her duty as wife and queen to bring about Edwin’s conversion. She was sent a silver mirror and an ivory comb ornamented with gold. Perhaps it looked somewhat like the silver-chased comb of her elder contemporary, Queen Theodelinda of the Lombards, now preserved at Monza.

The aftermath of Edwin’s baptism shows features with which the reader will by now be familiar. We see him assisting in the diffusion of Christianity in Northumbria, accompanying Paulinus as he taught and baptized at Yeavering, Catterick and the unidentified Campodunum. Royal ‘assistance’ did not just mean being present. Alcuin, the great eighth-century scholar, wrote of Edwin in his poem on The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York that ‘by gifts and threats he incited men to cherish the faith’.15 Edwin was active in pressing Christianity upon the rulers subject to him. He ‘persuaded’ (Bede’s word) Eorpwald, son and successor to Redwald of East Anglia, to become a Christian. One may suspect that Paulinus’ success in preaching the word in the kingdom of Lindscy (Lincolnshire) owed not a little to Edwin too. It is just possible that Edwin, like Ethelbert and Clovis, issued laws. This seems to be hinted at in some lines of Alcuin’s poem; but it should be stressed that Bede says nothing of any legislative activity and that no written lawcode attributable to Northumbria survives. Bede tells us something of the peace which Edwin maintained and of the royal state he kept. If historians have made heavy weather of the reference to ‘the standard which the Romans call a tufa and the English a thuuf the point surely for Bede was that there was now some ‘Roman’ quality about Edwin’s style of kingship.