CHAPTER III

ADOPTION OF CHRISTIANITY AND UNIFICATION OF ENGLAND

WHATEVER may have been the nature of the Anglo-Saxon conquest and settlement, the immediate political result was the foundation of several petty tribal states among which there ensued three centuries of warfare for supremacy. Dull as the annals of these three hundred years are, the period was nevertheless one of great importance in the building of the English nation. The heathen conquerors were converted to Christianity, Britain was brought into close relations with Rome, a wellplanned ecclesiastical system was founded, monks began there the work of civilization, the arts of peace flourished in spite of the conflicts, and learning increased. Doubtless the most vivid and interesting account of this period is to be found in John Richard Green's Short History of the English People.

§ 1. Rise of Kent and Landing of Augustine1

The conquest of the bulk of Britain was now complete (ca. 588). Eastward of a line which may be roughly drawn along the moorlands of Northumberland and Yorkshire, through Derbyshire and skirting the Forest of Arden to the mouth of the Severn, and thence by Mendip to the sea, the island had passed into English hands. From this time the character of the English conquest of Britain was wholly changed. The older wars of extermination came to an end, and as the invasion pushed westward in later times the Britons were no longer wholly driven from the soil, but mingled with their conquerors. A far more important change was that which was seen in the attitude of the English conquerors from this time toward each other. Freed to a great extent from the common pressure of the war against the Britons, their energies

Green, Short History of the English People, pp. 26 ff. By permission of Mrs. John Richard Green.

turned to combats with one another, to a long struggle for over lordship which was to end in bringing about a real national unity.

The West-Saxons, beaten back from their advance along the Severn valley, and overthrown in a terrible defeat at Faddiley, were torn by internal dissensions, even while they were battling for life against the Britons. Strife between the two rival kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira in the north absorbed the power of the Engle in that quarter, till in 588 the strength of Deira suddenly broke down, and the Bernician king, Ethelric, gathered the two peoples into a realm which was to form the later kingdom of Northumbria. Amid the confusion of north and south the primacy among the conquerors was seized by Kent, where the kingdom of the Jutes rose suddenly into greatness under a king called Æthelberht, who before 597 established his supremacy over the Saxons of Middlesex and Essex, as well as over the English of East Anglia and of Mercia as far north as the Humber and the Trent.

The overlordship of Æthelberht was marked by a renewal of that intercourse of Britain with the Continent which had been broken off by the conquests of the English. His marriage with Bertha, the daughter of the Frankish King Charibert of Paris, created a fresh tie between Kent and Gaul. But the union had far more important results than those of which Æthelberht may have dreamed. Bertha, like her Frankish kinsfolk, was a Christian. A Christian bishop accompanied her from Gaul to Canterbury, the royal city of the kingdom of Kent; and a ruined Christian Church, the Church of St. Martin, was given them for their worship. The marriage of Bertha was an opportunity which was at once seized by the bishop, who at this time occupied the Roman See, and who is justly known as Gregory the Great. A memorable story tells us how, when but a young Roman deacon, Gregory had noted the white bodies, the fair faces, the golden hair of some youths who stood bound in the market-place of Rome. "From what country do these slaves come?" he asked the traders who brought them. "They are English, Angles!" the slave dealers answered. The deacon's pity veiled itself in poetic humor. "Not Angles but Angels," he said, "with faces so angellike! From what country come they?" "They come," said the merchants, "from Deira." "De ira!" was the untranslatable reply, "aye, plucked from God's ire, and called to Christ's mercy! And what is the name of their king?" "Ella," they told him; and Gregory seized on the words as of good omen. "Alleluia

shall be sung in Ella's land!" he cried, and passed on, musing how the angel faces should be brought to sing it.

Only three or four years had gone by when the deacon had become bishop of Rome, and Bertha's marriage gave him the opening he sought. After cautious negotiations with the rulers of Gaul, he sent a Roman abbot, Augustine, at the head of a band of monks, to preach the gospel to the English people. The missionaries landed in 597 on the very spot where Hengist had landed more than a century before in the Isle of Thanet; and the king received them sitting in the open air on the chalk-down above Minster, where the eye nowadays catches miles away over the marshes the dim tower of Canterbury. He listened to the long sermon as the interpreters whom Augustine had brought with him from Gaul translated it. "Your words are fair," Ethelberht replied at last, with English good sense; "but they are new and of doubtful meaning"; for himself, he said, he refused to forsake the gods of his fathers, but he promised shelter and protection to the strangers. The band of monks entered Canterbury, bearing before them a silver cross with a picture of Christ, and singing in concert the strains of the litany of their Church. "Turn from this city, Lord," they sang, "Thine anger and wrath, and turn it from Thy holy house, for we have sinned." And then in strange contrast came the jubilant cry of the older Hebrew worship, the cry which Gregory had wrested in prophetic earnestness from the name of the Yorkshire king in the Roman market-place, "Alleluia."

It is strange that the spot which witnessed the landing of Hengist should be yet better known as the landing place of Augustine. But the second landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure the reversal and undoing of the first. "Strangers from Rome" was the title with which the missionaries first fronted the English king. The march of the monks as they chanted their solemn litany was, in one sense, the return of the Roman legions who had retired at the trumpet-call of Alaric. It was to the tongue and the thought not of Gregory only but of such men as his own Jutish fathers had slaughtered and driven over the sea that Æthelberht listened in the preaching of Augustine. Canterbury, the earliest royal city of the new England, became the centre of Latin influence. The Roman tongue became again one of the tongues of Britain, the language of its worship, its correspondence, its literature. But more than the tongue of Rome returned with Augustine. Practically his landing renewed the union with the Western world.

which the landing of Hengist had all but destroyed. The new England was admitted into the older commonwealth of nations. The civilization, arts, letters, which had fled before the sword of the English conquest, returned with the Christian faith. The fabric of the Roman law indeed never took root in England, but it is impossible not to recognize the result of the influence of the Roman missionaries in the fact that the codes of customary English law began to be put into writing soon after their arrival.

As yet these great results were still distant; a year passed before Æthelberht yielded, and though after his conversion thousands of Kentish men crowded to baptism, it was years before he ventured to urge the under-kings of Essex and East Anglia to receive the creed of their overlord. The effort of Æthelberht, however, only heralded a revolution which broke the power of Kent forever. The tribes of mid-Britain revolted against his supremacy, and gathered under the overlordship of Radwald of East Anglia. The revolution clearly marked the change which had passed over Britain. Instead of a chaos of isolated peoples, the conquerors were now, in fact, gathered into three great groups. The Engle kingdom of the north reached from the Humber to the Forth. The southern kingdom of the West-Saxons stretched from Watling Street to the Channel. And between these was roughly sketched out the great kingdom of mid-Britain, which, however its limits may vary, retained a substantial identity from the time of Æthelberht to the final fall of the Mercian kings. For the next two hundred years the history of England lies in the struggle of Northumbrian, Mercian, and West-Saxon kings to establish their supremacy over the general mass of Englishmen, and unite them in a single England.

§ 2. Supremacy and Conversion of Northumbria

In this struggle, the lead was at once taken by Northumbria, which was rising into a power that set all rivalry at defiance. Under Æthelfrith, who had followed Æthelric in 593, the work [ of conquest went on rapidly. In 603 the forces of the northern Britons were annihilated in a great battle at Dægsastan, and the rule of Northumbria was established from the Humber to the Forth. Along the west of Britain there stretched the unconquered kingdoms of Strathclyde and Cumbria, which extended from the river Clyde to the Dee, and the smaller British states which occupied what we now call Wales. Chester formed the link between

these two bodies; and it was Chester that Æthelfrith chose in 613 for his next point of attack. Some miles from the city two thousand monks were gathered in the monastery of Bangor, and after imploring in a three days' fast the help of Heaven for their country, a crowd of these ascetics followed the British army to the field. Æthelfrith watched the wild gestures and outstretched arms of the strange company as it stood apart, intent upon prayer, and took the monks for enchanters. "Bear they arms or no," said the king, "they war against us when they cry against us to their God," and in the surprise and rout which followed the monks were the first to fall.

The British kingdoms were now utterly parted from one another. By their victory at Deorham the West-Saxons had cut off the Britons of Devon and Cornwall from the general body of their race. By his victory at Chester, Æthelfrith broke this body again into two several parts, by parting the Britons of Wales from those of Cumbria and Strathclyde. From this time the warfare of Briton and Englishman died down into a warfare of separate English kingdoms against separate British kingdoms, of Northumbria against Cumbria and Strathclyde, of Mercia against modern Wales, of Wessex against the tract of British country from Mendip to the Land's End....

The greatness of Northumbria reached its height under Eadwine (617-633). Within his own dominions Eadwine displayed a genius for civil government which shows how completely the mere age of the conquest had passed away. With him began the English proverb so often applied to after kings, “A woman with her babe might walk scatheless from sea to sea in Eadwine's day." Peaceful communication revived along the deserted highways; the springs by the roadside were marked with stakes, and a cup of brass set beside each for the traveller's refreshment. Some faint traditions of the Roman past may have flung their glory round this new "Empire of the English"; some of its majesty had at any rate come back with its long-lost peace. A royal standard of purple and gold floated before Eadwine as he rode through the villages; a feather-tuft attached to a spear, the Roman tufa, preceded him as he walked through the streets. The Northumbrian king was, in fact, supreme over Britain as no king of English blood had been before. Northward his frontier reached the Forth, and was guarded by a city which bore his name, Edinburgh, Eadwine's burgh, the city of Eadwine. Westward, he was master of Chester, and the fleet he equipped there subdued