Canterbury Becomes Center of Catholic Influence

Today’s installment concludes Augustine’s Missionary Work In England,
with a short selection from History of the English People by John R. Green published in 1880.

John R. Green (1837-1883) was an English historian. First the concluding paragraph by the Venerable Bede.

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Previously in Augustine’s Missionary Work In England.

Time: 597 AD
Place: Kent

After these things, then, Father Augustine, beloved of God, departed [this life], and his body was buried without [doors], nigh the church of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, which we mentioned before, because it was not then yet fully built nor hallowed. As soon as it was hallowed, then his body was put into it, and becomingly buried in the north porch of the church, in which likewise the bodies of all the after-following archbishops are buried but two; that is, Theodorus and Berhtwald, whose bodies are laid in the church itself, because no more might [be so] in the foresaid porch. Well-nigh in the middle of the church is an altar set and hallowed in name of St. Gregory, on which every Saturday their memory and decease are celebrated with mass-song by the mass-priest of that place. On St. Augustine’s tomb is written an inscription of this sort: Here resteth Sir * Augustine, the first archbishop of Canterbury, who was formerly sent hither by the blessed Gregory, bishop of the Roman city; and was upheld by God with working of wonders. King Ethelbert and his people he led from the worship of idols to the faith of Christ, and, having fulfilled the days of his ministry in peace, departed on the 26th day of May in the same King’s reign.

[* “Sir” in English (Schir, Scottish) equal to Dominus, Latin, was five or six centuries ago prefixed to the name of every ordained priest.]

Now a short excerpt from John R. Green

Years had passed by since Gregory pitied the English slaves in the market-place of Rome. As bishop of the imperial city he at last found himself in a position to carry out his dream of winning Britain to the faith, and an opening was given him by Ethelbert’s marriage with Bertha, a daughter of the Frankish king Charibert of Paris. Bertha, like her Frankish kindred, was a Christian; a Christian bishop accompanied her from Gaul; and a ruined Christian church, the church of St. Martin beside the royal city of Canterbury, was given them for their worship.

The King himself remained true to the gods of his fathers; but his marriage no doubt encouraged Gregory to send 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 in the Isle of Thanet, at the spot where Hengist had landed more than a century before; and Ethelbert 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.

The King listened patiently to the long sermon of Augustine as the interpreters the abbot had brought with him from Gaul rendered it in the English tongue. “Your words are fair,” Ethelbert 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 with the usual religious tolerance of his race 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, O 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!”

[See introduction to Augustine’s Missionary Work in England.]

It was thus that the spot which witnessed the landing of Hengist became yet better known as the landing-place of Augustine. But the second landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure a 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 a return of the Roman legions who withdrew at the trumpet-call of Alaric. It was to the tongue and the thought not of Gregory only, but of the men whom his Jutish fathers had slaughtered or driven out that Ethelbert listened in the preaching of Augustine.

Canterbury, the earliest royal city of German England, became a 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 that union with the western world which the landing of Hengist had destroyed. The new England was admitted into the older commonwealth of nations. The civilization, art, letters, which had fled before the sword of the English conquerors returned with the Christian faith. The great 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 codes of the customary English law began to be put in writing soon after their arrival.

A year passed before Ethelbert yielded to the preaching of Augustine. But from the moment of his conversion the new faith advanced rapidly and the Kentish men crowded to baptism in the train of their King. The new religion was carried beyond the bounds of Kent by the supremacy which Ethelbert wielded over the neighboring kingdoms. Sebert, king of the East Saxons, received a bishop sent from Kent, and suffered him to build up again a Christian church in what was now his subject city of London, while the East Anglian king Redwald resolved to serve Christ and the older gods together.

This ends our selections on Augustine’s Missionary Work In England by two of the most important authorities of this topic:

• Ecclesiastical History of the English People by The Venerable Bede published in 731 AD.
• History of the English People by John R. Green published in 1880.

The Venerable Bede begins here.

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