Kent’s connections with Continental traders does not completely explain its apparently unique status among the English kingdoms and there may also be a historical tradition behind its eminence. The so-called Kentish Chronicle, which forms part of the Nennian compilation, describes the disastrous invitation that the Britons made to Germanic warbands in the 430s after Britain’s civitates, her tribal councils, had been given apparent permission by Emperor Honorius to look to their own defences.*6 Vortigern, the leader of the tribal councils that inherited the administrative functions of the British state, made a fatal pact with the legendary Hengest and Horsa by which they would protect Britain from the predations of her traditional enemies, the Irish and the Picts, in return for possession of the Isle of Thanet.22 Hengest and Horsa were Jutish: that is, from the peoples of the Jutland Peninsula said by Bede to have settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight in the fifth century. The coasts of the English Channel (known as the Oceanus Britannicus to the Romans and perhaps Minch to the natives, as it is still called La Manche—the Sleeve—by the French) were familiar to North Sea traders and raiders in their sleek, shallow-draughted rowing keels or cyuls. The Straits of Dover were, as they are today, the shortest crossing point for those wishing to exploit markets and vulnerable peoples along Britain’s south and east coasts.
At some point, perhaps five or ten years after the initial treaty, the Jutish warlords decided that the balance of the deal was not quite to their liking:
Hengest was an experienced man, shrewd and skilful. Sizing up the king’s impotence, and the military weakness of his people, he held a council, and said to the British king [Vortigern], ‘We are few; if you wish, we can send home and invite warriors from the fighting men of our country, that the number who fight for you and your people may be larger.’ The king ordered it to be done…23
The Nennian version has it that, when reinforcements arrived, there was a great feast and that, having been made exceedingly drunk by the cunning and wily Hengest, Vortigern became enamoured of the Jutish chief’s daughter and offered to swap her for the whole kingdom of Kent whose incumbent, Gwyrangon, was summarily deposed. This is legendary and not very historical, but it echoes the sort of political marriage alliance that sealed many a treaty in the Early Medieval period. If this garbled tale records faint traces of reality, Kent—or perhaps more pragmatically the right to tax the peoples of Kent—was the price the Britons thought it worth paying for the Jutes, who must have been little more than Channel pirates, to keep all the other pirates at bay. They were setting a thief to catch a thief. The British probably had little choice, because Vortigern was politically weak. He was forgiven neither by the chronicler whose records underlay Nennius’s compilation, nor by Gildas, who heaped infamy on the stupid Britons and their ‘Proud Tyrant’.
Kent, perhaps specifically East Kent, was the earliest English kingdom granted in toto by treaty, disregarding any other parts of the eastern seaboard that might have been affected by the arrival of North Sea traders/raiders or settlers. Such treaties were not new. Foederati, as the Romans called such military clients, were employed widely by an imperial administration engaged in strategic military plate-spinning from Cornwall to Constantinople. This was not the land-grab beloved of Dark Age fantasy, but a legal treaty; and the self-confidence of later Kentish kings, one suspects, reflects that. The unexplained oddity has always been the idea that Germanic naval mercenaries were based in Thanet to counter the predations of the Irish and Picts. It seems as though the priority in the south-east of Britain was to protect Channel trade, never mind what the Picts and Irish were up to. Keeping the seaways open here kept Britain (especially Kent) in contact with what remained of the Empire and her traders. Any half-decent wartime leader, from Vortigern to Churchill via Queen Elizabeth I and Pitt the Younger, knows that the Channel is the key to Britain’s back door. What would Philip II of Spain or Bonaparte or Hitler have given to keep the Royal Navy away for a week in good weather in 1588, 1805 or 1940?
The idea that Kentish kings regarded themselves as direct inheritors of the late Roman state is reinforced by the minting of coins in the late seventh century at Canterbury. One, found in a hoard at Crondall, Hampshire, bears the inscription DOROVERNIS CIVITAS.*7 That a Canterbury mint of that late date should call Canterbury a civitas—an explicitly Roman administrative name for a British tribal capital—is telling. So too is Bede’s testimony that when Augustine arrived at Canterbury in 597, at least two churches of Roman construction were to be found near the city, still standing and in reparable condition. Kent may, then, have been regarded as having a sort of residual primacy among the English kingdoms, to which was added the cachet of some continuity of Roman civic life, such as a theatre, and its continuing relations with the more sophisticated Merovingian court at Paris (the English have remained in awe of Paris ever since). Æthelberht’s father, Irminric, bore a suspiciously Frankish-sounding name. Even Oswald’s Deiran uncle Edwin thought it expedient to marry the king of Kent’s daughter.
In far-distant Rome, Pope Gregory himself knew of Deira. It was he, in the days before his papacy, who noticed in a Roman slave market a blond-haired youth. On enquiring where the child came from he was told that he was an Angle from the far north, from the kingdom of Deira.24 The Pope’s awful puns on Angles/angels and Deira/de ira are probably bad enough to be authentic.*8 Gregory had intelligence of the English, knew that they were heathen; he probably also knew that Kent, the most continental of its kingdoms, might be the most receptive to a mission from the mother church, for not only had Æthelberht of Kent married into a Frankish royal family, he had married a Christian princess, one Bertha, the daughter of Charibert of Paris.
Hengest and Horsa and their original three boatloads of men were said to have landed on the Isle of Thanet, that north-east corner of Kent which in those days was detached by the wide channel of the River Wantsum. It was on Thanet, also, that Gregory’s missionaries landed in the year 597. The mission got off to a shaky start. The monks, understandably apprehensive about being sent to convert a barbarous people on the edge of the world, faltered in their purpose on the long journey through the kingdom of the Franks. Augustine, the leader of the mission, returned to Rome to try to beg them off what must have seemed an impossibly daunting task. He was ‘encouraged’ by his master to carry on in somewhat forceful terms and the mission resumed its journey. Bede’s account of subsequent events is a great set-piece of English history. It also has the stamp of authenticity provided by his quotation verbatim of letters between the Pope, Augustine and Æthelberht which can hardly reflect anything but the essence of the mission’s arrival and reception. And yet, the letters do not tell the whole truth—not by a long shot.
To begin with, one wonders about the relationship between Æthelberht and the Franks. His marriage to a Merovingian princess and the political and material sophistication of the Franks at this period strongly suggests that if Æthelberht was overlord of southern Britain, Charibert of Paris and his successors were in turn his overlord. In which case, why did the Christianising mission not originate with the king of the Franks? Was Æthelberht trying to assert his independence from a now-partitioned Frankia by accepting a mission direct from Rome, as it were above Frankish heads? Was he expecting the mission; had he been warned of its impending arrival? Or was he, as Bede suggests, responding to opportunity as it arose?
Bede has it that when Augustine and his forty-strong party landed on Thanet they sent to Æthelberht asking him to receive them. Æthelberht ordered that the party await him on the island, either so that he might take counsel with his advisors on what to do with them or, if he had foreknowledge of their arrival, while he prepared some sort of formal reception. He agreed to hear the papal embassy on condition that they met in the open air, so that no devilment should take place. There is more to this than mere pagan superstition on his part. Thanet was the site of one of the major wic settlements in Kent. At Sarre, the first crossing-point to the mainland to be bridged (as late as t
he fifteenth century), a richly furnished cemetery was excavated in the nineteenth century revealing a sixth- to eighth-century settlement there, populated by traders. Many of the graves contained such items as weights and balances, and large numbers of exotic and highly valuable imports were also recovered.25 Sarre was, in fact, an emporium, perhaps one of the main ports of entry for Kent. Another, Fordwich, lay on the River Stour close to Canterbury—perhaps too close for comfort for Augustine to be allowed to land there.
Recent study suggests that these emporia offered a sort of duty-free quarantine status for foreigners, not unlike the conference facilities of global airport hubs like Schipol or Charles de Gaulle, full of bustle and exotica, people as well as goods.26 One is almost tempted to think of something like the Casablanca of Rick’s Café Américain, where almost anything, including men’s souls, might be bought and sold. Augustine, it seems, was initially to be treated as a trader/diplomat, permitted to come to the international port of arrival where his credentials and the bona fides of his mission could be scrutinised ‘for some days’.27 Æthelberht had every reason to be cautious: after all, a party of forty, in other circumstances, might constitute an invading army and he evidently anticipated some sort of hocus-pocus from Augustine, a man elevated enough in rank to bring a splendid retinue with him. Æthelberht, despite or perhaps because of his wife’s devotion to the Christian faith, was determined to treat Augustine’s arrival with all the pomp and suspicion with which mob-handed Continental suitors would later be received at the courts of England’s medieval kings and queens. In this case the only weapons on display were ceremonial: a silver cross and an image of the Lord painted on a wooden panel. These were the sword and shield of Augustine the warrior of Christ. What was Æthelberht to make of them? Had his queen prepared him for such disarming oddities?
So far, nothing in Bede’s story suggests Æthelberht had asked for, or been prepared for, the papal mission; it seems Augustine was by no means sure of his reception. Bede’s tone further implies that the king took his time to calculate the political pros and cons of allowing, or fostering, the objectives of the mission. In the Ecclesiastical History I.25 Bede relates how, with the aid of interpreters picked up in Frankia, Augustine told Æthelberht of the good news (the Gospels) which he brought from Rome with the promise of everlasting life. Æthelberht, from a personal point of view, was sceptical. As king of Kent and overlord of southern Britain he fulfilled the role of chief priest of the obscure heathen ceremonies practised by the English. A king’s success in battle depended on propitiating the Germanic gods of war to fight for his side. Dare a king surrender this power? This was no light matter. But then, Æthelberht was no battle-fighter.
Perhaps in consultation with Queen Bertha, who had her own priest in the form of the Frankish bishop Liudhard, and certainly with the advice of his gesiths,*9 his elite household of warrior nobles, the king allowed the Christians freedom to preach, offering them provisions and giving them a dwelling in the city of Canterbury. Whatever his personal reaction to Augustine’s mission, Æthelberht had to weigh carefully the political implications of allowing himself to be converted. This was not an issue for hasty judgement. Letting Christian preachers evangelise among the people was one thing; Augustine’s mission, and the essence of Æthelberht’s dilemma, was the conversion of the king and the nobility of Kent. This was as much to do with the acquisition of diplomatic relations with Rome as it was with personal salvation. It was about being part of something bigger. Were the kings of the English to acknowledge the spiritual overlordship of the Bishop of Rome? It is the ever-interesting British question: to join and be part of the European club, to surrender a part of one’s independence; or to remain aloof and excluded. For Bede, who belonged firmly to the Roman Catholic family, this was about the heathen English grasping the opportunity that the stupid Britons had rejected: the chance of salvation and re-integration into an idea of Empire and of civilisation.
Augustine and his fellow-missionaries settled in Canterbury, as Bede says, according to the way of life of the apostles and of the primitive church: that is to say, according to monastic rule, even though they did not immediately establish a monastery. They ‘preached the word of life to as many as they could’.28 This is intriguing. Were their new converts the rural poor of Kent? Were they members of the nobility, testing the waters? Could they even have been a community of Christians already worshipping in Canterbury, survivors of the congregations belonging to the old Roman buildings in what was left of the city? This potential continuity of Roman Christianity in Britain is one of the key questions in Early Medieval studies. In the British West a monastic movement had established itself on the Atlantic coast of Wales, and in Ireland in the sixth century there was a flourishing culture of tribal monasticism, but neither of these movements had been inspired by the diocesan church of Rome. Their spiritual inspiration came from the desert fathers, from St Anthony and his fellow ascetics. There is some evidence of British Christian communities hanging on in the Pennines and further north right into the seventh century; but it has been hard to demonstrate their survival in any English kingdom, unless that is what Bede alludes to in this enigmatic passage.
In the same chapter Bede hints at other fascinating aspects of the conversion, or reconversion process that the new Roman mission triggered. Æthelberht, he says, was at last persuaded to convert although the suggestion that he was ‘attracted by the pure life of the saints’ does not really ring true. The king rejoiced, says Bede, as increasing numbers of his subjects followed him. We are told that he did not compel anyone to accept the new faith, ‘though none the less he showed greater affection for believers since they were his fellow citizens in the kingdom of heaven’. The historian’s ears prick up at this sort of reference: it is as clear a sign as Bede could make of the political implications of the conversion. The lines of patronage which flowed down from a king through the distribution of favours, land, gifts and alliances were to be closed to those who did not accept the new faith; the Whips’ office is not an invention of twentieth-century party politics. Pope Gregory and Augustine were perfectly well aware of the pragmatic necessity for a conversion from the king down, that embracing existing systems of patronage was a key to success. Bede knew it too.
There is another phrase in the Ecclesiastical History I.26 of immense significance to understanding the impact Christian patrons would have on history. ‘It was not long,’ Bede says, ‘before he [Æthelberht] granted his teachers a place to settle in, suitable to their rank, in Canterbury, his chief city, and gave them possessions of various kinds for their needs.’ Here is the beating heart of the Anglo-Saxon tribal system. When young noble warriors like the legendary Beowulf came to offer their swords to a great king, they were without lands of their own. Only after they proved themselves loyal, brave and successful in battle did the king grant them lands ‘suitable to their rank’. So here in this key phrase we have Æthelberht recognising Augustine as the leader of a de facto warband (albeit that his warriors were soldiers of Christ) who, swearing to fight for his salvation and bring him the gifts of everlasting life, was rewarded with the possessions due to a proven, eligible gesith, or household companion. Bede uses the same phrase of Benedict Biscop in his Historia Abbatum, the Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow. In his case it was because Biscop had reached the proper age of about twenty-five and had served his time as one of King Oswiu’s thegns.29 Biscop rejected the earthly reward ‘for the sake of Christ’. In Æthelberht’s gift lies the first hint of the relationship that bishops and abbots would forge with their kings in the seventh century; it was a relationship adapted from secular tribal custom, with mutual benefits that came to be recognised and exploited with increasing cunning by both parties. Its long-term, unforeseen, dramatic implications for the English state only became apparent in the next three generations, in the policies of Oswald, his brother and his nephews. Although it is not possible to reconstruct the delicate negotiations which must have preceded Æthelbe
rht’s and his household’s conversion, King Edwin’s subsequent personal and political agonisings over the same issue were to be cast in a riveting, if typically frustrating, Bedan narrative.
Pope Gregory was quick to capitalise on the initial success of Augustine’s mission to Kent. In 601 he sent letters of support and encouragement to Augustine and to Æthelberht (whom he cannily compared to the Emperor Constantine), welcoming the king into his community. He sent gifts. Gregory also dispatched a support group of senior priests, carrying with them the pallium*10 that conferred metropolitan status on Augustine: the first Archbishop of Canterbury. In response to a list of questions posed by Augustine relating to the subtleties of adapting to local custom, Gregory sent a lengthy reply of which perhaps the most significant aspect is his attitude to pagan shrines and idols. His unequivocal advice to Augustine and to Æthelberht was that these were to be suppressed and destroyed. Within a month he had changed his mind and decided to propose a more subtle approach which, in today’s politico-military parlance, would be called a hearts-and-minds strategy:
The King in the North Page 5