Growing papal success in Germany was counterbalanced by a deteriorating papal position in Italy itself. Once supervised by the Byzantine imperial governors at Ravenna, the popes were now in danger from the Lombard kings, with their capital at Pavia. It seemed they might become mere bishops of Rome, subjects not of the emperor but of a great Lombard monarchy. They looked for help from the Frankish kingdom across the Alps.
The title to power was still held by the Merovingians – later dubbed the fainéants (do-nothing) kings – at this point embodied by Childeric III, but action was the province of their Carolingian chief minister, now Pippin the Short. Even in its decadence the dynasty was held in awe among the people. With a charisma symbolized by the long uncut tresses of their hair, according to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill in Early Germanic Kingship, they retained privileged behaviour, notably open polygamy, from the pagan past. Straightforward assassination followed by a coup d’état might be possible for an ambitious member of the royal family; but the overthrow of that family itself was another matter. If the pope wanted help against the Lombards, he would have to offer help himself – to the ambitious ruler of the Franks.
Pippin aimed to oust King Childeric III; this required the authority, if not of God himself, then of as near as one could get on this earth. His family’s cultivation of the successors of St Peter was about to pay off. Pippin sent a two-man embassy to Rome: Fulrad, abbot of Saint Denis near Paris and Burchard, bishop of Würzburg, an Anglo-Saxon and a Mercian by birth. They were to pose Pope Zacharias a question: ‘Which of two should be king: the man who had the title but no power or the man who, in these difficult times, exercised the power but had not the title?’ It was hardly a trick question and the pope, fortunately, knew the answer. He ordered that Pippin be made king, forthwith.
Yet the Merovingians were a hard act to follow and required special magic. In 750 the great minister’s henchmen arranged for his election as king of the Franks at Soissons. Next, in early autumn 751 ‘King’ Pippin, who had been baptized by Archbishop Willibrord, was, according to the Royal Frankish Annals, anointed by another Englishman, Boniface, by now archbishop of Mainz and ‘Legate for Germany for the Catholic and Apostolic Church of Rome’. So it appears that the dynasty of Charlemagne or Charles the Great, King of the Franks, the dynasty that established the medieval, later Holy Roman, empire was raised to royal status in consecration by an Englishman.
English contributions in the field
Boniface had long depended on support from the Frankish authorities. In a letter to Bishop Daniel he explained that without their help the suppression of pagan rites and idol worship would be quite impossible; the protection of the clergy within the community could be hazardous; even discipline within the church itself could be difficult. All depended upon directives from the palace and the fear of sanctions if they were broken. But in this world of rival loyalties and sanctions Boniface had telling arguments on his own side when dealing with pagans: first his own allegiance to St Peter, founder of God’s church on earth; second to that church itself, a monarchical hierarchy, and a fighting body, or church militant.
In a letter to Eadburga, abbess of Minster in the Isle of Thanet, he asks her to copy out for him in ‘letters of gold’ the Epistles of his lord, St Peter. There was a lot to commend the books to non-Christian lords and rulers. In the first place, Boniface’s oath had been pledged on the earthly relics of their author, the first lord of the church militant – surely an important factor among men whose world was governed by oaths of allegiance. Secondly, the greatest of all the saints was no grey celibate but a married man who, like the many-partnered rulers the missionary was dealing with, had known all about the pleasures of sex. Thirdly, the books were ‘compact’, so to speak – just seven short chapters in total. But above all the glorious gilded lettering and luxurious quality of the illuminated manuscripts that Eadburga was to prepare for him would ‘impress a reverence and love of Holy Scripture on the minds of the heathens to whom I preach’. He also writes that he is sending the costly materials for the work by separate messenger.
Of all the gifts he received from his own correspondents, Boniface particularly welcomed the books ‘as lamps . . . [of the word of God] . . . to guide the feet of one working . . . in these gloomy lurking-places of the German people’. It is a telling glimpse of work in the great central forest of Dark Age Germany. Time and again we catch an echo of the workaday life of the mission field. The lack of a library to hand means that Boniface must check a basic date, like the year of Augustine’s arrival in England, with Canterbury; he settles technicalities about the validity of baptisms performed in ‘heathen tongues’ and urges his co-workers to always instruct in the Catholic traditions of the see of Rome; he petitions the English clergy to pray regularly for the missionaries and to remember the pagan Saxons, ‘. . . people of the same blood and bone’ and unable to honour the heavenly lord by death as members of his war band, so long as they are destined for hell.11
In Bavaria Boniface appointed three new bishops and with the support of Duke Odilo, who brought his nobles with him, divided the duchy into four dioceses and so laid out the basic ecclesiastical geography of the state for the next thousand years. Gregory rubberstamped the arrangements and vested Boniface with ‘apostolic authority’ to attend a council shortly to be held on the banks of the Danube as his representative. Outside Bavaria, as he reported to Gregory’s successor Pope Zacharias (741–52), he had appointed three further bishoprics, Erfurt, Würzburg (then in Franconia) and Buraburg, near Fritzlar, the ancient meeting place of east Franks and Saxons. He begged the pope to give charter confirmation to the foundations ‘so that there may be in Germany three Episcopal sees founded and established by St Peter’s word and the apostolic see’s command’.12 The pope agreed this request.
Reform in the German church was certainly needed. Many a diocese had come into the hands of laymen who, although they claimed ordination, continued to behave like the members of a warrior aristocracy, riding into battle not only against heathens but also shedding the blood of Christians in their local feuding. In fact, since Europe’s lay establishment pursued warfare as a way of life and since they often manned the upper reaches of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the church could do little but compromise.
The principal means of establishing discipline in the religious life itself was the Rule of St Benedict of Nursia (proclaimed the patron saint of all Europe by Paul VI in 1964), founder of the monastery of Monte Cassino. The spread of the rule of St Benedict in Frankish monasteries owed much to English foundations such as the abbey of Fulda, which accepted it from the outset. So impressed was he by the Benedictine advance, promoted by the Anglo-Saxons, that Charles the Great was to ask the abbot of Monte Cassino for an authentic copy of the Rule. Many English monks spent years at the great monastery, among them Willibald the kinsman and biographer of Boniface, who had lived there for a decade before Boniface appointed him bishop of Eichstätt (‘Oakstead’). But Willibald had led an action-packed life before retiring to the cloister and his biography, composed by a nun visiting his brother Wynnebald’s abbey of Heidenheim, opens a window onto the great rival world of Islam barely a century old at that time.
Contacts with the world of Islam
Willibald had left England for Rome in his early twenties. After a three-year stay in the great city he took ship from Naples for the Holy Land with Wynnebald and another companion. Their destination, which had been within the territory of the Christian Roman empire only eighty years before, was now under the Muslim caliphate of Damascus, which was administered by governorships and emirates. Christian–Muslim relationships were now peaceful, if wary; trading vessels plied once more and some took fare-paying passengers. Travel was feasible but some form of identification or letters of introduction was advisable. The three young monks reached Cyprus without trouble and found a passage to the Syrian port of Tartus, formerly the Byzantine Christian city of Antaradus. From here a day or two on the road took them to Emesa, in
the Orontes Valley. Birthplace of two Roman emperors and then a seat of Christian bishoprics, since 636 it had been an Arab city under the name of Hims (Homs), although still with a sizeable Christian element and a number of churches. Without documents, Willibald and his party were immediately arrested as spies because ‘the pagan Saracens . . . [did not know] . . . to which nation they belonged.’ Luckily the local dignitary who first questioned them had encountered other men from remote parts of the world travelling in Palestine, ‘eager to fulfil their [own] law’, as he put it – presumably equating Christian pilgrimage with the Muslim’s obligation to the hajj. The party now applied to the governor for documents to cover their onward journey to Jerusalem. Instead, he put them in prison awaiting further instructions from the ‘king’ of the region, presumably the emir of Hims.
Their ‘imprisonment’ was not too arduous. Apparently impressed by their loyalty to their religion, a generous local merchant fitted them out in new clothes, sent them well-prepared meals from his own kitchen and twice a week had them escorted to the local bath house. On Sundays he took them himself to the local Christian church. (Christians and Jews were at that time allowed to continue the practice of their faiths on payment of a tax.) For a time, it seems, these ‘young, handsome and beautifully dressed’ Englishmen caused quite a stir in the town. Eventually they were cleared of suspicion and sent on their way. Arrested as spies they had emerged almost as friends at court. All this the biographer attributes to the benign workings of God, though we might think that Muslim generosity was part of the story. Willibald and company certainly returned with a wallet of travellers’ tales: from the soured milk drink they shared with a company of shepherds (presumably a type of kwass) to a near-encounter with a mountain lion.13 A century or so later the local inhabitants might well have been seen as dangerous. Upheavals in Islam brought in the less Christian-tolerant regimes; the local Christian community of Hims would be ‘cleansed’ and its churches demolished.
In fact, bands of Saracen raiders were harrying Europe soon after Willibald settled into his work in Germany. A letter of the 740s from Boniface bewails them as the punishment of God on a sinful people; more practically the saint warns an abbess friend planning to visit Rome that even here travel could be hazardous, given the prevailing incursions – the contemporary equivalent of an Islamist terrorist threat.
The tribulations of an old man
Such ‘Saracen’ attacks presented a physical danger but no threat to the Faith as such. Here the danger was the enduring resistance to the missions. The ‘conversion’ of the Saxon heartlands, for example, was to be achieved only after decades of warfare by the armies of Charles the Great that killed tens of thousands of Saxons. Meanwhile, Boniface had to contest against the corruption and debasement of his beloved religion’s image by the conduct of the Christians themselves. His strictures against Æthelbald for his immoral life owed much to the scandal they caused in pagan territories across the frontier where sexual fidelity was fiercely enforced:
Thus, in Old Saxony . . . if a married woman commit adultery, they sometimes force her to kill herself by hanging; and when the body has been cremated they hang her seducer over the pyre . . .
The implied contrast with goings on among the Christian (Anglo) Saxons under Æthelbald’s dispensation is obvious.14
But then the lifestyle of the average, unreformed Frankish aristocrat bishop paid little heed to clerical niceties, either. Polygamy was not unheard of among the episcopate – perhaps on the theory that a bishop’s ordination gave him something of the sacral mystery surrounding the king. Boniface reported deacons who slept nights with four or five concubines in their bed, acknowledged bastard children, and yet became bishops and celebrated mass. Part of the problem was that the church permitted married men to enter the priesthood if, admittedly, on what one might term a strictly one priest, one wife basis. Neighbouring heathen tribes might understand such concessions to their own practices. What they could not stomach, Boniface wrote, were pagan practices in Rome itself–January celebrations in front of St Peter’s, where crowds paraded the streets and gorged themselves at food- and wine-laden tables and women, festooned in ornaments, hawked pagan amulets and bracelets.15
Nor was Boniface much helped by the unsavoury reputation that the clergy of his native island seem to have acquired on the Continent. In his long letter to Archbishop Cuthbert of Canterbury he complains about reports of drunken parish priests, and even drunken bishops who encourage what sounds suspiciously like binge drinking among their clergy. Even then the English had a reputation for excessive drunkenness, which later in the same letter Boniface laments as ‘a vice that is peculiar to the heathen and to our race, and that neither the Franks nor the Gauls, . . . Lombards, . . . Romans, nor Greeks [indulge in]’ [my emphasis].16
Apparently, although he never read Bede on the ‘English’, Boniface was perfectly aware of an ethnic identity that distinguished him from other peoples of Europe – including, it would seem, the heathen Saxons. It is also worth pausing to notice that he distinguishes between ‘Gauls’, the original Romano-Celtic population of what we today call ‘France’, and ‘Franks’, the federation of diverse barbarian tribes that overran them. As to drink, perhaps Boniface himself was not averse to the occasional episcopal tipple. In a letter to Archbishop Ecgberht of York he not only asks for copies of the book of homilies and the commentary on the Proverbs of Solomon by Bede, ‘inspired priest and student of the scriptures’ (not ‘historian’, we note), but sends by the bearer two small casks of wine to be consumed ‘in a merry day with the brethren’.
But books were always the great solace and book requests are a standard feature; with advancing age he had a particular need for large print versions ‘with the letters written out clearly and separately’, which were to be had in England but ‘unavailable in this country’. The more serious troubles of old age in exile, such as the withering of friendship, could challenge even his determination. Recalling his original name ‘Boniface also called Wynfrith’ asks a West Country acquaintance from his youth to pity ‘. . . an old man worn out by tribulations in this land of the Germans’.17
The role of women
This section focuses upon St Lioba, for whom St Boniface had an intense regard. She is just one of a number of Anglo-Saxon women saints, such as Abbess Hild of Whitby, Abbess Æthelburga of Barking in Essex and Abbess Æthelthryth (also known as Etheldreda or Audrey), daughter of King Anna of the East Angles. Twice married, Æthelthryth nevertheless maintained her virginity so that her second husband, Ecgfryth of Northumbria, who evidently expected more from a ‘peace weaver’, as dynastic wives were called, released her for the life of religion so that she might found a double monastery at Ely, where she presided until her death. She was succeeded by her sister St Sexburga, dowager queen of Kent.
The double monastery/nunnery was a fairly common institution in the Old English church and in most cases headed by a woman rather than a man. But then the Anglo-Saxons honoured many women as saints, a practice that ended with the Norman Conquest; in the view of the distinguished historian Doris Stenton, ‘Anglo-Saxon women were more nearly the equal companions of their husbands and brothers’ than in Norman England. In her Women in Anglo-Saxon England, Christine Fell cities cases of women apparently in business on their own account in the craft of embroidery. In the 810s the bishop of Worcester granted a certain Eanswith 200 acres (80 hectares) of land in return for the maintenance and enlargement of the cathedral’s vestments, which means she must have employed a team of craft workers. From the reign of Edward the Confessor we hear of Ælfgyth, who was made a modest grant from the royal revenues for teaching a king’s sheriff’s daughter the craft of gold thread embroidery (aufrisium).
Laws regulating relations between the sexes could be harsh. Adulterers were liable to severe penalties, but whereas a man might be subject to forfeiture of land, under Cnut’s laws a woman offender faced bodily mutilation. But from the very earliest period, Anglo-Saxon codes pr
ovide clear and sensible legislation for the rights of women. A rapist could expect a heavy fine but the laws also specified compensations payable for different degrees of sexual harassment short of rape, from seizing the breast to throwing a woman to the ground. The ‘morning gift’ a man paid to his wife on their marriage became her personal property to dispose of as she saw fit and it could be a substantial amount, whether in money or land. Æthelfryth, a certain ninth-century lady, sold land equivalent to five peasant land holdings. The code of Æthelred II of 1008 protected a widow from forced remarriage, ruling that she must remain single for twelve months, after which time she could remarry if she wished, but was free to choose her husband. Some chose to enter the life of religion: noblewomen and others might already be literate and, as for men, the church could offer prospects denied them in lay society. Not all could be abbesses, but many could exercise lesser responsibilities, while some apparently learnt to excel at the demanding skills of manuscript illumination.
Like Jerome, Boniface enjoyed the friendship of women. But whereas Jerome seems to have had a more or less permanent entourage of female admirers, Boniface kept a wide correspondence with various nuns and abbesses – many, like him, of noble kin, but also expert in the disciplines and the skills of the religious life. We have seen him writing to Abbess Eadburga, asking her to make a luxury copy of the Epistles of St Peter. It is not a question of her commissioning the work from a master illuminator but it is clear he is confident of her skills in this highly sophisticated and complex technique. A princess of the West Saxon dynasty, she uses the vocabulary of royal triumph on hearing of Boniface’s initial success against the Frisian King Radbod, ‘the enemy of the Catholic Church, [whom] God humbled at your feet’. When she says farewell ‘in love unfeigned’, one senses feelings deeper than mere friendship. His mission certainly owed a good deal to her generous support in books, church furniture and money.
A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons Page 18