The History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland: From the First Century to the Twenty-First

By Gerald Bray

The history of Britain and Ireland is incomprehensible without an understanding of the Christian faith that has shaped it. Introduced when the nations of these islands were still in their infancy, Christianity has provided the framework for their development from the beginning.

Gerald Bray's comprehensive overview demonstrates the remarkable creativity and resilience of Christianity in Britain and Ireland. Through the ages, it has adapted to the challenges of presenting the gospel of Christ to different generations in a variety of circumstances. As a result, it is at once a recognizable offshoot of the universal church and a world of its own. It has also profoundly affected the notable spread of Christianity worldwide in recent times.

Although historians have done much to explain the details of how the church has evolved separately in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, a synthesis of the whole has rarely been attempted. Yet the story of one nation cannot be understood properly without involving the others; so, Gerald Bray sets individual narratives in an overarching framework.

Accessible to a general readership, The History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland draws on current scholarship to serve as a reference work for students of both history and theology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apollos
• Release date: Jun 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789741186

Gerald Bray

Gerald Bray (DLitt, University of Paris-Sorbonne) is research professor at Beeson Divinity School and director of research for the Latimer Trust. He is a prolific writer and has authored or edited numerous books, including The Doctrine of God; Biblical Interpretation; God Is Love; and God Has Spoken.

Book preview

Preface

Writing a one-volume history of Christianity in the British Isles is a daunting task, but it is also an increasingly necessary one. No factor has been more influential in shaping the destiny of the peoples of Britain and Ireland than the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the history of these islands cannot be understood apart from it. At the same time, this unifying force has revealed itself in great diversity, contributing much to the distinctive identities of the nations that inhabit the North Atlantic archipelago and the divisions within them. The development of British and Irish Christianity contains many different stories that both converge and diverge from one another. Historians have done much to explain the details of how the church has evolved in the separate nations of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, but a synthesis of the whole has rarely been attempted. Yet the evolution of one nation cannot be understood properly without involving the others, and some attempt must be made to situate individual narratives in an overarching framework. This is what the present book attempts to do.

The past generation has witnessed an explosion of academic studies on the history of Christianity in the British Isles. Every aspect of it has been studied, often in great detail, and the cumulative results far surpass the capacity of any one writer to master. Most historians are more comfortable in some centuries and geographical areas, and many will feel largely ignorant of the others. A work of this kind must rely heavily on the labours of a wide range of scholars and will inevitably reflect their interests and bias to some extent, although fortunately the volume of research is such that a reasonably objective consensus is often possible. The days when an author’s personal convictions determined his or her approach to the subject are now happily over, although it is often still the case that many Catholics gravitate towards medieval subjects and Scotsmen confine themselves to events north of the border. That is only to be expected but, with few exceptions, confessional or nationalistic concerns are far less important now than they were in the past.

The downside of this is that British and Irish society, at least in its academic and intellectual dimension, has secularized to an extent that many who study it have no faith commitment of their own, and may be quite insensitive to the factors that shape the Christian mind and have governed the behaviour of Christian people down through the ages. They may chronicle the theological and ecclesiological debates of the past without really understanding why they occurred, or why those who engaged in them took them seriously. Modern believers may sometimes share their puzzlement, but they are more closely engaged with the subject and more likely to feel the effects of this complex history as a living part of their own heritage. This volume is written from the standpoint of Christian faith, and makes no apology for that. Christians are sinners saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. We make no claims to perfection or to omniscience but, at the same time, ‘[we] know whom [we] have believed, and [are] persuaded that he is able to keep that which [we] have committed unto him against that day’ (2 Tim. 1:12, kjv). Christians cannot be indifferent to matters of life, death and eternal salvation, and we believe that the events of the past, present and future will one day be judged by the justice and mercy of the eternal God. To write our history is to confess our sins before him, but it is also to reaffirm that it is through much tribulation that we shall enter the kingdom of God (Acts 14:22). We do not know when the consummation of all things will come, but we believe that it will, and we write with that perspective in view.

That the present time is one of trial for Christians and for Christianity in the British Isles is beyond dispute. The smug complacency of the Victorian era is gone beyond recall, and the immediate future is not encouraging. The UK is in greater danger of falling apart than it has ever been and the secular belief that peace and harmony will flow from shared material prosperity and religious indifference has been shown to be hollow. It is certainly true that at one level the peoples of the British Isles have become virtually one and, apart from local accents and folklore, the inhabitants of Cork, Aberdeen, Swansea and Cheltenham now share a common culture and mental outlook. But this homogenization has also produced a countervailing tendency that emphasizes ‘the narcissism of petty differences’, which threatens to sow division and bitterness among those who are fundamentally alike. In that climate a reminder that what we have in common is far more important than what separates us is more necessary than ever, and our Christian heritage provides us with a foundation for doing this that nothing else does. If this book can help us understand who we are, where we have been and where we may be going, it will have served its purpose. Of course, our faith is bigger than the British Isles – it embraces the whole of Europe and stretches across the entire world. But within that bigger picture the peoples of Britain and Ireland constitute a definable and distinguished unit. For better or worse, it has bequeathed to us a legacy that is our responsibility to embrace and hand on to generations yet unborn, until that day when our Lord will come again in glory. It is to encourage both an understanding of that inheritance and an acceptance of it that this book has been written.

The pages that follow reflect a wide-ranging involvement with both the history and the historians of British and Irish Christianity, and I am deeply indebted to the dedicated work and precious insights of many who have laboured in the field. My debt to them will be obvious from the ways in which I have made use of their work. More immediately, I am grateful to Alan Mordue, then of SPCK, who took an interest in this project while it was still an idea in the author’s mind, and to Philip Duce, Senior Commissioning Editor at Inter-Varsity Press, who agreed to take it on under the wider SPCK umbrella, and to Eldo Barkhuizen, for his meticulous and much appreciated copy-editing. It is my hope that their confidence in me will not go unrewarded, and that this volume will provide both enlightenment and inspiration to those who have been called to take up their cross and follow Jesus Christ in our generation. As he said to his disciples, ‘Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom’ (Luke 12:32).

Gerald Bray

Introduction

A few years ago I stepped off a train at Waterside Station in Londonderry. Derry, as the city is more commonly known, is now the last outpost of the UK, sitting at the mouth of the River Foyle only a few kilometres from the Irish border. But small and remote as it may be, Derry encapsulates the history of British Christianity to a degree that few other places do. It was from here that the monk Crimthann, better known to us as Columba, set out to establish a monastery on the island of Iona, from where he and his companions would evangelize the north of Britain. Centuries later the walls of Derry withstood a siege and helped defeat the armies of the Catholic King James II, thereby ensuring that Britain would remain a Protestant country. In our own time it was in Derry that the ‘troubles’ between Catholics and Protestants broke out in 1968 – a latter-day reminder of the religious fault line that runs across western Europe and has done so much to determine the destiny of both Great Britain and Ireland.

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There is another Derry of course, and it too has left its mark on us. It was here that Cecil Alexander, gazing out of the window of the bishop’s palace and moved by the lush green hills of Inishowen that form the backdrop to the city, penned her well-known Easter hymn:

There is a green hill far away

Without a city wall

Where the dear Lord was crucified

Who died to save us all.

Mrs Alexander can be faulted on her geography – the hills outside Jerusalem are not nearly as green as the ones outside Derry are – but her effortless fusion of the local landscape with the atoning work of Christ betrays an intimate connection between her world and God’s plan of salvation that has characterized British Christianity from the beginning.

Crossing the River Foyle to enter the city, I could not help but notice a large Union Jack on the far side of the bridge. People in mainland Britain seldom see the flag flying and few stop to think about it when they do, but Northern Ireland is different. Here the flag is a sign of conquest, of commitment and of defiance. Its centrepiece is the red cross of St George, standing for England, the nation that has long been the centre of the UK. Radiating out from it are the saltires of Scotland and Ireland, to remind us that England does not stand alone but is supported by sister nations that circle around it. The red-and-white banner of St Patrick is something of an artificial invention, but Patrick was a real person – an ancient British man who spent his life evangelizing Ireland and is now commemorated as its patron saint. St Andrew, after whom the flag of Scotland is named, was also a real person, known to us as the apostle and brother of St Peter, although he never came anywhere near Britain and might never have heard of it. Yet in being reminded of him we are taken back to the very beginnings of Christianity in the gospel preached by Jesus and his disciples, something that remains fundamental (and irreplaceable) in our own spiritual life.

In stark contrast to Patrick and Andrew, St George, the patron saint of England, is a figure of legend who is supposed to have slain a dragon somewhere in Syria or Armenia, but who probably never existed and certainly had nothing to do with Britain. Missing altogether from the flag is our fourth patron saint, David of Wales, who was not only a real person but the leading evangelist of his native country. His banner is not on the flag because Wales is a principality formally annexed to England, and so has been swallowed up by St George. What a tale this simple piece of bunting tells! In one flag we have a link to the New Testament and the origins of Christianity, a reminder of how it came to the British Isles through the work of intrepid missionaries, and a strange sense that distant myths (St George) can claim precedence over facts (St David) and assert themselves as the dominant thread of what we call history. The flag would not be what it is if it were not for Christianity, whose symbolism gives it meaning and coherence, nor would the country it represents make sense otherwise. Fictitious St George might have been, but the blood-red cross associated with him tells its own story. It is the cross of Christ, the cruel tree on which he shed his blood for the salvation of humankind. Over the centuries it has been appropriated for causes both good and bad, but its basic message transcends them and beats in the heart of all who follow the Saviour:

In the cross of Christ I glory

Towering o’er the wrecks of time

All the light of sacred story

Gathers round its head sublime.

The hymn strikes a chord in the heart of every believer who sings it, but how many know it was written by John Bowring (1792–1872), a Unitarian who once quipped that ‘Jesus Christ is free trade and free trade is Jesus Christ’? Bowring was an archetypal Victorian – a liberal reformer at home, where he pushed for greater democracy and for modernization, including the adoption of a decimal currency, but a classic imperialist abroad. He went to China, where he played a key part in establishing that country’s finances on a firm footing before becoming the fourth governor of Hong Kong, where he created a botanic garden and where his name is still commemorated in Bowrington Road. The achievements and contradictions of his time can be found in him in equal measure, reminding us that the story of British Christianity is larger and more complex than most people realize.

Its legacy comprehends men and women who were pillars of the church alongside many whom Winston Churchill once described as ‘flying buttresses’: those who (like himself) do not belong to it but who support it from the outside. It is a tradition that continues to this day. Alongside the saints and heroes of the faith are agnostics and even outright atheists who write church music, support the Salvation Army for purely secular reasons and sometimes pontificate on spiritual matters in ways unknown (and unacceptable) elsewhere. Comprehensiveness is the boast of the Church of England, celebrated by some and reviled by others, but a reality that no amount of preaching and teaching has ever managed to change.

Christianity is part of the warp and woof of Britain, but it is greater than any one country or nation. There have been people who have tried to maintain that the British are a chosen race, that God is an Englishman, that the peculiarities of the ancient Celtic church or of modern Anglicanism set us apart from others. This is false. The Christian faith was a foreign import, brought to our shores by unknown Roman traders or soldiers. It gradually took root but, as it did so, it reached out in mission to others, in particular to the still unevangelized tribes of Germany and northern Europe. Wynfrith of Crediton, virtually unknown in his homeland, became the great St Boniface, the man who did more to win the Germans for Christ than any other individual. Centuries later the teachings of the English John Wyclif were eagerly absorbed in Bohemia, where they helped to provoke a national uprising against an oppressive church and state.

Later on the flow went the other way. The British churches as we know them today were shaped by the theology of Wittenberg, Zurich and Geneva. In the seventeenth century, Dutch influence was so strong that Britain and the Netherlands were almost one country, as they briefly became in the time of King William III (1689–1702). Georg Friedrich Händel came to England from his native Germany and, although he never fully mastered English, he left us some of the greatest and most beloved oratorios in our language. More recently, British Christians have fanned out again, to North America, South Africa and Australasia as settlers, and to much of the rest of the world as missionaries. They have taken the Christianity of their homeland and planted it on almost every imaginable foreign soil. To some this smacks of colonialism, and in our post-imperial age there are constant appeals for ‘indigenization’, a process meant to strip this Christianity of its British roots and transform it into something more in keeping with the local culture. But this pressure is frequently resisted, not by latter-day metropolitan colonialists but by those who have received their faith in this form. Many Africans and Asians are unbothered by this supposed foreignness and are happy to take it on board, often with the English language too, and who are we to say them nay? After all, British Christians worshipped in Latin for nearly a thousand years before switching to their mother tongue, so inculturation is hardly the most salient characteristic of our faith.

Today, thanks to a combination of empire and technology, British Christianity is more influential on the world scene than it has ever been. A time may come when it loses its original identity and is regarded as no more British than Roman Catholicism is Italian. That day is not yet. Britain remains the centre of a cultural sphere that is still growing and spreading into places where it has never gone before. The hands that bring this culture may be American, as they often are, but the voice is mostly still British, whether it comes across as Anglican, Baptist, Methodist or Presbyterian. The great hymns, the theological confessions and the traditions of church government all betray the same unmistakable origin, and anyone who wants to understand world Christianity today has to come to terms with that.

Within the British Isles a certain pride of place has to be given to England. This is not only because England is the largest country of the archipelago, although it is that – more than 80% of the population lives there, a higher proportion than it has ever been. The English have given their language, their laws and their literature to the other nations, and have done so for centuries. We are not so naive as to think that England and the UK are synonymous, in the way that many foreigners do, but England’s influence on the surrounding Celtic countries cannot be denied. Wales, Scotland and Ireland have become what they are because of their interaction with England, not with one another, and their identities can be understood only in that context.

For similar reasons a prominent place must be given to the Church of England and its Anglican cousins in Wales and Ireland, as well as to the established presbyterian Church of Scotland. Anglicanism is a peculiarly British phenomenon, as is the denominational diversity that has grown out of reactions to it. The Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians and even the Catholics all have their own stories to tell, but they are what they are because they have separated from (or refused to become) Anglicans. We may wish that things could have been otherwise, but they have not been, and any history of Christianity in the British Isles must respect that reality.

For British people the variegation and worldwide spread of British Christianity may be a source of pride, but we must be modest about this. The purposes of God in human history are beyond our understanding and we must not presume that there is any virtue in us that has earned us the place we now occupy on the world stage. Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), often hailed (or reviled) as the great poet of empire and a man whose relationship to Christianity was ambiguous, understood the need for humility very well. Asked to compose a poem for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897, he stuck his neck out and resisted the spirit of the age. In the words of his famous ‘Recessional’:

The tumult and the shouting dies

The captains and the kings depart

Still stands thine ancient sacrifice

An humble and a contrite heart

Lord God of Hosts be with us yet

Lest we forget, lest we forget!

The Union Jack still flies on the walls of Derry, but there the tumult and the shouting have never quite died. Questions of faith and identity still haunt the far corners of the land, even as the chattering classes of the big cities wish they would go away and leave us in what they call a post-Christian era, something that to them is a mark of progress and enlightenment. Church leaders often seem helpless before what appears to be a rising tide of unbelief, and the future looks bleak and uncertain. But the ancient sacrifice is still there, the humble and contrite heart that regards its own righteousness as filthy rags and turns to the cross of Christ as its only hope of salvation. The fire of faith may seem to be smouldering in embers but at any moment it may burst forth in glorious flame and sweep all before it. The scoffers of this age have their day but they will fade away like the morning dew when the sun shines on it. Believers know it is through much tribulation that we shall enter the kingdom of God. We do not surrender to the siren call of so-called modernity but listen instead to the still small voice that speaks to us from beyond the boundaries of time and space. We go on our pilgrim way, as John Bunyan so famously challenged us:

He who would valiant be

Gainst all disaster

Let him in constancy

Follow the Master.

There’s no discouragement

Will make him once relent

His first avowed intent

To be a pilgrim.

British and Irish Christians are pilgrims on a journey that has not yet come to an end. It is the aim of this book to plot that journey so far, holding before our eyes the cross of him who died for us and trusting in his mercy that in his good time we shall arrive safely at our destination.

1

In the beginning (to ad 597)

The shadow of Rome

In the Roman year 802, better known to us as ad 49, the emperor Claudius issued a decree banning Jews from the capital city. They had been rioting over an obscure figure called Chrestus, who was almost certainly Jesus. The incident is known from the Roman historian Suetonius, and is obliquely mentioned in the New Testament, which tells us that two of the expelled Jews turned up in Corinth, where they hosted the apostle Paul on one of his missionary journeys.

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Six years earlier, the same Claudius had authorized the invasion of Britain, an island first visited by Julius Caesar a hundred years before. Caesar had managed to impose a tribute on the tribes living along the southern coast, but had not attempted a permanent invasion. That was left to Claudius, who was able to parade in triumph at this latest acquisition to the still growing empire. As the Romans expanded their holdings in the decades that followed, so the Jewish followers of ‘Chrestus’ implanted themselves more firmly across the imperial provinces, eventually reaching as far as the remote island Rome had half conquered.

Nobody knows when the first Christians reached Britain’s shores. There is a legend that says Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy Jew who allowed Jesus to be buried in his tomb in Jerusalem, made his way there and settled in the south-west, where he supposedly founded the monastery of Glastonbury.

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Given that the legend first appeared more than 1,200 years after the events it narrates, we may assume that it is a fable, but does it contain a tiny grain of truth? It is quite possible that the first Christians in Britain were traders not unlike Joseph, and it may even be that they went to the south-west, where the tin mines of Cornwall had long attracted people like them. Whether they reached such a remote province within the lifetime of the apostles is certainly doubtful. Paul wrote to the Romans about ad 57, telling them he intended to travel westward to Spain, where (we assume) there was still no Christian presence at that time, and Britain was a good deal further than that.

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It is more likely that the first Christians to reach Britain arrived sometime in the second century, although that can only be a guess. Christian traders might well have established themselves in Londinium (London) and worshipped relatively inconspicuously in that tiny metropolis. The church of St Peter, Cornhill, claims to have been founded in ad 179, which may seem improbable but is not necessarily fanciful. By that time there could well have been a Christian community in Britain, doing its best to proclaim the gospel in difficult circumstances. The first mention of Christians in Britain comes from Tertullian of Carthage (around ad 200), who claimed that the name of Christ had already conquered ‘parts of the Britons unreached by the Romans’, although given that this reference appears in a catalogue of distant regions where he claimed that the gospel had been preached, it is hard to know what to make of it.

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Rhetorical flourish or historical fact? We cannot say. Similar statements can be found in Origen, writing in the early third century, although he was more cautious about the success of the mission, if indeed there had been one.

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If Christianity was not brought to Britain by traders, it might have arrived with soldiers in the Roman legions. Britain was a highly militarized province, and some of the soldiers posted there might have been Christians, but it is unlikely that they would have been able to set up a church. As soldiers they would have sworn an oath of allegiance to the emperor as the son of a god, which went against Christian principles. There is also the fact that before Christianity was legalized in ad 313, the church took a dim view of military service and discouraged its members from joining the army.

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But there is a story that tells of how a Roman soldier met a Christian presbyter and was so impressed by him that he became a Christian himself. When the presbyter was arrested and sentenced to death, the soldier took his place, thus becoming the first martyr for the new faith to die on British soil.

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The truth behind this account is hotly disputed, but it has a better claim to historicity than either the Joseph or Cornhill legends do. The tale was certainly embellished over time, but the earliest mention of it occurs only a century or two after the events it describes, by which date a cult of the martyr was in existence. We know him as Alban, or Albanus, and the site of his death is supposed to have been a hilltop just outside the Roman city of Verulamium, a day’s march north-west of Londinium. A shrine to his memory was erected there that became the nucleus of the modern city of St Albans, which preserves his name to the present day. What we do not know is when Albanus might have been put to death. There were periodic persecutions of Christians in the third and early fourth centuries, and his martyrdom could have occurred at any time before ad 313. A date between 251, when Christians suffered under the emperor Decius, and 305, when the great persecution under Diocletian came to an end, would seem most likely, but from this distance in time it is impossible to say for certain. From our perspective it scarcely matters. What counts is that a Roman soldier was put to death for professing the Christian faith, and that he was later venerated – a plausible, if unprovable, historical foundation for the pious legends elaborated later on.

What is certain is that by 313 there were already several churches in Britain organized along lines common elsewhere in the Roman Empire. They could hardly have appeared overnight and might well have been in existence for a generation or two already. What we know is that three British bishops, Restitutus of Londinium (London), Adelfius of Lindum Colonia (Lincoln) and Eborius of Eboracum (York), together with Arminius, described as a deacon from Lincoln, attended a synod held at Arles in 314, where they participated in the condemnation of the Donatists. If we except Albanus, they are the first identifiable British Christians known to us. The Donatists were a new and rigorous North African sect that rejected any compromise with the godless Roman state and insisted that any bishops who had handed over Christian books to the persecuting authorities a decade earlier should be deposed. This was felt to be too extreme, and Donatism was rejected by the wider church. The Synod of Arles also recommended that Easter should be celebrated on the same day throughout the world, an important point that would later become a matter of dispute in Britain, and that every bishop should be consecrated by at least three of his fellows.

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How much of what happened at Arles resonated with the British delegation is hard to say. There were certainly no Donatists in Britain, nor do we hear of anyone there who had handed over sacred texts to the imperial authorities. Perhaps the rule (or canon) that meant the most to them was the one that demanded the presence of three bishops every time a new one was consecrated. Acceptance of this suggests that there must have been more British bishops at that time than the three who went to Arles. If there had not been, the canon would have been inapplicable in Britain and its envoys might have opposed it for that reason. But they did not, and so we must conclude that the British churches were in step with their counterparts elsewhere, although they did not suffer from the internal divisions common among Christians in other parts of the Roman world.

The fourth and fifth centuries were a golden age for Christian theology, as the worldwide church debated the great questions surrounding the being of God as three Persons in one Substance and the Person of Jesus Christ, who was fully God and fully man. The Roman Empire was rocked by controversies over these and other matters, and its unity was more than once stretched to breaking point. But, as far as we can tell, Britain stood on the sidelines and merely acquiesced in the great theological decisions taken elsewhere.

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This is hardly surprising. The province was remote from the scene of action, which mostly took place in the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean, and wandering theological disputants were unlikely to turn up in such a backwater. If any did, they have gone unrecorded and we can safely assume that the British church never experienced the divisions caused by the great Christological debates of the late Roman period.

Pelagius

There is however at least one, somewhat curious, indication that British Christianity might not have been in step with mainstream opinion elsewhere. A well-educated British monk called Pelagius made his way to Rome sometime around ad 400, where he became a popular preacher and teacher.

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He wrote commentaries on the New Testament that were so good they were preserved after his fall from grace and recycled as the work of Jerome or of Cassiodorus. Only in the nineteenth century was their true author revealed, allowing scholars to arrive at a more favourable view of Pelagius than had been possible before that time. Where Pelagius got his learning from is unknown, but if it was somewhere in Britain it shows that the level of theological education available there in the late fourth century was comparable to anything that could be found in the Latin-speaking West.

When Alaric the Goth captured Rome in 410 and sacked the city, a stream of refugees fled to North Africa, among them Pelagius himself and many of his followers. There they encountered the formidable Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, who was already well known as a scourge of the Donatists. When Augustine heard what the Pelagians were teaching, he turned his ire on them, and it is largely thanks to his unremitting opposition that we know so much about them today. It seems that Pelagius was saying that fallen human beings were not entirely sinful. Somewhere in the human mind and will there remained an ability to turn to God and to cooperate with him in the process of salvation. Pelagius did not believe that people could save themselves entirely by their own efforts, but he thought they had a free will that could respond to the calling of God and work alongside him to get rid of their sinfulness. Augustine countered this idea by saying that humankind’s fall into sin was total and irreversible. No human being, however good or moral, can voluntarily respond to God or cooperate with him in that person’s salvation. That is possible only by the free gift of God in Christ, which is given to those who have been chosen to receive it. Human beings can do no more than confess their sins, hoping that God will hear their cries and be merciful to them, but even that is possible only if God gives sinners the grace to repent of their wrongdoing.

It was not long before Pelagius was condemned for heresy and had to flee North Africa. He went to Palestine and then to Constantinople, where the controversy he had stirred up was unknown and he could live in relative peace. Perhaps he had no idea why his teaching was wrong, and people in the East appear not to have reacted to it in the way Augustine did. We hear no more of Pelagius after this, but traces of Pelagianism survived in western Europe and they had to be stamped out. Germanus, a fifth-century Bishop of Auxerre, was particularly active in this enterprise, and in 429 he visited Britain in order to eradicate whatever Pelagianism might be lurking there. His mission was successful, but was there much Pelagianism for him to find? That we cannot tell. It is possible that Pelagius was supported by kinsmen and old friends from his youth in Britain, who were loyal to him personally without being consciously committed to his doctrine, which they might not have fully understood. Certainly Germanus did not have to spend long in Britain, so the roots of the heresy could not have been very deep.

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Ireland

Germanus was thorough, and he left nothing to chance. He had heard that there were British Christians in Ireland, where they were surviving like sheep without a shepherd. To remedy that situation, he sent them Palladius, a missionary bishop whose task was to organize the first Christian churches in the emerald isle.

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Who these Christians were, how they had got to Ireland and whether they had been influenced by Pelagianism is unknown. They might have been merchants who had gone there and stayed, or refugees from the Saxon invaders who were raiding the eastern shores of Britain and beginning to settle permanently on the island. Perhaps they were slaves who had been captured by Irish raiders. They might have been a mixed multitude of different origins and even included a few native Irish converts – we do not know. Archaeological evidence and a few place names suggest that whoever they were, they were concentrated in the east and south-east of the country, but even that cannot be proved. All we can say for sure is that Palladius reached Ireland in 431 – the date that marks the beginning of recorded history there. How long he stayed and how successful his mission was is unknown, but for reasons that will become apparent, he was probably not there very long and his efforts were soon largely forgotten.

It was in the twilight years of Roman Britain that Irish raiders stepped up their activities and transported many Britons to Ireland as slaves. One of them was a 16-year-old boy called Patricius (Patrick), who stayed in captivity long enough to learn the language of the country and to develop a passion for evangelizing his captors. After seven years Patricius managed to escape and return home, where he was ordained into the Christian ministry. What sort of training or education he had is unclear, although we know from his surviving writings that his Latin was not particularly good. After his ordination, Patricius returned to Ireland, where he spent the rest of his life preaching the gospel far and wide, although probably not as extensively as later legend would claim. Most of his activity seems to have been in the north and west of the island, although it is impossible to pinpoint his activities with any degree of precision. What we do know is that Patricius was not supported by his British countrymen as much as he might have hoped, and that he had to counter their opposition by explaining his motives to them. Ironically, it is thanks to that unhappy circumstance that we have the first written testimony to the spread of the gospel across the British Isles and we can glimpse the kind of world in which that evangelization took place.

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Who opposed Patricius and why? He himself tells us that when he was 15 he committed a ‘grave sin’, and evidently some thought it serious enough to bar him from ministry in adult life. There were others who apparently believed that he went to Ireland in order to enrich himself, although it is hard to see what basis they had for making that accusation. We know only one side of the story, and at this distance in time it is impossible to arrive at a balanced conclusion, but experience of similar situations elsewhere suggests that what might have happened is depressingly familiar. Patricius might well have been impatient in his zeal for evangelism, and this might have struck his superiors as unjustified arrogance. At the same time it is not hard to detect a spirit of jealousy in his accusers – the reaction of lesser men when confronted with someone whose passion (and success) was considerably greater than theirs.

Patricius died in Ireland and was probably buried at Downpatrick, a place that preserves his name. It is quite likely that he passed away on 17 March, which is still celebrated as his feast day, but in what year? We cannot say. What is certain is that his reputation as a missionary rapidly eclipsed that of Palladius, so much so that the work of the latter was absorbed into the legend of the former. Later generations claimed that Patricius went to Ireland in 432, only a year after Palladius, although there is no evidence for that. Some have even said that Palladius was also called Patricius, thereby creating a ‘second Patrick’ and making it easier to confuse the two men. Modern scholars generally agree that Palladius was the first Christian bishop in Ireland, sent there with the authority of the Roman church behind him, and that Patricius followed later, although how much later is uncertain. Richard Hanson believed that he was born about 390 and died about 460, which would make his mission almost contemporary with that of Palladius, but most others have preferred a later date.

¹⁴

The Irish annals are of little help, since they give dates for Patricius’s death that range from 457 to 493, all of which seem to be guesswork on the annalists’ part. What is agreed is that Patricius lived and worked in the fifth century and he did not evangelize Ireland on his own. How is it then that he has been given the credit for the conversion of the Irish people?

Perhaps the main reason for this is that Patricius was an innovator in the field of mission, who succeeded in creating a permanent Christian presence in Ireland in a way Palladius had not. Ireland lacked cities, which in the Roman world had been the centres of the church. To make up for this, Patrick established monastic communities, which became the bases for evangelizing the many tribes that lived in the country. Each tribe, or clan, had to have its own church and bishop, who was almost always a monk and often the abbot of the local monastery. As far as possible, these monasteries reflected their local communities and control of them often passed from father to son. Odd though it seems to us, Irish abbots were allowed to marry and bequeath their monasteries to their descendants, a pattern that in some cases would survive until the sixteenth-century Reformation.

¹⁵

It was a situation unique in the Christian world and an anomaly as far as monasticism was concerned, but it worked. It appears that individual monks established their cells in strategic locations across the island, and these cells developed into churches. That must have happened early on, before the initial ‘c’ of the Latin word cella softened to a ‘ch’ sound, since it is recorded in Irish place names as Kil-. Their frequency (Kildare, Kilkenny, etc.) bears witness to the widespread influence this evangelistic method had. Within a hundred years Ireland had been Christianized, and the Irish were set to embark on missions of their own – not least to those parts of Britain where the gospel was unknown or where the church had been wiped out by barbarian invasions from the east.

The heroic age of Irish missionary activity came later, but the names of the so-called ‘twelve apostles’ of Ireland have been preserved for us and they played an important part in the conversion of the island, especially in the south-west, where it seems that neither Palladius nor Patrick ministered. Some of the earlier ones might have been trained by Patrick himself, but even if they were not they carried on his methods and guaranteed that their own successors would be well equipped for wider service elsewhere. Taken in order of their presumed deaths (since we do not know when most of them were born), they were Ciarán of Saighir (d. c.530), Ninnidh of Lough Erne (d. c.530), Senán of Inis Cathaigh (d. 544), Mobhí of Glasnevin (d. 545), Columba of Terryglas (d. 552), Laisrén of Munster (d. 564), Brendan of Birr (d. 573), Brendan of Clonfert (d. 577), Ruadháin of Lorrha (d. 584), Columba of Iona (d. 597) and Canice of Aghaboe (d. 600). Brendan of Clonfert was a legendary navigator who was said to have sailed the Atlantic in his coracle and was thought to have discovered the Islands of the Blessed to the west, although whether these were the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland or North America is unknown. Brendan’s account is primarily an allegory of the Christian life, although apparently Christopher Columbus used it as a guide to the prevailing winds and currents of the ocean he later crossed. Of Columba of Iona, the only one of the twelve to evangelize beyond Ireland, we shall hear much more. The others remain obscure and wrapped in legend, but they serve as reminders to us that the conversion of an entire country is seldom if ever the work of a single individual. Patrick may get the credit for it nowadays, but the devoted labours of his host of disciples and successors confirmed his work and their contribution must not be forgotten.

The Anglo-Saxons

By the end of the fifth century the survival of once-Roman Britain was becoming increasingly precarious. The Roman legions left in 410, leaving the island’s defence to the locals. For a while they were remarkably successful at this, but gradually the remains of the Roman province were worn down and fell into the hands of rival warlords, who weakened it still further by their internecine squabbling. It seems that one of them, a man called Vortigern, appealed to some Germanic raiders for support against his British enemies, and that they took advantage of this by establishing a permanent settlement along the eastern seaboard. That is supposed to have happened around ad 449, after which the post-Roman province rapidly descended into anarchy.

The Romano-British people were largely Christianized by this time, but the Germanic invaders who were settling in the east of the island were pagans. Most of the British regarded them as illegal immigrants and wanted them to go home, but they kept on coming – the Angles from a region of southern Denmark that was shaped like an angle, the Saxons from what is now north-western Germany and the Jutes, probably from mainland Denmark, which is known as Jutland to this day. They spoke a series of closely related dialects that strongly resemble Frisian, a minority tongue still used in parts of the Netherlands and Germany. When they got to Britain, they fused naturally into a single ethnic group, as they maintained a sense of their original tribal identities. We call them the Anglo-Saxons (the Jutes having been absorbed by the Saxons), and claim them as the immediate ancestors of the English people of today.

Our only written source for this invasion is a tirade against the shortcomings of the Britons and their treacherous rulers, written by a British monk called Gildas. The title of his book, The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae), tells us all we need to know about his approach to the subject.

¹⁶

We are not sure when or where Gildas lived, but it was probably in what is now south-west England, sometime in the first half of the sixth century. Gildas was not primarily interested in writing a chronological history of his times, with the result that, although he mentions many different events, we cannot be sure when they took place. Nor, given his purpose, is it easy to separate fact from polemic. What we can say is that a century after the Roman legions had left Britain it was still possible to get a good classical education in some parts of the country, since Gildas had obviously had one. It is also clear that by his time the upper classes identified themselves as Christians and were familiar with the Bible, because Gildas peppered his account with biblical references his hearers would have been expected to recognize. Most intriguingly, from our point of view, Gildas (and presumably his readers) saw themselves as God’s chosen people, the new Israel suffering for its sins in just the same way as the old Israel had done. It is a theme that would recur in later centuries and that has still not entirely disappeared, although in more recent times it has generally been pressed into service in support of Britain’s supposed greatness, and not as an explanation for its failures, as it was with Gildas.

It used to be thought that the Anglo-Saxons drove the Britons out and pushed them into the hills of the west and north, where they survived in what became Wales, Cumbria and Cornwall. But while there may be some truth in that, we now know that the process was more complicated than historians once made it appear. DNA testing has revealed that a large number of Britons remained in Anglo-Saxon-held territory, where they were eventually absorbed by the newcomers. British place names survive all over England, although the English language was not much influenced by British. It is possible that the progressive tenses of English (e.g. ‘I am coming’, etc.), which do not exist in the other Germanic languages, are the result of British influence, as is the word ‘dad’ for ‘father’, but beyond that there is not much to report. The Britons’ name for themselves (Cymry) survives in Cumbria, but we now call them Welsh – a Germanic word for Romanized indigenous people that pops up across Europe as Wallonia in Belgium, die Welschschweiz in Switzerland (la Suisse Romande in French) and even as Walachia in Romania. Roman Cornubia likewise became Cornwall in English – the Cornish Wales! Nothing speaks more clearly than this of the extent of Germanic dominance, since the natives were no longer known by their own names but by ones their conquerors chose to give them, and those who survived in occupied territory were almost completely assimilated by the invaders.

Wales

But what of British Christianity? Did it survive the invasions in some form or was it completely rooted out? This is impossible to say for sure. It is conceivable that it went underground, being preserved in folk rituals passed on from British mothers to mixed-race children, and the memory of former churches was preserved here and there. But as long as the Anglo-Saxons remained officially pagan, there was no organized Christian religious activity and certainly no form of education that might have preserved it. The British churches seem to have been deficient in this respect – for the acquisition of classical learning one had to go to Ireland, where such learning was not only maintained but propagated to a degree that equalled the best in western Europe at that time. Admittedly, the bar was low, but the Irish achievement should not be underestimated, and it would be from there, as much as from anywhere else, that the culture of the Latin world would re-enter Anglo-Saxon England.

Meanwhile many of the inhabitants of post-Roman Britain emigrated to the European continent, where they founded Little Britain, or Brittany as we now call it. They took their British church with them, where it maintained a distinct existence at least until 818, when at the Council of Vannes the Breton church submitted to the Archbishop of Tours and its imported British customs were gradually forgotten or replaced with Gallic ones.

¹⁷

Back at home, the later sixth century was a difficult time for the Britons, who lost control of much of what is now England. They remained dominant in the remoter parts of western Britain, and the contours of what we now call Wales and Cornwall began to take shape.

¹⁸

They lacked political unity and their lands were subdivided into a number of petty kingdoms, most of which are little known and proved to be ephemeral. However, it does seem that every king had his own bishop and that the church was organized accordingly.

¹⁹

This was the world in which a young man called Dewi (David) gradually rose to prominence. Dewi was probably born in what is now Pembrokeshire, sometime early in the sixth century, and apparently died on 1 March (now his feast day), which is supposed to have been a Tuesday. That limits the options as far as the year of his death is concerned, and 589 is a popular guess, but we have no way of knowing for sure. In any case he was active in the 560s, when he spoke at a synod held at Brefi (now Llanddewi Brefi) and at another one that met at Caerleon some years later. On both occasions he is said to have spoken out forcefully against Pelagianism, the condemnation of which was why the synods were summoned in the first place, but the details are obscure. What ‘Pelagianism’ would have meant to Dewi is impossible to say and it might have been no more than a general term applied somewhat indiscriminately to anyone who seemed suspect for whatever reason.

What we do know is that the British church was still appointing bishops in the areas under its control and that, thanks to his performances in the synods, Dewi was recognized as the most outstanding of them. After his death he became the patron saint of Wales and his supposed career was regularly cited by much later churchmen as evidence that the Welsh church had once been (and therefore ought again to be) independent of the Church of England, with its own archbishop and provincial synod. It was a cause that would be frustrated for centuries and only became real in 1920 – in circumstances very different from anything Dewi could have imagined. His bones were laid to rest at the site where a cathedral was later erected and named after him, and the settlement thus established is called St David’s to this day. With under 2,000 inhabitants, it is the smallest city in the British Isles.

What happened in Cornwall is much less clear. A British church survived there as long as the Cornish remained independent of the English, but how it was governed is unknown. A man called Kenstec appears as its bishop, but not until the mid-ninth century, after which there was a succession of Celtic bishops for a century or so. However, after 959 they were all Anglo-Saxons. The see of Cornwall maintained a shadowy existence for another hundred years, until it was finally merged with Exeter in 1050. It remained there until 1877, when the modern bishopric of Truro was created, but by then all trace of ancient Cornwall and its language had disappeared.

²⁰

A Celtic church?

When Germanus of Auxerre visited Britain in 429, the island was still in regular contact with the European continent and keeping in step with developments in the wider world. But a generation later, barbarian invasions and the upheavals associated with them had made contact more difficult and the British church, now with an Irish offshoot, gradually drifted out of the Continental orbit. This had particular consequences for fixing the date of Easter. The Synod of Arles in 314 had already proposed a common date for the celebration, and the first Council of Nicaea in 325 had enacted canons that were intended to give effect to that proposal, but it took time for the new calculation to be adopted. Local churches often continued to use the systems they had grown accustomed to, or even devised new ones that did not take the Nicene canons into account. Rome did this about 410, and again in 457. The British church accepted the 410 decision but not the later one, of which it seems to have remained ignorant for quite some time.

The discrepancies were not great, but they occasionally led to different results and the churches found themselves celebrating Easter on different days. Rome gradually conformed to the Nicene pattern, but the Celtic churches of Britain and Ireland did not. There were occasional discussions about this, but the Celts felt the Roman methods were less scientific than theirs and resisted pressure to conform to what they saw as an inferior system. As long as the two churches had little contact with each other this made no difference and the question lay dormant, although with the passage of time both traditions acquired an air of authority in their respective spheres, running the risk of making any future adjustment look like a surrender of one side to the other.

Along with the Easter question a number of minor liturgical and practical differences set the Celts apart from the Romans. For example, Roman monks tonsured their hair by shaving the middle of the scalp, whereas the Celts shaved the edges instead. To illiterate people, variations of that kind were easily assumed to reflect differences of belief, which they did not. In other ways however, the Celtic churches maintained Roman traditions and ways long after the empire had disappeared. In particular they continued to use Latin for worship and for most other purposes too. Latin had been a spoken language in Roman Britain, but it seems to have been confined to a minority and did not long survive the departure of the legions. Unlike Gaul, Iberia or Italy, Britain never developed a Romance vernacular language but preferred the Celtic dialects that had once existed in those other countries but had died out by the end of the imperial period. As a result, the Celts worshipped in a recognizably foreign language, which helps to explain why they were such good scholars – they had to pay careful attention to every word of the Bible and the liturgy.

The many quirks that resulted from this situation led some nineteenth-century romantics to suggest that there had once been an independent Celtic church more spiritually minded than its Roman counterpart and more ‘primitive’, both in relation to the New Testament and in the context of early medieval culture. Reconnecting with one’s Celtic roots was interpreted as returning to the early days of Christianity, and affirming a British (or Irish) version of the faith that was more authentic than its chief rivals. Pseudo-Celtic festivals were invented by romantic nationalists and the ancient druids were recycled as poets who could be (and often have been) Christian in every respect that matters, although of course they could claim to be neo-pagans as well. Celtic script and the Celtic cross became easily recognizable symbols of this ‘revival’ and many such symbols are still familiar, having been taken up by various strands of the ‘New Age’ movement in recent years. Celticism is now often promoted as being more mystical and spiritual than its English or Anglo-Saxon equivalent and therefore, in the eyes of its devotees, superior to it in every way. Its Christian form is decidedly non-dogmatic and anti-Augustinian, celebrating barbarian innocence and deprecating such uncongenial ideas as sin and human depravity.

The truth (alas!) is more prosaic. There never was a Celtic church in any real sense of the word, and the notion that there was a distinctive Celtic spirituality is largely a modern invention. Clare Downham’s assessment is fair:

Perceptions of early Irish churches have been greatly influenced by romantic notions of ‘otherness’. Ireland’s place on the margins of Europe has led its early Church to be regarded as separate from the mainstream, with greater continuity of pagan traditions and possessing a less worldly outlook than the Church in other lands. Such stereotypes can only be maintained through a very selective and partial reading of the primary sources.

²¹

There were certainly monks and hermits scattered across the Celtic world who lived in close communion with nature, but this was true of Christianity everywhere. Their mythical exploits are paralleled by similar tales from the eastern Mediterranean and elsewhere and belong to a recognizable genre of hagiography. The mixture of pre-Christian customs and Christian themes – ‘baptized paganism’ – detectable in the Arthurian legends can also be found in Beowulf, the Icelandic sagas and so on. There is nothing particularly Celtic about any of this, and the notion that there was once a self-consciously Celtic church that was closer to true Christianity than its Roman counterpart must be discarded. Romantics may be disappointed, but sober historians cannot be held captive by myth makers, however attractive some of their imaginative creations may be.

²²

King Arthur and the end of Roman Britain

The intersection of history and myth is at its most powerful in the legends associated with King Arthur. Who was he? If such a figure ever existed, he must have been the leader of the British forces that apparently halted the Anglo-Saxon advance across southern Britain sometime around the year 500. There was apparently a great battle at a place called Mount Badon, which may be Badbury (Wiltshire), where the Britons inflicted such a defeat on their enemies that they were left in peace for a generation. The core of this story need not be doubted. There probably was such a reverse in the Anglo-Saxon conquest, which represented a victory for Christians against their pagan foes. This spiritual aspect of the battle would have appealed to the Britons at the time and it was to have a long history ahead of it. Fighting for the sake of Christ became an integral part of medieval Christianity, in particular its British variant, and has remained so into modern times. Arthur and his knights of the round table were celebrated as archetypes of Christian manhood, whose testosterone-fuelled aggressiveness was a divine gift to be used in the service of the gospel. They were warriors consecrated to Christ, noblemen who lived and fought for the glory of the holy city. The Arthurian legends called it Camelot, but it was really a picture of the New Jerusalem that would come down from heaven. ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ may be a relatively modern hymn, but its roots go back a long way.

So too does the chivalric tradition associated with such figures as Sir Lancelot, Sir Galahad and Sir Gawain. The quest for the holy grail (the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper) may be a fiction, but it strikes a chord with those who believe it is part of their Christian duty to protect the weak and fight for truth and justice. It goes without saying that the men were strong and the women and children weak and in need of defending, but this was not an exercise in male chauvinism. On the contrary, it gave aggressive masculinity a saving purpose and responsibility that denied the concept that ‘might is right’ and made service to others the crowning human virtue. Militancy in the name of the gospel is nowadays denounced by many as a perversion of the message of the Prince of Peace, but the Arthurian tradition gives it an appeal