THE CONVERSION
OF EUROPE
From Paganism to Christianity
371–1386 AD
RICHARD FLETCHER

DEDICATION

To my Father

and

in memory of my Mother

who nurtured my love of History

and by encouraging regular church-going

made me permanently interested

in how those buildings got there and what they were for.

In memory also of

Nico Colchester

my cousin and beloved friend,

a man of rare quality and manifold talents

whose life was tragically cut short

in 1996 at the age of only forty-nine

with whom I often discussed this book

in remote places far from libraries

in Devon and the Cévennes.

EPIGRAPH

History, I think, is probably a bit like a pebbly beach, a complicated mass, secretively three-dimensional. It’s very hard to chart what lies up against what, and why, and how deep. What does tend to get charted is what looks manageable, most recognisable (and usually linear) like the wriggly row of flotsam and jetsam, and stubborn tar deposits.

RICHARD WENTWORTH

Enormous simplifications were possibly necessary to carry a deeper truth than lay on the surface of a mass of unsorted detail. That was, after all, what happened when history was written; many, if not most, of the true facts discarded.

ANTHONY POWELL

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure.

JANE AUSTEN

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

LIST OF MAPS

PREFACE

1 Who is it For?

2 The Challenge of the Countryside

3 Beyond the Imperial Frontiers

4 The New Constantines

5 An Abundance of Distinguished Patrimonies

6 The Chalice and the Horn

7 Campaigning Sceptres: the Frankish Drive to the East

8 Rising by Steps: Christian Consolidation

9 Rival Monotheisms

10 A Certain Greek Named Methodius

11 Scandinavians Abroad and at Home

12 The Eastern Marches from Wenceslas to Nyklot

13 Mission Into Church

14 The Sword Our Pope: the Baltic and Beyond

15 Slouching Towards Bethlehem

FURTHER READING

PRAISE

INDEX

NOTES

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

LIST OF MAPS

1 The Mediterranean world in late antiquity

2 To illustrate the activities of Martin, Emilian and Samson, from the fourth to the sixth centuries

3 To illustrate the activities of Ulfila during the fourth century

4 To illustrate the activities of Ninian and Patrick in the fifth century

5 Gaul and Spain in the age of Amandus and Fructuosus, seventh century

6 The British Isles in the age of Wilfrid and Bede c. 700

7 The Frankish drive to the east in the eighth century

8 The world of Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century

9 Christianity in the Viking world, c. 1000

10 Eastern Europe and the Baltic, twelfth to fourteenth centuries

PREFACE

This book is an investigation of the process by which large parts of Europe accepted the Christian faith between the fourth and the fourteenth centuries and of some of the cultural consequences that flowed therefrom. It is therefore unfashionably ambitious in its scope. Professional historians today are expected to know more and more about less and less, and to communicate their findings to other professional historians in those weird gatherings known as academic conferences. In consequence fewer and fewer people are going to listen to what they have to say. It is a wholly deplorable state of affairs when specialists in any discipline talk only to each other, and accordingly I have sought to write a book which will communicate some of the fruits of research in a manner which will make them accessible to all. Whether or not I have succeeded in this aim will be for others to judge. The last attempt at such a survey by an English author was a work called The Conversion of Europe by the Reverend C. H. Robinson, published in 1917. Much has happened in the discipline of medieval history in the eighty years since Canon Robinson’s book was published. It is timely to essay a new synthesis.

Very early on in my reflections on this topic I became convinced that it would be imprudent to attempt to explain this process of the acceptance of Christianity. Efforts to do so tend to be superficial and glib. My book proceeds by way of suggestion rather than explicit argument; my preferred method is to dispose the raw building blocks of evidence in such a manner as to move suggestions forward. Implicit argument may, I hope, be detected, to use an architectural analogy, in the disposition of mass and shape. The building is rambling, but I hope it coheres.

There are a few practical points of which the reader needs to be aware. The scope of the book is confined for the most part to western, Latin or Roman Christendom. The history of eastern, Greek or Orthodox Christendom is not my concern, let alone the history of those exotic Christian communities, Ethiopic, Indian and Nestorian, which lay beyond the eastern Mediterranean hinterland. Orthodox Christendom will loom on the horizon from time to time, notably in Chapters 10, 11 and 14, but for most of the time my concern is with Christianity in the west and the north of Europe. An exception to this rule is furnished by Chapter 9, which deals with the rival monotheisms of Judaism and Islam, with particular reference to early medieval Spain, offered as a kind of counterpoint to the main thrust of the book. Wherever possible I have allowed the original sources to speak for themselves by quoting them in the text, sometimes at length. The endnotes supply references to identify quotations, whether from original sources or from modern authorities, and to indicate reliable published translations where they exist. In a work of this character a formal bibliography would be out of place. Instead I have provided each chapter with brief notes on further reading, almost invariably in English, which will enable the enquirer to pursue matters further.

I wrote this book between September 1993 and June 1996, principally in the course of the two academic years 1993–5. I am grateful to the Research Committee of the History Department at the University of York, and to Alan Forrest, the then Head of the Department, for allowing me to take an accumulated entitlement to leave of absence during the academic year 1993–4; also to the British Academy for the award of a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship in the year 1994–5. It was thus my rare good fortune to be relieved of all academic duties for two singularly happy years during which I was enabled to concentrate single-mindedly upon research and writing. I record here my gratitude to the two institutions concerned for releasing me from employment and thereby making work possible.

In the course of preparing this book I have incurred many debts to colleagues and friends who have been unfailingly generous with books, articles, information, advice and criticism. I register here my grateful thanks to Lesley Abrams, Peter Biller, James Campbell, Eric Christiansen, Roger Collins, Katy Cubitt, James Howard-Johnston, Edward James, Henry Mayr-Harting, Judith McClure, Peter Sawyer and Charles Thomas. To six persons in particular I owe irredeemable debts. First, to Peter Rycraft, il miglior fabbro, under whose always patient if sometimes exacting guidance I first encountered the challenges and opportunities presented by the comparative historical study of Christian missions. Second, to Ian Wood, who with great generosity read the first half of the book in draft and saved me from many errors of fact and interpretation, especially as regards Frankish matters. Third, to Graham Shaw, who selflessly read the entire typescript and made a large number of extremely acute and perceptive suggestions, on matters both structural and detailed, for its improvement in the course of final revision. Fourth, to Stuart Proffitt, whose courtesy, diligence and sensitivity as an editor know no bounds. I should also like to put on record my heartfelt gratitude to Arabella Quin whose taste, enthusiasm and expertise have been a tower of strength to me during the process of seeing this book through the press. Fifth, to my son Humphrey, who repeatedly showed me that rage and despair were inappropriate (as well as ignoble) reactions to the bewilderments of an unfamiliar technology, and that calm, patience and humility were better means to acquire the necessary skills. Sixth and finally, to my wife Rachel: to her my gratitude is beyond words.

Nunnington, York

June 1997

CHAPTER ONE
Who Is It For?

To spread abroad among barbarians and heathen natives the knowledge of the Gospel seems to be highly preposterous, in so far as it anticipates, nay even reverses, the order of Nature.

General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 1796

WHO IS Christianity for? It may seem an odd question. The plainest of answers is furnished by the so-called ‘great commission’ which concludes St Matthew’s Gospel: ‘Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.’ What could be more explicit than that? But it needs only a slight acquaintance with the history of the past 2,000 years to show that Christians have not always heeded even the least ambiguous of instructions. Consider the withering rebuke delivered by a gathering of Baptist ministers to the young William Carey, later to be so famous in the Indian mission field, when in 1786 he first voiced his wish to become a missionary: ‘Sit down, young man. When it pleases the Lord to convert the heathen He will do it without your help or mine.’

This book is about the process by which a religion which had grown up in the Mediterranean world of the Roman empire was diffused among the outsiders whom the Romans referred to as barbarians; with far-reaching consequences for humankind. The eighteenth-century sentiments already quoted might have been uttered by many a civilized Christian of the first few centuries A.D. There was nothing inevitable about the proffer of the faith to barbarians. But it started to occur in the obscure period which followed the decline and fall of the western half of the empire, and thereafter continued with apparently unstoppable momentum throughout the Old World. By the year 1000 Christian communities had been planted from Greenland to China. The acceptance of Christianity by these outsiders was not simply a matter of confessional change, of dogma, of religious belief and observance in a narrow sense. It involved, or brought in its wake, a much wider process of cultural change. The conversion of ‘barbarian’ Europe to Christianity brought Roman and Mediterranean customs and values and habits of thought to the newcomers who were the legatees of the Roman empire. These included, for example, literacy and books and the Latin language with all that it opened up; Roman notions about law, authority, property and government; the habits of living in towns and using coin for exchange; Mediterranean tastes in food, drink and costume; new architectural and artistic conventions. The Germanic successor-states which emerged from the wreckage of the empire – for these are the outsiders with whom we shall be initially concerned – accepted Christianity and in so doing embraced a cultural totality which was Romanitas, ‘Roman-ness’. It was particularly significant that this occurred at a time when two other processes were shattering the cultural unity of the Mediterranean world. One of these was the withdrawal into herself of the eastern, Byzantine, Orthodox half of the former Roman empire. The other was the irruption of Islam into the Mediterranean and the resultant hiving off of its eastern and southern shores into an alien culture. The cultural unity of the Mediterranean disappeared for ever. But what had been harvested from the classical world and transplanted with Christianity into a northern seedbed germinated there, sprouted and grew into a new civilization, one which indeed owed much to the Mediterranean but was distinctively its own: western European Christendom. The growth of Christendom decisively affected the character of European culture and thereby, because of European dominance in human affairs for several centuries before the twentieth, the civilization of our world. That is why the coming of Christianity to north-western Europe is worth examining, and why this book has been written.

It will be as well to begin by looking at one specific example of this process. In or about the year 619 an Italian priest named Paulinus made his way from the kingdom of Kent in the south-eastern corner of Britain to the court of King Edwin, whose realm of Northumbria had its nucleus in what we now call Yorkshire. Paulinus was a member of the team of missionaries sent by Pope Gregory I a generation earlier to convert the English to Christianity. He had been working in Kent, and possibly other parts of eastern England as well, since his arrival in 601. The Gregorian mission had had a modest success in Kent, where the royal family had been converted and an archbishopric founded at Canterbury. The northern venture was a new departure which had arisen from a dynastic marriage-alliance. Paulinus went north as the domestic chaplain of a Christian princess from Kent, Ethelburga, who was to be married to the pagan King Edwin of Northumbria.

Britain, Britannia, had once been a part of the Roman empire. That had been a long time ago, though the memory of it had endured in some circles, perhaps to exert influence upon the mind of Pope Gregory. After the withdrawal of the apparatus of Roman imperial administration in the early years of the fifth century Britain was left vulnerable to her enemies. Prominent though not alone among these were the Germanic peoples of the North Sea coastline from the Rhine to Denmark. It is traditional and convenient, if only approximately accurate, to refer to them as the Anglo-Saxons. In the course of the very obscure fifth and sixth centuries Germanic warrior aristocracies established themselves as the dominant groups over much of eastern Britain. By the year 600 a number of petty kingdoms under Anglo-Saxon princely dynasties had emerged. Kent was one of these, Northumbria another.

Edwin was the most powerful Anglo-Saxon ruler of his day. His kingdom of Northumbria stretched from the Humber to the Firth of Forth between the North Sea and the Pennines. In addition to this he enjoyed a wider overlordship in Britain over many other kings and princes, both Germanic and Celtic. This position of dominance had been gained by incessant warfare against his neighbours. Seventh-century English kings did not ‘govern’ in any sense that we should recognize today. Their primary business was predatory warfare and the exaction of tribute from those they defeated. The spoils of successful war – treasure, weapons, horses, slaves, cattle – were distributed to their retainers as payment for past and lien upon future loyalty. A king who failed to provide rewards would forfeit loyalty. The warriors of his warband would melt away to take service with more successful and therefore more generous warlords, or would thrust the king aside into exile or an early grave to make way for a more promising candidate. It was a risky business being a Germanic king in post-Roman Europe.

Beyond their own arms and those of their retainers these kings looked to their gods to furnish them with victory. It is a grave difficulty with our subject – one which we shall encounter time and again in the course of this book – that we know very little indeed about Germanic traditional, pre-Christian religion. If we ask ourselves the question, ‘What were Germanic kings converted from?’ we have to confess that we don’t know much about it and never will. Most of the traces of Germanic paganism have been diligently obliterated by its Christian supplanter. (This has not deterred modern scholars from writing many weighty books about it.) But we are on fairly safe ground in the supposition that for a king like Edwin and for his heroic warrior aristocracy the cult of a god or gods of war was of central importance. Edwin’s gods had done very nicely by him. He was not a man, one might hazard, who would hastily abandon their cult. Paulinus’ brief was not simply to minister to the spiritual needs of Ethelburga and her attendants but also to try to convert her husband to Christianity. As he journeyed northwards Paulinus must have reflected that Edwin presented him with a formidable challenge. But Edwin did give way in the end. He was baptized at York on Easter Day, 12 April, in the year 627, in a wooden chapel hastily erected for the purpose, along with other members of his family and many of his warriors. The king founded an episcopal see at York; Paulinus was its first bishop. For the remainder of his life until his death in battle in 633 King Edwin strenuously encouraged the missionary activities of Paulinus in his kingdom.

We owe this account to Bede, a Northumbrian monk and scholar who completed his Ecclesiastical History of the English People about a century after Edwin’s death. Bede was an exceptionally careful and honest historian, though in using him we have to bear in mind that his aims and methods in writing history differed widely from those of today. Although his chronology presents difficulties – silently resolved above – no one has ever doubted that the central episode of this narrative, the baptism of Edwin into the Christian faith on Easter Day 627, was one that did really happen. However, if we wish to approach a deeper understanding of the facts there is a great deal more that we should like to know. Bede furnishes some tantalizing scraps of information about the background to the baptism which can be eked out with some even more fragmentary materials from other sources.

In 626 Queen Ethelburga gave birth to a daughter. Paulinus assured Edwin that the queen’s safe delivery and the baby’s survival were owed to his prayers to the God of the Christians. Later in the same year Edwin led his warband against the king of the West Saxons (who gave their name to the kingdom of Wessex). Before he set out on campaign he promised that if God should grant him victory he would renounce the worship of idols and serve Christ. As a pledge of his promise he permitted his infant daughter to be baptized, which took place at Whitsun (7 June) 626. His campaign was completely successful: five chieftains of the West Saxons were slain and Edwin returned booty-laden and rejoicing to the north. He abandoned the worship of idols and sought instruction in the Christian faith from Paulinus, though he did not yet publicly declare himself a Christian. As well as instructing him Paulinus reminded Edwin of a mysterious experience that he had had years before, while in exile before fighting his way to power in Northumbria. At dead of night he had encountered an unknown stranger – in one version of the story this was Paulinus himself – who had prophesied Edwin’s future greatness and held out the promise of salvation. In a final episode of Bede’s conversion narrative the king held a meeting with his counsellors and sought their advice. The chief pagan priest, by name Coifi, made the point that a lifetime’s devotion to pagan cult had brought little in the way of material advantage to himself, the principal intermediary between king and gods. (We should note that Bede regarded these as ‘prudent words’; his nineteenth-century editor and matchless commentator Charles Plummer found it ‘disappointing’ that Bede should have approved such ‘gross materialism’.) A nobleman present likened the life of man to the flight of a sparrow through the king’s hall in winter, from darkness to darkness, and urged sympathetic consideration for a faith which might reveal more of the origins and ultimate goals of mankind. Paulinus also spoke in the debate. At its close Edwin formally embraced Christianity and Coifi led the way in profaning the heathen temples. The royal baptism at Easter followed shortly thereafter.

Bede was writing a century later. He was dependent on oral testimony, stories about King Edwin preserved at the monastery of Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast, where the king was buried. He wrote with a didactic purpose, teaching lessons in Christian living to the kings and clergy of his own day by holding up a gallery of good examples from the past, among whom Edwin and Paulinus were prominent. These features of Bede’s work, for all his honesty and care, render it less than wholly satisfactory as an account of the conversion of Edwin. But it is very nearly all we have.

The coming of Christianity to Northumbria in the seventh century prompts questions which may serve as some kind of informal agenda for enquiries which will range more widely in time and space.

First, there is the problem of the apostolic impulse. It is observable that in the course of Christian history churchmen have been now more, now less concerned with spreading the faith. Why did Pope Gregory I decide to send a mission to convert the English to Christianity? What was it that took Patrick to Ireland, or Boniface to Germany, or Anskar to Sweden, or Cyril and Methodius to Moravia?

Second, there are the evangelists like Paulinus to be considered. Who were these activists who engaged themselves in the work – the toilsome, often unrewarding, sometimes dangerous work – of missionary preaching? What sort of previous experience or training had they had? What models or precedents guided them, what ideas about strategy and tactics?

Third, there is the missionary ‘target’ or ‘host society’, in this instance a warrior king and his household of military retainers. Was it a condition of successful evangelism in early medieval Europe that missionaries worked through and with the secular power? Who indeed were identified as the potential converts – individuals or groups; central people or marginal people; men or women or children; kings, noblemen, farmers, merchants, craftsmen, labourers, slaves, prisoners of war or what-have-you; settled, nomadic, intermittently mobile, or displaced people?

Fourth, there are the expectations of the potential converts, founded in their experience of the traditional religion in whose observances they were brought up. What did they expect of it? It has already been pointed out that we know little of Germanic paganism. The same may be said – must be said, indeed, and the theme is one that needs regular sounding – of Celtic, Scandinavian and Slavonic paganisms. But of one thing we may be reasonably confident. The rich diversity of pre-Christian cults with which evangelists had to contend shared a core of what sociologists of religion like to call ‘empirical religiosity’. That is to say, the belief that proper cult brings tangible reward in this present world, in material benefits like health, prosperity, success or fame, as well as in whatever Hereafter traditional religion might have envisaged. Edwin wanted victory in battle, glory and treasure and power and the continuing loyalty of his retainers. Others of less exalted status would have had different hopes and expectations: enough food to see the family through the winter, murrain-free cattle, cures for sickness or disability, a good husband or wife, successful trading, deliverance from shipwreck, release from enchantment, protection against evil spirits, the death of an enemy, revenge, freedom, a return home. How could widely differing hopes and fears be satisfied?

Fifth, there is the question of the communication of the message. How did evangelists set about the business of putting over the faith and its associated standards of conduct to potential converts? For a start, what language did they use? For Paulinus the vernacular of every day in his native Italy was Latin; for Edwin it was a Northumbrian dialect of Old English, a Germanic language having its closest counterpart in the Frisian coastlands of north Germany. When Edwin’s mysterious nocturnal visitor spoke to him of ‘salvation’, what Old English word or phrase might he have used? How did missionaries render key Christian concepts in the vernacular – ‘sin’, ‘regeneration’, and so forth? Most important of all, what word did they choose to render ‘God’, and what cluster of associations might it have had for their converts?

Sixth, there is the delicate problem of the adaptability of the message. How much elasticity or ‘give’ did missionary Christianity have in an early medieval context? What compromises or adjustments did evangelists have to make, and with how much heart-searching? How and where were the limits drawn between what was tolerable in traditional belief and practice and what was not? To what extent could or did Christian activists try to change traditional custom – in respect of, say, marriage, penal practice, the disposal of the dead, warfare, blood feuds, slave-trading?

Seventh, there are the differing patterns of acceptance. What did the new converts make of the new faith and its demands? What models of Christian living were presented to them? How, if at all, was Edwin different (to human eyes) as man and as king after Easter 627 from what he had been before? Bede tells us that subsequently Paulinus spent thirty-six days at King Edwin’s royal residence at Yeavering (in present-day Northumberland) engaged in non-stop baptism in the nearby river Glen of all who flocked to him. What did they think had happened to them? Do we have even the faintest shadow of a chance of finding out? How much of a leap into the unknown was conversion, how high a hurdle? Were converts required to abandon all, or some, or hardly any of their previous customs, rituals or taboos?

Eighth, there is the consolidation that has to follow close upon the initial acceptance and conversion, the process by which a mission becomes a church. How did a structure of ecclesiastical government come into being in the mission field, and in what respects did it differ from the Mediterranean model whence it derived? Why were such enormous numbers of monasteries founded in newly converted regions such as seventh-century England or eighth-century Germany? How were cathedrals and monasteries endowed, and what implications might this process have had for legal notions about the ownership and transfer of property? How did parishes come into existence? What positions were taken up on such potentially controversial matters as the formation of a native priesthood, the role of women within the young churches, the imposition of dues such as tithe upon the new converts, the translation of Christian scriptures into the vernacular? What was to be the architectural form and the constructional technique of new church buildings? Could ‘native’ art become ‘Christian’ art?

Ninth, and almost finally, there are the cultural consequences of conversion, already glanced at. We do not know exactly where Edwin’s wooden chapel stood, though there is some likelihood that it was in the pillared square of what had once been the praetorium or headquarters building of the Roman fortress at York. Excavation has shown that this enormous and imposing structure was still standing in Edwin’s day. If this supposition about the siting of York’s earliest Anglo-Saxon cathedral is correct, Edwin’s baptism at the hands of an Italian missionary bishop took place in an unambiguously Roman architectural setting. Bede tells us that Edwin used to have a standard of Roman type carried before him. He quotes papal letters which addressed Edwin with exalted Latin titles, ‘glorious king of the English’, ‘most excellent and surpassing lord’. To Bede it was clear that there was something Roman about Edwin’s kingship after his conversion. Whatever the reality might have been, from Bede’s angle of vision the perception was a just one. Within little more than a century of Edwin’s death the cathedral school at York had become the most important centre for the study of Christian and classical learning in western Europe. Among others it educated Alcuin, that early example of the brain-drain who, head-hunted by Charlemagne, king of the Franks, was the architect of that revival of literature and learning under royal patronage, the so-called Carolingian renaissance, which was the threshold to the cultural achievements of western Christendom in the Middle Ages.

These are all questions to which answers may be found – however hesitant or provisional, however swaddled in circumlocutory cautions our formulations may need to be – in the meagre sources which are all that have come down to us from a remote epoch. The tenth and last question on our agenda is the most perplexing because it was never specifically addressed in our sources. It is no more and no less than this: What makes a Christian? At what point may one say of an individual, or a society, ‘He (or she, or it) has become, is now Christian’? If the saving grace imparted by baptism makes the Christian, then the hundreds of Northumbrian farmers and their families dunked in the waters of the river Glen by Paulinus were indeed made Christians in the course of those thirty-six days. It is a sound sacramentalist point of view. Was it enough for Paulinus? Was it enough for Bede? As it happens, we know how Bede would have answered that question. His requirements for right Christian living were rigorous. To investigate what more beyond baptism might be required is to discover that the question ‘What makes a Christian?’ was very variously answered in the span of place and time embraced by this book. Being a Christian was obviously a rather different operation for Pope Gregory I than it was for King Ethelbert of Kent. Being a Christian in seventh-century Northumbria was not the same as being a Christian in twelfth-century Northumbria (or, for the matter of that, in sixteenth- or twentieth-century Northumbria). Conversion could mean different things to different people at the same time. What was required of the convert could vary as circumstances or tactics or the pressure of time or the level of moral resources also varied. Investigators will choose diverse indicators of Christianization and frame judgements accordingly. For the historian the study of early medieval conversion can be bewildering; a game played in swirling mist on a far from level playing field in which unseen hands are constantly shifting the dimly glimpsed goalposts.

The theme is a grand one and the agenda (quite frankly) daunting. This is the more so because the sources to which we may turn for information are sparse and uniformly problematic. Early medieval Europe was a society of restricted literacy. Most of those who could read and write during the period which is my concern were ecclesiastics. In consequence, very nearly all the surviving written narratives were composed by what might be called professional Christians for a primary audience of other professional Christians. Works thus composed reach us only after a process of passing, so to say, through several different filters which have impeded the free flow of information. In the first place there was a kind of voluntary censorship practised by their authors. There are many things we should like to know about which these writers never tell us. A notorious example is furnished by Bede’s reluctance to tell us much about Anglo-Saxon paganism. A second source of difficulty is that these narratives are almost invariably to some degree didactic. I have already said that Bede’s portrayal of Edwin and Paulinus was drawn with an eye to the kings and clergy of his own day a century later. Indeed, there is not a single chapter in Bede’s great Ecclesiastical History which cannot be shown to have had a didactic purpose of one sort or another. The lessons which such writers sought to teach may not always be clear to the modern reader, but the didactic intent usually is. Now teaching lessons involves a measure of selection, of emphasis, of simplification, of omission. Here then is another filter through which the information has to pass. Bede presented Edwin as a sober statesman and an earnest seeker after truth. One cannot help suspecting that there may have been other sides to Edwin’s character than these. But this is how Bede wanted his audience to see him.

The most overtly didactic narrative literature of the period is that branch of Christian biography known as hagiography, or the lives of the saints. During the early Middle Ages the control of saint-making with which we are familiar – a formal process of canonization under papal supervision – did not exist: canonization in this guise was an invention of the ecclesiastical lawyers of the twelfth century. Instead, holy men and holy women (sancti, sanctae) were simply recognized and revered as such by neighbourhood and community. One way of keeping the memory of a saint fresh was by the composition of a memoir, the saint’s life (vita), which could be read aloud for edificatory purposes in the religious community to which the holy man or woman had belonged in life, and where his or her relics were treasured after death. Edification is the key word in this context. Although hagiography came – as it still comes – in many different costumes its aim was consistently to edify – to hold the saint up as an example of godly living and holy dying, to spur listeners or readers to compunction and devotion. One means of edification which may cause disquiet to the modern reader was the recording of wonders and miracles worked by the saint. Early medieval Europe was a world in which persons of every level of intellectual cultivation accepted without question that the miraculous could weave like a shuttle in and out of everyday reality. We need to remember this, and to resist the temptation to dismiss it out of hand as infantile credulity: patronizing the past never helped anyone to understand it. Hagiographical writings survive in great abundance from this period. They constitute an important source of information for the historian. At the most obvious level the lives of the saints contain an enormous quantity of incidental information about daily life. To give a trivial example, we learn from Chapter 20 of Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert that the saint used pig’s lard as a kind of dubbin with which to grease his leather shoes. At a more subtle level of interpretation saints’ lives can tell us something of the expectations which people held of their holy men and women. Did the saint foretell the future? Heal the sick? Found monasteries? Rebuke the mighty? Control the weather? Preach to the heathen? Wreak vengeance on his enemies? See visions? Practise ascetic self-denial? Sensitively used, hagiographical writings can enable us to peer into some at least of the more intimate religious feelings and aspirations of a people distantly removed from us in time.

Of course, matters are rarely straightforward. In the path of every historian of the early Middle Ages – and especially but not exclusively those who concern themselves with hagiography – there lies like some Slough of Despond the quagmire of the topos. The Greek word for ‘place’, topos has been adopted into the jargon of literary scholars to mean, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘a traditional motif or theme (in a literary composition); a rhetorical commonplace, a literary convention or formula’. In the context of hagiography what this means is that there existed, as it were, a bank of stock tales, themes, phrases on which the hagiographer could draw without restraint or acknowledgement: for example, future sanctity foreshadowed in childhood; renunciation of home and kinsfolk; the edifying deathbed, etc. But we need not restrict ourselves to hypothetical examples: let us return to Cuthbert and the pig’s lard. In the story it was brought to him on Farne Island by a pair of ravens (and if you want to know the ostensible reason why you had better read it for yourself). Bede himself tells us that the story of Cuthbert and the ravens was ‘after the example’ of a tale told by Pope Gregory in his account of St Benedict, founder of Montecassino and author of the Benedictine Rule. Behind this lies the story, well-loved in the early Middle Ages, of how the hermits Paul and Antony were sustained by a raven who brought them bread in the desert. Lurking still further back is the story in I Kings xvii of how the prophet Elijah was fed by ravens at the Lord’s command when he lay concealed beside the brook Cherith. It is extremely common to find that episodes in one saint’s Vita were modelled upon episodes in another or in the Bible. This feature of the literature raises nagging anxieties about historicity. To what extent might the demands of matching form and content to a literary model have distorted the reality which the writer professes to convey?

Conversion narratives, of which Bede’s account of Edwin is but one of many that we shall encounter, offer an open door to colonization by formulaic topoi. They present additional snags all of their own. The business of organizing a narrative round a conversion is in itself liable to project sharpness of outline on to a historical reality which was more likely than not blurred and indistinct. Hagiographical piety and didactic intent might highlight the missionary’s role by casting as unalloyedly pagan a people who had already been touched by Christianity. Narrative drama could be enhanced by presenting conversion as a moment rather than a process. Hindsight could show as smooth and harmonious the growth of a church which in reality had been characterized by improvisation and quarrelling. Even – or perhaps especially – the simple and fundamental opposition ‘pagan/Christian’ might be deceptive. In a word, we have to exercise great caution in our handling of the conversion narratives which have come down to us.

Narratives such as Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and hagiographies such as his Life of St Cuthbert are our most important written sources but not our only ones. They can be supplemented with sermons, tracts, letters, legislative enactments, deeds relating to property, poetry both sacred and profane. Each presents difficulties of interpretation. Sermons and lawcodes are normative or prescriptive; their authors tend to encourage the ideal rather than to describe the actual. Lettercollections such as Alcuin’s were on the whole valued and preserved rather for their style than for their content. Deeds rarely survive in their original form; the texts of the copies which have come down to us may have been tampered with in the course of transmission. Unattributed poetry is hard to date.

These diverse sources of information in written form may be supplemented by the material evidence of surviving objects or structures. Two notable excavations have helped us to grasp something of the setting of Edwin’s kingship. Aerial photography above the valley of the river Till, near Wooler in Northumberland, revealed in 1948 a complex of markings which were initially taken to indicate the remains of a hitherto unknown monastic settlement. Excavation in the 1950s revealed the site of Edwin’s residence at Yeavering with its associated structures, scene of the mass baptisms administered by Paulinus. Some years later, in the early 1970s, threats to the stability of the central tower of York Minster necessitated a strengthening of the foundations, which permitted some limited and hazardous archaeological excavation. It was in the course of this operation that it was discovered that the pillared square of the Roman praetorium was still standing in good repair in Edwin’s day. Some of the archaeological materials from this age may speak to us even more directly of conversion, as we shall see in due course.

There are hard questions to be faced, and intractable evidence to answer them with. But face them we must, and do with it what we can, if we are to do justice to the grandeur of our theme. Yeavering is a long way beyond what had been Rome’s northernmost frontier, Hadrian’s Wall. Edwin’s great hall was an enormous barn-like structure of timber, with doorways in the long sides through which a sparrow might pass from winter darkness to winter darkness. The quantities of cattle bones excavated near by suggest that the king and his retainers gorged themselves on beef, washed down no doubt by copious draughts of beer from generous drinking-horns like those found at Taplow or Sutton Hoo. A barbaric scene: yes, but not far from the hall there stood a flight of curved benches, rising in tiers and lengthening as they rose, whose occupants’ gaze would have focused upon a dais at ground level backed by a massive wooden post. This structure can only have been designed for seating an assembly which might be addressed from the dais. The design of this auditorium irresistibly recalls as it were a segment from a Roman theatre. Did Paulinus address Edwin’s warriors from that dais? Perhaps. The encounter between Paulinus and Edwin was one between Roman and barbarian, Christian and pagan, Latin and Germanic, literate and oral, wine and beer, oil and lard, south and north. It opened up perspectives on to distant notions and activities beyond the wildest surmises of the participants.

Christianity traces its historic roots to the ministry of a Jewish preacher and exorcist in a backward province of the Roman empire. As an offshoot of Judaic stock, early Christianity was heir to the proselytizing zeal of its parent. Accustomed as we are to a merely self-perpetuating style of Judaism which was brought about by subsequent centuries of Christian and Islamic religious repression, it is easy to forget that the Judaism of the Hellenistic world was an evangelizing faith, and not one by any means conceived as being exclusively for adherents who were of Jewish ethnicity. The diaspora, or dispersion, of the Jewish people from their homeland had begun several centuries earlier with the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities of the eighth and sixth centuries B.C. respectively. Thereafter it trickled on, quickening to a flood of emigration after the Jewish revolt of 66–70 A.D. and the destruction of Jerusalem, and again after the rebellion of Bar-Kochba in the years 132–5. By the first century of the Christian era there were significant Jewish communities to the east of the Roman empire in Armenia, Iraq, Iran and Arabia, and throughout the Mediterranean world in Egypt, Asia Minor, Italy and Spain; communities that were thriving and growing by evangelistic effort. We shall meet some of these scattered Jewish communities of the Mediterranean in a later chapter.

As a sect within Judaism, early Christianity followed in its parent’s geographical footsteps. It was characterized from the outset by its mobility. This rapid dissemination found its earliest chronicler in the author of the Acts of the Apostles, traditionally identified as St Luke, a masterly account focused principally upon the missionary labours of St Paul. But the impression given by Luke of an orderly and controlled diffusion – reinforced for many of us by map and mnemonic in the scripture lessons of childhood – is misleading. Our evidence is patchy. The spread of Christianity to Alexandria and beyond along the coast of north Africa to Carthage has left no narrative trace of any kind. But it is reasonably clear that Christianity spread to east and to west both quickly and anarchically, without overt strategy or leadership. In his epistle to the Romans Paul was not addressing a Christian community which he had founded, in contrast to the young churches of Ephesus, Corinth or Thessalonica. The Christian community in Rome already existed by at latest the middle years of the first century. It had just mysteriously come into being – mysteriously, that is, if one doubts (as most scholars now do) the traditions attributing its foundation to St Peter. This intimate association with Judaism continued to provide a ramifying network of communication for Christian churches throughout and beyond the long-drawn-out and messy process of the detachment of church from synagogue, of the law of Christ from the law of Moses.

Alexandria, Carthage, Corinth, Ephesus, Rome, Thessalonica: the expansion of Christianity took place in a social setting that was predominantly urban. It was in the cities of Asia Minor and Greece that St Paul found, or founded, the Christian communities which he nurtured, lectured, scolded or bullied. It was in the cities round the Mediterranean that a church organization developed, in the cities that martyrs suffered and were commemorated, in the cities that Christians organized the charitable works for which they were renowned. The early Christian communities were composed of city-dwellers of fairly lowly social rank. It is true that when, in the course of time – and hardly at all before about the year 200 – the Christian faith began to attract adherents of higher rank and greater wealth, such persons might possess country houses in which they and their families would spend part of the year. But these country villas were, in Ramsay MacMullen’s striking phrase, like ‘pieces of cities broken off’.¹ Even in the country houses of the rich Christianity remained an urban religion.

Such observations have long been truisms of early Christian studies. Like all truisms they need some qualification. The contrast between urban and rural may be made too clear-cut by our industrialized perceptions of that distinction. Before the era of railways, tinned food and refrigeration it was impossible for towns to be isolated from rural life. Apart from a handful of really big cities (Alexandria, Antioch and, of course, Rome) and a larger number of towns of middling size (such as Athens or Naples), most of the towns round the Mediterranean were small and closely integrated with their rural hinterland. Very many farmers would have lived in towns and walked out to their fields by day, as some still do twenty centuries later. In addition, we do have a few tiny fragments of evidence which suggest an early rural dimension to the spread of Christianity in, for example, Syria, Egypt or Asia Minor. The younger Pliny, governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor, addressed a famous letter to the Emperor Trajan in about 112 asking for guidance on the treatment of Christians, in the course of which he referred to a Christian presence in the countryside. Possibly he exaggerated; but it would be unwise to disregard his testimony altogether.

So a degree of circumspection is needed. Nevertheless, the old truism still has validity if we introduce a geographical modification. The early evidence for rural Christianity comes exclusively from the eastern provinces of the empire (and especially from those that were close to the Mediterranean). It does not come from the western ones which are the main concern of this book, those provinces embraced by north Africa west of Carthage, Spain, Italy and the Alpine regions stretching up as far as the Danube frontier, Gaul and Britain. There were no great cities at all in the west, if we exclude Rome, and far fewer of middling rank. Towns of modest size were generally even smaller than in the east, and thinner on the ground, further apart from one another. There were enormous tracts of countryside which were to all intents and purposes untouched by Romanization. We shall see evidence in the following chapter that they were untouched by Christianity too.

Then there is the question of cultural attitudes. The educated and articulate elite of the classical Mediterranean believed that civilization and culture were to be found exclusively in cities. Our daily use of such words as ‘urbane’, ‘polite’ and, of course, ‘civilized’ shows what a good job that elite has done in persuading posterity of its point of view. Occasionally the writers who belonged to this tiny elite deigned to celebrate country life and the happy lot of the peasantry – their rude health, sturdy virtues and innocent pleasures. Reality was different. City-dwellers, parasitic upon the surrounding country for their essential supplies, repaid this dependence in the harsh coin of disdain. Most townspeople, most of the time, looked upon the rural peasantry with mingled disgust, fear and contempt. They were dirty and smelly, unkempt, inarticulate, uncouth, misshapen by toil, living in conditions of unbelievable squalor, as brutish as the beasts they tended. These attitudes are easy to document from surviving Greek and Latin literature. The peasantry of the countryside were beyond the pale, a tribe apart, outsiders. Such attitudes underpinned the failure of the urban Christian communities to reach out and spread the gospel in the countryside. We might regard this lack of initiative as negligent. But such an accusation would probably have bewildered the urban Christians. For them the countryside simply did not exist as a zone for missionary enterprise. After all, there was nothing in the New Testament about spreading the Word to the beasts of the field.

Unappealing as we might find this disposition of antique citydwellers, it was one which witnessed to a massive confidence in the urban order of imperial Rome. The Christian communities of the Mediterranean world had grown up in that order, if not quite of it. They took it for granted and they were right to be confident in it. From the beginning of the Christian era in the reign of Augustus for the next two centuries the Mediterranean (as opposed to the frontier) provinces of the empire had basked in almost uninterrupted peace and prosperity: the pax romana. The public buildings of the cities and the speeches which were declaimed in them alike display a bland and soothing mastery of their respective architectural and literary techniques; symptomatic of a social order which gazed upon its way of going about its business and was pleased with what it saw. Look at me, the colonnades and arches of Leptis Magna seem to say: relax; enjoy; and it’ll go on like this for ever.

But it didn’t. In the middle years of the third century the Roman empire experienced a phase of trouble more harrowing and profound than any that had occurred since the founding of the principate by Augustus. During the half-century which followed the death of the Emperor Severus Alexander in 235 there ensued a series of short-lived and for the most part incompetent rulers. Of twenty more or less legitimate emperors – not counting usurpers – all but two died violently. The average length of reign was two years and six months. A symptom, and perhaps to a large degree a cause of this instability was the inability of government to hold the allegiance of the armies. This played into the hands of the generals, who used the troops under their command to stage coups which made and unmade emperors or to set up breakaway ‘empires within the empire’. As central control slackened, imperial income fell. To make ends meet, and in particular to try to satisfy the insatiable demands of the military and thus to purchase loyalty, the government resorted time after time to that most irresponsible of expedients, debasement of the coinage. Debasement brought in its train, as it always does, inflation. By the end of the third century the purchasing power of the denarius stood at about a half of 1 per cent of what it had been at its outset.

Crippled by instability, civil war, fiscal chaos – and, just to make matters worse, by intermittent outbreaks of bubonic plague – the empire was in no position to defend its frontiers. From 224 onwards the new Persian dynasty of the Sassanids constituted a well-organized and hostile presence to the east, bent upon regaining the Syrian territories which Persian kings of old had ruled. For the Roman empire, the most humiliating moment of this time of troubles occurred in 260 when the Emperor Valerian was captured by the Persians. The Germanic tribes of the Goths, settled at this period on the northern shores of the Black Sea in today’s Ukraine, took to the sea to strike deep into Asia Minor. By land, they pressed hard on the Danube frontier, launching raids into the Balkans and Greece. The Emperor Decius was defeated and killed by them in Thrace in the year 251. Along the Rhine frontier new Germanic confederations, those of the Alamans and of the Franks, took shape. In 257 they broke into Gaul to plunder it at will. Some of them even penetrated as far as northeastern Spain, where they sacked the city of Tarraco (Tarragona). Berbers along the Saharan fringes attacked the long, thin, vulnerable littoral of Roman north Africa. In far-flung Britain the construction of coastal defences witnessed to new enemies from overseas – Saxons from Germany and Scots from Ireland. One of the most telling signs of the times was the building of town walls throughout the western provinces of Gaul, Spain and Britain, furnishing defences for settlements which had never needed them before.

The third-century slide into anarchy and helplessness was arrested by the Emperor Diocletian (284–305). His stabilizing reforms, fiscal, military and bureaucratic, were continued and extended under his successor Constantine I (306–37). Their work gave the empire the stamina and solidity it enjoyed in the fourth century. One feature of these reforms was the adoption of ideas about monarchy, together with the associated ceremonies and ritual, which drew on earlier Hellenistic and Persian thinking. The principal tendency of this body of political theory was to stress the power of the ruler in matters sacred as well as profane. It would encourage the moving together of church and state and, as time went by, their near merging in the imperial theocracies of the East Roman or Byzantine empire and, much later, in its Russian heir. It was a tendency which was less pronounced in the western provinces of the fourth-century empire. This was a difference which had important implications, to which we shall return shortly. A second feature was the division of the unitary empire into two halves, an eastern and a western. Diocletian had led the way here, dividing the empire into a tetrarchy – a senior emperor in east and west, each with a subordinate emperor – as part of his reforms; a decentralization intended to make more effective the emperors’ discharge of their primary responsibility, defence. This formal structure was not maintained after his death and practice varied in the course of the fourth century, but by its last quarter the political division into eastern and western empires had become permanent. One development which helped to institutionalize it was Constantine’s foundation of a new capital city in the east, named after him – Constantinople.

A third feature of the reforms of the Diocletianic-Constantinian period was the change in the status of Christianity within the empire. Towards the end of Diocletian’s reign there occurred the last and most serious persecution of the Christian communities ever mounted by the imperial authorities. It was immediately halted by a respite. The story of Constantine’s conversion is well known but needs to be told again in outline here because it became such a potent model – indeed, a topos – of how a ruler should be brought to the faith. Constantine had been proclaimed emperor in Britain in 306. Six years later, having by then made himself master of Gaul and Spain as well, the emperor was leading his army south to do battle with his rival Maxentius for control of Italy and Africa. At some point in the course of this journey – much later tradition would locate this at Arles – Constantine saw a vision of the cross superimposed on the sun above the words In hoc signo vince, ‘Conquer in this sign’. He advanced over the Alps and down towards Rome. His troops were ordered to mark their shields with the sign of the cross. In the battle of the Milvian Bridge, just outside Rome, Constantine was victorious against all odds. The Christian God – a god of battles – had been on his side. A few months later, in March 313, the so-called Edict of Milan put an end to the persecution of the Christians.

In what sense and when Constantine became a Christian are questions that have been endlessly and inconclusively debated. In the formal sense of the word he was not initiated until shortly before his death in 337. Like many others in the early church he chose to postpone baptism until his deathbed. But his adhesion to Christianity from 313 onwards was not to be doubted. Its most enduring manifestation was in open-handed patronage. Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire, though this is often said of him. What he did was to make the Christian church the most-favoured recipient of the near-limitless resources of imperial favour. An enormous new church of St Peter was built in Rome, modelled on the basilican form used for imperial throne halls such as the one which survives at Trier. The see of Rome received extensive landed endowments and one of the imperial residences, the Lateran Palace, to house its bishop and his staff. Constantinople, begun in 325, was to be an emphatically and exclusively Christian city – even though it was embellished with pagan statuary pillaged from temples throughout the eastern provinces. Jerusalem was provided with a splendid church of the Holy Sepulchre. Legal privileges and immunities rained down upon the Christian church and its clergy. The emperor took an active part in ecclesiastical affairs, summoning and attending church councils, participating in theological debate, attempting to sort out quarrels and controversies.

1. The Mediterranean world in late antiquity.

The adhesion to Christianity of Constantine and his successors with the single exception of the short-lived Emperor Julian ‘the Apostate’ (361–3) – was a development of the utmost weight and significance in Christian history. All sorts of relationships were turned topsy-turvy by it. From being a vulnerable, if vibrant, sect liable to intermittent persecution at the hands of the secular authorities, Christians suddenly found themselves part of the ‘establishment’. The end of persecution meant that martyrdom must thenceforward be found only outside Christendom or be understood in a metaphorical rather than a literal manner. Christian bishops were no longer just the disciplinarians of tightly organized sectarian cells but rapidly assimilated as quasi civil servants into the mandarinate which administered the empire. Their churches were no longer obscure conventicles but public buildings of increasing magnificence. So much, and more, flowed from Constantine’s spiritual reorientation.

The church repaid Constantine’s generosity by presenting him as the model Christian emperor, the ‘friend of God’ who ‘frames his earthly government according to the pattern of the divine original’. The words are those of Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, who lived from c. 260 to c. 340. Eusebius was a notable scholar and a prominent member of the little circle of court clerics who helped to school Constantine in Christian ways and to shape an image of him for contemporaries and for posterity. His Oration in Praise of Constantine, from which the passages quoted above are taken, is a prime example of fourth-century rhetoric, a work of oily panegyric which was hugely successful in carefully directing attention to all that was most admirable in its subject while discreetly drawing a veil over the less appealing features of the emperor’s character. It is not to Eusebius that we must go to learn that Constantine murdered his father-in-law, his wife and his son. On the contrary, Constantine was ‘our divinely favoured emperor’, who has received ‘as it were a transcript of the divine sovereignty’ to direct ‘in imitation of God himself, the administration of this world’s affairs’.²

Eusebius’ handling of Constantine requires to be considered in the context of early Christian thinking about the relationship between the church and the world. For simplicity’s sake one may distinguish two contrasting tendencies. The first was an attitude of wariness towards the secular world, of distrust, even of hatred for it. The Christian church was a society set apart, a ‘gathered’ community of the elect salvaged from the polluting grasp of the world, though still menaced by it in the form of the secular state, the Roman empire. The most violent expression of these views in early Christian writings is to be found in the book of Revelation, composed towards the end of the first century. The Roman empire is the beast, the harlot, ‘drunk with the blood of the saints and the martyrs of Jesus’. Keeping the world at arm’s length long remained an urgent concern among some Christian groups. We shall return shortly to some of its manifestations in the late antique period.

The second tendency was the quest for some form of accommodation with the secular world and the empire. This search was muted and hesitant at first but gained in confidence and assertiveness as time went on. The earliest sign of it may be glimpsed in the two New Testament books attributed to Luke. It is significant that both were dedicated to Theophilus, a patron of social or official eminence in that very world, secular, gentile and Romano-Hellenistic, which other Christians regarded with misgiving. A next step was to ponder the implications of the coincidence in time between the establishment of the Roman peace and the growth of the Christian church within the empire. Bishop Mellitus of Sardis, addressing an Apologia to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius about the year 170, could claim that the Christian faith was ‘a blessing of auspicious omen to your empire’ because ‘having sprung up among the nations under your rule during the great reign of your ancestor Augustus … from that time the power of the Romans has grown in greatness and splendour’. The next move was to suggest that the Roman empire was in some sense itself related to God’s scheme for the world. The first who dared to think such a thought was the great Alexandrian scholar Origen. In his work Contra Celsum, composed between 230 and 240 to refute the attacks on Christianity by the pagan philosopher Celsus, Origen had occasion to comment upon the following words in Psalm lxxii.7: ‘In his [the just king’s] days righteousness shall flourish, prosperity abound until the moon is no more.’ Origen observed that ‘God was preparing the nations for His teaching, that they might be under one Roman emperor, so that the unfriendly attitude of the nations to one another caused by the existence of a large number of kingdoms, might not make it more difficult for Jesus’ apostles to do what He commanded them when He said “Go and teach all nations” …’ Augustus therefore, who first ‘reduced to uniformity the many kingdoms on earth so that he had a single empire’, could be presented as the instrument of God’s providence.³

These accommodating tendencies were carried to extreme lengths after Constantine’s adhesion to Christianity early in the fourth century. Faced for the first time with an entirely novel situation, churchmen had to come to grips with the question, How is a Christian emperor to be fitted into the scheme of things? The most comprehensive answer was provided by Eusebius, explicitly in his Oration, implicitly in the work to which the Oration was a pendent, the Ecclesiastical History – the earliest work of its kind, the most important single source for our knowledge of the first three centuries of Christian history, and a potent literary influence upon the work of Bede. Eusebius brought the Roman empire within the divine providential scheme for the world. It was an astonishing feat of intellectual acrobatics, here summarized in the words of a modern scholar:

Eusebius sees the achievement of a unified Christian empire as the goal of all history. He insists on the mutual support of Christianity and Rome, of the monarchy of Christ and the monarchy of Augustus. For him, Roman empire and Christian church are not only essentially connected; they move towards identity … Eusebius can say that the city of earth has become the city of God, and that the monarchy of Constantine brings the kingdom of God to men.⁴

This Eusebian accommodation between church and empire became and long remained a cornerstone of the ‘political theology’ of the eastern empire and its successors. For the historian of conversion it has two significant implications. If empire and church are moving towards identity, if they are (in the words of another scholar) but ‘two facets of a single reality’, then one of the questions from which we started – Who is Christianity for? – acquires at once a sharper urgency and an answer. If Romanitas and Christianitas are co-terminous, then the faith is for all dwellers within the ring-fence of the empire but not for those outside. All dwellers within means the ‘internal outsiders’, the huge rural majority, whose evangelization will occupy us in the next chapter. Those outside means the barbarians.

Barbarians could be as effectively de-humanized by the educated minority as were the peasantry. ‘Roman and barbarian are as distinct one from the other as are four-footed beasts from humans,’ wrote the Spanish Christian poet Prudentius in about 390. His contemporary St Jerome was sure that some of the Germans were cannibals. ‘The holy priesthood, chastity and virginity do not exist among barbarian peoples; and if they were to do so, they would not be safe,’ wrote Bishop Optatus of Milevis in north Africa in the 360s. Ingrained habits of thought are revealed in the turn of a phrase. The Spanish historian Orosius, writing in about 417, could begin a sentence with the words ‘As a Christian and as a Roman …’ Quite so.⁵ The identities were conflated. In such a climate of opinion there could be no question of taking the faith to the heathen barbarian. In the words of a leading modern authority, ‘Throughout the whole period of the Roman empire not a single example is known of a man who was appointed bishop with the specific task of going beyond the frontier to a wholly pagan region in order to convert the barbarians living there.’⁶

One qualification needs to be made. If Christian communities came into existence outside the imperial frontiers they might request the church authorities within the empire to send them a bishop to minister to their needs. There was a variety of ways in which such communities might come into existence, by means of trading settlements, diplomatic contacts, veterans returning from service in the Roman army in the course of which they had been converted, cross-frontier marriage, the settlement of prisoners carried away from their homelands by barbarian raids, and so on. Here is an example. At the end of the fourth century Rufinus of Aquileia translated Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History from Greek into Latin to render it accessible to the Latin-speaking west. He also brought it up to date, continuing it from where Eusebius had left off in Constantine’s day down to the death of the Emperor Theodosius I in 395. Rufinus had met the king of Georgia, in the southern Caucasus, who told him that his predecessor King Miriam, who reigned in the time of Constantine, had acquired a Christian slave-girl who had converted her master to Christianity. Rufinus did not know her name, though later sources were to name her as Nounè or Nino. Whatever may lie behind this story – perhaps a jumbled memory of diplomatic relations between Constantinople and Tiflis – we may be certain that Christian communities did exist in Georgia in Constantine’s reign, because reliable sources reveal that a certain Patrophilus, bishop of Pithyonta (Pitsunda), attended the ecclesiastical council of Nicaea in 325. The site of his bishopric on the Black Sea coast at the foot of the Caucasus suggests that maritime contacts with the Roman empire had given rise to the Christian community over which he presided. We shall examine some further instances of these extra-imperial communities in Chapter 3.

However, the Eusebian accommodation would not commend itself in all quarters. It would be looked upon with disfavour by those of the ‘gathered’ tradition. It was persons of this persuasion, largely if not exclusively, who were responsible for perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon of late-antique Christianity – the growth of monasticism. Withdrawal from the world by an individual to a life of ascetic renunciation and self-denial in a desert solitude had an obvious biblical precedent in John the Baptist. The gospel stories of the temptation of Jesus reinforced the notion that the desert, the wilderness, was the place where the truly committed might test their faith and overcome the wiles of the Devil. It was in the valley of the Nile, where the desert and the sown lie so close together, that Christian solitaries first made their appearance. The most famous of these early hermits was Antony, a Coptic peasant who ‘dropped out’ of his village community at the age of twenty, in about the year 270, and for the remainder of a very long life gave himself over to prayer and asceticism. His example was infectious. Though he retreated ever deeper into the desert he was pursued by disciples eager to follow his example and receive his spiritual guidance. It was to one of these followers, Pachomius – perhaps significantly, an ex-soldier – that there occurred in about 320 the idea that communities of ascetics might be organized, living a common life of strict discipline according to a written rule of life. Thus was monasticism born.

It spread like wildfire in the fourth century. In part this was perhaps because, in a church now at peace after the Constantinian revolution, ascetic monasticism offered a means of self-sacrifice which was the nearest thing to martyrdom in a world where martyrs were no longer being made. In part the call of the ascetic life could be interpreted as a movement of revulsion from what many saw as the increasing worldliness of the fourth-century church, the merging of its hierarchy with the ‘establishment’, its ever-accumulating wealth, the growing burden of administrative responsibilities which encroached upon spiritual ministry. Monasticism offered, or demanded, a manner of life in which individualism had to be shed. To be ‘of one heart and of one soul’ within a community, to have ‘all things common’, was not simply to follow the example of the apostles commended in Acts iv.32: it was also to be liberated from the insidious temptation of private cares, selfish anxieties. Such liberation offered the possibility to humans of building a heavenly society upon earth. The monastic vocation was a call to a new way of apprehending, even of merging into, the divine.

Its appeal was made the more seductive by some persuasive advocates. A Life of St Antony was composed by Athanasius, the great bishop of Alexandria, in 357. It is one of the classics of Christian hagiography. Its speedy translation from Greek into Latin made it accessible in the western provinces of the empire. By a happy chance there has survived a vivid account of the effect this work had upon a pair of rising civil servants in the early 380s.

Ponticianus continued to talk and we listened in silence. Eventually he told us of the time when he and three of his companions were at Trier. One afternoon, when the emperor was watching the games in the circus, they went out to stroll in the gardens near the city walls. They became separated into two groups, Ponticianus and one of the others remaining together while the other two went off by themselves. As they wandered on, the second pair came to a house which was occupied by some servants of God, men poor in spirit, to whom the kingdom of heaven belongs. In the house they found a book containing the life of Antony. One of them began to read it and was so fascinated and thrilled by the story that even before he had finished reading he conceived the idea of taking upon himself the same kind of life and abandoning his career in the world – both he and his friend were officials in the service of the state – in order to become a servant of God. All at once he was filled with the love of holiness. Angry with himself and full of remorse, he looked at his friend and said, ‘What do we hope to gain by all the efforts we make? What are we looking for? What is our purpose in serving the state? Can we hope for anything better at court than to be the emperor’s friends? … But if I wish, I can become the friend of God at this very moment.’ After saying this he turned back to the book, labouring under the pain of the new life that was taking birth in him. He read on, and in his heart a change was taking place. His mind was being divested of the world, as could presently be seen … He said to his friend, ‘I have torn myself free from all our ambitions and have decided to serve God. From this very moment, here and now, I shall start to serve him. If you will not follow my lead, do not stand in my way.’ The other answered that he would stand by his comrade, for such service was glorious and the reward was great …⁷

The author of this account, numbered among the audience of Ponticianus, was Augustine, later to become bishop of Hippo in north Africa. It occurs in his Confessions, the greatest work of spiritual autobiography ever written.

Augustine is important for us because out of his voluminous writings can be constructed a theology of mission which was to have far-reaching influence upon the concerns of the western church. In the first place, he was an African, and thereby the heir to a distinctive Christian tradition. The African church looked back to Tertullian (d. c. 225), lawyer and prolific Christian controversialist, and to Cyprian (d. 258), bishop of Carthage and martyr. The writings of these two fathers of the African church had expressed a rigorist view of Christianity, one which sought to keep the secular world at a distance. This intellectual tradition, widely respected in the western, Latin provinces of the empire, gave a twist to the character of western Christianity which differentiated it from the Christianity of the eastern, Greek provinces of the empire. Where the east, schooled by Origen and Eusebius, was assimilationist and welcomed the co-existence of the church and the world, the west tended to see discontinuities and chasms, and maintained a distrust for secular culture. If in the east church and state were nearly identical, in the west they were often at odds. Harmony was characteristic of the east, tension of the west. It was to be a critically important constituent of western culture that church and state should be perceived as distinct and indeed often competing institutions. Built into western Christian traditions there was a potential rarely encountered in the east for explosion, for radicalism, for non-conformity, for confrontation. To these traditions Augustine was the heir; to them he contributed in no small measure. His was a discordant voice in the general chorus orchestrated by Eusebius in celebration of the Christian empire. It would matter very much indeed that Augustine’s would prove to be among the most powerful and influential voices that western Christendom has ever heard.

It has not always been discordant. As a young man Augustine enjoyed a brilliant career as an academic in Milan. (He was living in Milan when he heard the story of the encounter at Trier quoted above.) At that date Milan was the political and intellectual capital of the western half of the empire. Its bishop, the great St Ambrose (d. 397), was the most prominent western advocate of the views of Eusebius (though not without some qualifications). Ambrose exerted considerable influence on Augustine, who was attracted to the Eusebian perspective. Significantly, it was only when Augustine abandoned this glossy metropolitan life in 395 and returned to his native Africa to become a small-town bishop – living in obedience to a monastic rule with his diocesan clergy – that misgivings began to arise in his mind. But they were not formulated in any coherent fashion until he composed the work for which he is most famous, De Civitate Dei (The City of God), between 413 and 425. This is a book so big, so complex, so alive, so rich in ideas, so brimming with passion, that it is difficult to summarize it in any manner which does it justice. It is commonly said that the work was occasioned by the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410: an attempt to answer the pagans who claimed that Rome had been sacked in punishment for her abandonment of the gods who had always previously protected her. But Augustine’s book was intended, or at any rate turned out to be, a great deal more than this. In its final form it was an extended meditation on the meaning of history, on the place of man and society and the state in the divine scheme of things, and on the nature of the Christian community within the world. In the course of it Augustine came out with views sharply at variance with the Eusebian accommodation.

For our purposes the most important point about Augustine’s social thought is that he detached the state – any state, but in particular, of course, the Roman state – from the Christian community. Under his hands the Roman empire became theologically neutral, drained of the positive moral charge with which Eusebius had invested it. For Augustine the empire was just one set of political arrangements among many. It was necessary for the purpose of ensuring certain limited ends such as the maintenance of peace and order, the administration of human justice or defence against aggression from outside its frontiers: necessary, but in no sense special or privileged. This was to strike at the root of the Eusebian position. The empire was not part of a divine providential scheme; not the vehicle for the furtherance of God’s purposes. Its emperor was not messianic, not quasi-divine; he no longer walked with God. Its institutions were ordinary institutions, human, fallible, random, limited and messy. Its history was not the unfolding of a plan for the harmonious ordering of the world under a God-directed emperor, but instead a squalid tale of lust for domination, of war and suffering, of oppression and corruption. Worldly empires would blow away like smoke; and, as Augustine dismissively observed, ‘smoke has no weight’.

Over against this earthly polity is set the city of God: that is, the community of Christians whose city is not of this world, who indeed are aliens (peregrini) in this terrestrial world. Such notions were not new. There was a rich Judaic literature of exile which was developed by early Christian writers. It was Paul who wrote to the Corinthians of ‘an house not made with hands’. The anonymous author of the Epistle to Diognetus, writing in about 200 and echoing another Pauline passage, had observed that Christians ‘spend their existence upon earth, but their citizenship is in heaven’.⁸ There were also influences at work from outside the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Neoplatonic philosophers who strongly influenced the young Augustine had written persuasively of the soul imprisoned in the body, trapped in the flesh, from which it strives to break free. What Augustine did was to express these ideas of exile and alienation with passion and force. To one word in particular he imparted a special resonance: peregrinus. ‘And so long as he is in this mortal body, he is a peregrinus in a foreign land,’ he wrote in Book 19 of De Civitate Dei, echoing II Corinthians v.6. It was a technical term in Roman law: to be a peregrinus meant to be a resident alien, a stranger, a person without kin, friends, sureties, patrons. It was also a word with further connotations within the Judaeo-Christian scriptural tradition. Exile or deprivation were often associated with sin and punishment, but sometimes also with a sense of divinely allotted destiny. Jacob fled into exile because of murderous conflict between kinsmen; his destiny was to inherit the land of his exile or pilgrimage (peregrinationis) and through him were all peoples of the earth to be blessed (Genesis xxviii). So a pilgrim could also be a harbinger, like John the Baptist. Augustine seized upon the possibilities latent in this everyday word. Here was an exacting standard for the Christian. He must become a peregrinus, an exile or pilgrim, make of his life a peregrinatio, a pilgrimage, cutting loose like a monk from the worldly ties that bind and accepting instead the liberating society and disciplines of the city of God: ‘The Heavenly City, while on its earthly pilgrimage, calls forth its citizens from every nation and assembles a multilingual band of pilgrims; not caring about any diversity in the customs, laws and institutions whereby they severally make provision for the achievement and maintenance of earthly peace.’⁹

Here then is Augustine’s vision of a Christian community not confined to the Roman empire. Other strands of his reading and reflection were woven into it. In common with other Christians of his day Augustine was convinced that the end of the world was near. But before this could happen there had to be a universal preaching of Christianity. ‘This gospel of the Kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the earth as a testimony to all nations: and then the end will come.’ Augustine was forced to elucidate this apocalyptic passage in Matthew’s gospel (Matt. xxiv.14) at the very time that he was working on De Civitate Dei. Prompted by an earthquake on 19 July 418 Bishop Hesychius of Salona (Split) consulted Augustine about Daniel’s prophecies of the end of the world. In his reply Augustine made reference to Matthew’s passage on the in-gathering of the nations which must precede the end and to other biblical passages of similar purport. But Hesychius, evidently a persistent man, was not satisfied and wanted more. He got it. Augustine, never one to skimp where doctrinal exposition was concerned, replied in a long letter divided into no less than fifty-four chapters. This second letter circulated widely as a separate pamphlet under the title De Fine Saeculi (On the End of the World). Hesychius had evidently claimed that the gospel had already been preached to all nations. Not so, argued Augustine, ‘for there are among us, that is in Africa, innumerable barbarian tribes among whom the gospel has not yet been preached … yet it cannot rightly be said that the promise of God does not concern them’ because ‘the Lord did not promise the Romans but all nations to the seed of Abraham’. He went on to elucidate ‘the prophecy made of Christ under the figure of Solomon, “He shall rule from sea to sea” (Psalm lxxii.8)’. This must mean ‘the whole earth with all its inhabitants, because the universe is surrounded by the Ocean sea’. All nations, therefore, ‘as many as God has made’ are to adore the Lord and call upon him.¹⁰ But – and here Augustine turned to Paul’s words in Romans x.14–15 – ‘How shall they call upon Him in whom they have not believed? How shall they believe Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they be sent?’ Augustine did not follow the logic of the argument to its conclusions: therefore we must send out missionary preachers. But we can see how a combination of influences – the African intellectual tradition, apocalyptic speculations, episcopal responsibilities, ideals of pilgrimage and renunciation – brought him to the brink of that conclusion.

Another who was brought to that brink was Augustine’s younger contemporary Prosper of Aquitaine. Usually remembered mainly as the writer of a chronicle which is an important source for fifth-century history – we shall meet it in Chapter 3 – Prosper was also the author of works of theological controversy. One of these was called De Vocatione Omnium Gentium (On the Calling of All Nations) and it was composed at Rome in about 440. Prosper’s De Vocatione has been called ‘the first work in Christian literature to be concerned with the salvation of infidels’.¹¹ Salvation, yes; but not quite their evangelization.

Prosper starts from the proposition that God wishes all men to be saved. However, by His inscrutable judgement some peoples receive the faith later than others. He considers, but rejects, the Eusebian position: ‘Christian grace was not content to have the same frontiers as Rome and has already subjected many peoples to the sceptre of Christ’s cross whom Rome did not conquer with arms.’¹² Christian grace: this lay at the doctrinal heart of Prosper’s concerns. He was an extreme follower of Augustine’s teachings on grace. These had been developed in opposition to the doctrines on free will taught in Italy and subsequently Palestine by the British-born philosopher Pelagius, doctrines which caused a great stir in the church and were eventually declared heretical in 418. Prosper’s general position was that it was for divine grace alone to bring about conversion. One suspects that he would have sympathized with the Baptist ministers who rebuked William Carey in 1786. Like Augustine, Prosper hesitated. If grace is omnipotent, irresistible, omnipresent and inscrutable, then might it not be that for humans to choose to undertake missionary preaching was presumptuously to interfere with its workings? Prosper never asserted this in so many words, but one can sense the thought lurking there unformulated.

Perhaps, in the last resort, western theologians like Augustine and Prosper could never quite forget that they were Romans. They might have had their doubts – indeed, we know that they did have their doubts – about the moral tradition which had corralled Christianity safely inside the city walls of the empire; but it was hard to break with the cultural habits of a millennium. It takes an outsider to think the unthinkable. However, what had still been unthinkable in the age of Augustine and Prosper had become absolutely thinkable by the time that Paulinus encountered Edwin two centuries later. What had happened in between to bring this about?

CHAPTER TWO
The Challenge of the Countryside

‘It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.’

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, ‘The Copper Beeches’,

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892

AT ONE POINT in the course of Origen’s celebrated work Contra Celsum, in the context of claims for the extent of Christian evangelization, the author boasted that Christians ‘have done the work of going round not only the cities but even villages and country cottages to make others also pious towards God’. This was certainly an exaggeration. In Origen’s day Christianity was still a preponderantly urban faith. What is interesting, however, is that the claim should have been made at all, that it should have seemed to the writer an apposite claim to make in the course of polemic. It is even more interesting that the earliest name associated with the conduct of rural mission within the Roman empire should have been a pupil of Origen. This was Gregory of Pontus, familiarly known as Gregory Thaumaturgus, Gregory ‘the Wonder-worker’.

The bare facts of Gregory’s career may be summarized as follows. He was born in about 210 into a prominent family of the province of Pontus Polemoniacus, roughly speaking the northern parts of central Asia Minor, modern Turkey, bordering on the Black Sea. Pontus was a quiet, undistinguished region. It was off the beaten track, a province whose towns were small, whose concerns were local and agricultural. It was modestly prosperous in the way that places are where nothing much happens to disturb the even tenor of life. Gregory belonged by birth to one of those provincial elites on whose local services and loyalties the empire depended for its smooth functioning. As a young man he was sent off to study at the famous law schools of Berytus (Beirut): a distinguished career in law or rhetoric or the civil service seemed to be in prospect. But his life took a different and unexpected turn. Gregory met Origen, who was then at the height of his fame as a teacher and scholar and who had attracted a talented band of pupils round him at Caesarea in Palestine. Gregory stayed with Origen for five years and then returned to Pontus; this would have been, as we may suppose, round about the year 240. On his return home he became bishop of the Christian community in his home town of Neocaesarea, the capital of the province, which office he exercised for the remainder of his life. He and his congregations survived the persecutions of the reign of the Emperor Decius (249–51) and weathered the disruptions of barbarian raids in the mid-250s. Under Gregory’s leadership the Christian community of Pontus grew, though at what rate or by how much we cannot tell.¹ He died in about 270.

These bare facts are just about all that we know. Gregory has left us a body of writings which tell us something about him. His farewell address of thanks to his master Origen has survived, from which we can learn something of both his intellectual development and a great teacher’s methods. A paraphrase of the book of Ecclesiastes bears witness to his biblical studies. A document known as the Canonical Letter sheds a little light on his pastoral activities as bishop. In addition to Gregory’s own writings we have a short oration or sermon in commemoration of him composed about a century after his death by his namesake Gregory of Nyssa. It has often been remarked that the oration contains little if any reliable information about the historical Gregory of Pontus. It is a collection of hagiographical commonplaces. Indeed: but the judgement needs two qualifications. First, traditions of Gregory had been handed down by word of mouth. Gregory of Nyssa’s own older brother, Basil of Cappadocia, had as a small boy learned wise sayings attributed to Gregory of Pontus at the knees of his grandmother Macrina. Oral traditions may be garbled, adapted, misunderstood, misapplied, but they will generally preserve something of the person who uttered them or to whom they refer. Second, the Christianization of Pontus was still incomplete when Gregory of Nyssa was writing. The stories he reports show what his late-fourth-century audience was ready to believe about the earlier Gregory, about the process he initiated which was still visibly and audibly going on round about them. The stories had to be plausible not just in terms of their expectations of a wonder-worker but also in terms of their expectations of everyday life: and it is not for us to be surprised if these categories of expectation prove to overlap. Carefully handled, the legends of Gregory Thaumaturgus may have something to tell us – just something – about what he set in motion in Pontus.

Gregory of Nyssa claimed that when Gregory became bishop of Neocaesarea there were only seventeen Christians in the diocese but that by the time of his death there were only seventeen pagans. This is demonstrably an exaggeration. It can be shown that pagan observance was lively in Pontus both before and after Gregory’s day. It has even been said that it is ‘misguided and anachronistic’ to cast Gregory for the role of rural missionary.² Our reaction to such a judgement will depend a little on the images and expectations prompted by the phrase ‘rural missionary’. Pontus was a backwoods sort of place. Gregory felt affection for his native province, but even he must have been ready to concede that after the sophisticated urban culture of Beirut and Caesarea, in returning to Pontus he was retreating to a country backwater. (The Christian idealist who exchanged a promising ‘metropolitan’ secular career for a provincial ecclesiastical one is a recurrent figure of the late Roman period: Gregory is an early, Augustine the best-known example.) Because Pontus was the sort of place that it was, because urban and rural society overlapped and interpenetrated there, a bishop who made his presence and his power felt would be making an impression upon his rural as well as upon his urban constituency. It is in this sense that we may call Gregory a rural missionary.

Gregory saw visions. He was commanded to accept the bishopric of Neocaesarea by St John and St Mary – the earliest recorded vision of the Blessed Virgin in Christian history – who recited to him the creed which he should profess. According to Gregory of Nyssa, this credal statement was preserved in the cathedral of Neocaesarea in an autograph copy: ‘the very letters inscribed by his own blessed hand’. The cathedral itself had been built by Gregory. It was a new landmark among the city’s public buildings, and one moreover which did not suffer in an earthquake the damage experienced by secular buildings. Already one may detect some elements of what may have been going on. Gregory enjoyed direct access to the divine; a relic of his, a document from his hand, is venerated; God’s house built by him is miraculously preserved. A bishop such as this will command authority and prestige.

Then there were his wonders. Two brothers were quarrelling over the ownership of a lake. Their enmity had gone so far that they were preparing to arm their peasants and fight it out together. Gregory appeared on the scene as a mediator. At a twitch of his cloak the lake dried up and disappeared for ever. On another occasion the river Lycus was flooding and threatening damage. Gregory planted his staff on its bank to mark the limit beyond which the waters must not pass and the waters (of course) obeyed him. The staff grew into a tree which was still being pointed out to people a century later when Gregory of Nyssa recorded the story. Well, it’s not difficult to see how that story arose. But such a comment as this misses what would have been the point of the tale for those who told it to Gregory of Nyssa or heard it from him. God acted through Gregory to work wonders which healed human divisions and tamed the forces of nature. Demonstrations of supernatural powers – frequently in competition with non-Christian claimants to possess such powers – will meet us again and again. Almost invariably we are told that they led to conversions. What that might have meant is another matter.

Finally there was Gregory’s public role as bishop. He built a new cathedral, as we have seen. He interceded for his flock during an outbreak of plague, did what he could to shield them during the Decian persecution. In troubled times he was a force for order and stability. His Canonical Letter, to which we shall return in Chapter 3, shows him grasping at scriptural precept to assist in sorting out the harrowing human consequences of barbarian attack. This enlargement of a bishop’s responsibilities was to have a long and fruitful future.

Why did efforts to convert the country-dwellers begin, in however patchy and hesitant a fashion, in the course of the third century? It is a question which has never satisfactorily been answered. It may be that the trend towards near-identification of Romanitas with Christianitas, of empire with Christendom, rendered it desirable, even necessary, for all Romans to become Christians. ‘All Romans’ would mean all Roman citizens, a group which had been vastly enlarged by the so-called Constitutio Antoniana of the year 212, by which the government of the Emperor Caracalla extended the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship to all free men. (There were, of course, enormous numbers of country-dwellers who were not free.) Another factor, less nebulous and offering at least the possibility of investigation, might have been the changing social composition of the bishops who ruled the churches. Historians are agreed that the third century was marked by a steady if obscure growth in Christian numbers. Numerical increase was matched by increase in respectability. It would be possible to compile a list – granted, not a long list – of third-century Christians of some not inconsiderable social standing. Gregory the Wonder-worker is a good example. Persons of such rank and wealth who became bishops might be expected to be solicitous for the spiritual well-being of the peasantry on their estates, apprehensive of their vulnerability to demonic attack, despite the entrenched attitudes alluded to in the preceding chapter; and their example might be the more infectious to others who shared their status. What were the peasantry of the feuding brothers of Pontus encouraged to think when they were told to put their weapons away and get back to their fields? It is an interesting question.

After the imperial adhesion to Christianity under Constantine, never to be reversed except during the brief reign of Julian, the Christian community within the empire underwent phenomenal growth – which changed its character. Imperial patronage colossally increased the wealth and status of the churches. Privileges and exemptions granted to Christian clergy precipitated a stampede into the priesthood. Devout aristocratic ladies acquired followings of clerical groupies, experimented with fashionable forms of devotion. Christian moralists were apprehensive that conversions were occurring for the wrong reasons – to gain favour, to obtain a job, promotion, a pension. As far as the historian can tell, their anxieties do not appear to have been misplaced. Fashion is a great force in human affairs. The adherence of the establishment to Christianity in the course of the fourth century made more urgent than ever the task of converting the outsiders on whose labours the establishment rested: the huge majority who toiled in the countryside.

The process by which the empire became officially Christian may be said to have been completed in the course of the reign of Theodosius I (379–95). A cluster of events and decisions mark this: the defeat of an avowedly pagan military coup, the issue of legislation formally banning pagan worship, the removal of the Altar of Victory from the senate house in Rome, the destruction of the temple of the god Serapis at Alexandria. Some of the markers are uncomfortable portents: the first execution of a heretic (the Spaniard, Priscillian, in 385), and a rising tide of Christian anti-Semitism. It is surely not coincidental that it is from this period that influential voices can be heard urging landowners to make their peasantry Christian. Here is John Chrysostom, John ‘the golden-mouthed’, the most fashionable preacher of his day, patriarch of Constantinople between 398 and 404, preaching in the capital in the year 400 to an upper-class audience living, we presume, in their town houses, about their responsibilities to those on their landed estates.

Many people have villages and estates and pay no attention to them and do not communicate with them, but do give close attention to how the baths are working, and how halls and palaces are constructed – not to the harvest of souls … Should not everyone build a church? Should he not get a teacher to instruct the congregation? Should he not above all else see to it that all are Christians?³

And here is Augustine, congratulating Pammachius in 401 on ‘the zeal with which you have chased up those peasants of yours in Numidia’, and brought them back to Catholic unity. (Pammachius had converted them, not indeed from paganism to Christianity, but from deviancy in schism back to orthodoxy, but that does not weaken the point.) And here, finally, is Maximus, bishop of Turin from c. 398 to c. 412, and another famous preacher, in one of his sermons.

You should remove all pollution of idols from your properties and cast out the whole error of paganism from your fields. For it is not right that you, who have Christ in your hearts, should have Antichrist in your houses, that your men should honour the devil in his shrines while you pray to God in church. And let no one think he is excused by saying: ‘I did not order this, I did not command it.’ Whoever knows that sacrilege takes place on his estate and does not forbid it, in a sense orders it. By keeping silence and not reproving the man who sacrifices, he lends his consent. For the blessed apostle states that not only those who do sinful acts are guilty, but also those who consent to the act [Romans i.32]. You therefore, brother, when you observe your peasant sacrificing and do not forbid the offering, sin, because even if you did not assist the sacrifice yourself you gave permission for it.⁴

Constantinople, Africa, Italy – and other places too: wherever we look, bishops were encouraging the landed elites, the people who commanded local influence, to take firm and if necessary coercive action to make the peasantry Christian – in some sense. Other bishops took matters into their own hands, choosing to take direct and personal action rather than confining themselves to exhortation. The most famous example of such an activist is Martin, bishop of Tours from about 371 until his death in 397.

Martin is a man of whom we can know a fair amount, principally owing to the survival of a body of writings about him by his disciple Sulpicius Severus. Sulpicius was just the sort of man whom Augustine, John Chrysostom and Maximus of Turin were trying to reach and influence. He was a rich, devout landowner with estates in southern Gaul. Inspired by Martin’s ideals Sulpicius founded a Christian community at one of his estates, Primuliacum (unidentified; possibly in the Agenais), and it was there that he composed his Martinian writings. These comprise the Vita Sancti Martini (Life of the Holy Martin), composed during its subject’s lifetime, probably in 394–5; three Epistulae (Letters) from 397–8; and two Dialogi (Dialogues) from 404–6 also devoted to Martin.⁵ The Vita was the first work of Latin hagiography to be composed in western Christendom: it displays literary debts to the Vita Antonii by Athanasius and it was in its turn to be enormously influential during the coming centuries as a model of Christian biography. Sulpicius presented Martin as a vir Deo plenus, ‘a man filled with God’. Sulpicius’ Martin was first and last a spiritual force – a man who walked with God, a man set apart by his austerity and asceticism, a monk who was also active in the world as a bishop, fearless in his encounters with evil, endowed with powers beyond the natural and the normal, worthy to be ranked with prophets, apostles, martyrs: a powerhouse of holy energy which crackled across the countryside of Touraine.

One of the features of Sulpicius’ writings about Martin which strikes the reader is their defensive and apologetic tone (to be distinguished from the didacticism common to all hagiography). Martin was a figure of controversy during his lifetime and continued to be controversial after his death. This was in large part because he was in more ways than one an outsider. In the first place he was not a native of Gaul. He was born, probably in 336, at Sabaria in the province of Pannonia (now Szombathely in Hungary, not far from the Austro-Hungarian border) and he was brought up in Italy, at Pavia. He was of undistinguished birth, the child of a soldier. As the son of a veteran Martin was drafted into the army as a young man (351?) and served in it for five years. A convert to Christianity as a child, he was baptized in 354. After obtaining a discharge from the army in 356 he returned to Italy, where he lived for a period as a hermit with a priest for companion on the island of Gallinara off the Ligurian coast to the west of Genoa. Making his way back to Gaul he attached himself to Bishop Hilary of Poitiers, a churchman whose enforced residence in the east between 356 and 360 – exile during the Arian controversy (for which see Chapter 3) – had borne fruit in acquainting him with eastern monastic practices. Martin settled down as a hermit at Ligugé outside Poitiers. His fame as a holy man spread widely in the course of the next decade and in 371 (probably) he was chosen by the Christian community of Tours as their bishop.

2. To illustrate the activities of Martin, Emilian and Samson, from the fourth to the sixth centuries.

Martin’s pre-episcopal career was extremely unconventional. Of obscure origin and mean education, tainted by a career as a common soldier, ill-dressed, unkempt, practising unfamiliar forms of devotion under the patronage of a bishop himself somewhat turbulent and unconventional, the while occupying no regular position in the functioning hierarchy of the church – at every point he contrasted with the average Gallic bishop of his day, who tended to be well heeled, well connected, well read and well groomed. No wonder that the bishops summoned to consecrate Martin to the see of Tours were reluctant to do so. No wonder that Martin did not care to associate with his episcopal colleagues.

This was not the only way in which Martin’s behaviour continued unconventional after he had become a bishop. He refused to sit on an episcopal throne. He rode a donkey, rather than the horse which would have been fitting to a bishop’s dignity. He dressed like a peasant. He founded a monastery at Marmoutier, not far from Tours, where he lived with his disciples, rather than in the bishop’s house next to the cathedral in the city. He was no respecter of persons. He insisted on forcing his way into the house of Count Avitianus in the small hours of the night to plead for the release of some prisoners. When dining with the usurping Emperor Magnus Maximus he was offered the singular honour of sharing the emperor’s goblet of wine; instead of handing it back to Maximus, Martin passed it on to a priest who was accompanying him. His pastoral activities, to which we shall return shortly, were most peculiar. He frequently encountered supernatural beings: the Devil, several times, once masquerading as Christ (but Martin saw through him); angels, demons, St Mary, St Agnes, St Thecla, St Peter and St Paul. He had telepathic powers, could predict the future, could exorcize evil spirits from humans or animals and could raise the dead to life. He worked many miracles and wonders, conscientiously chronicled by Sulpicius Severus. His fame spread widely. He was called over to the region of Sens to deliver a certain district from hailstorms through the agency of his prayers. An Egyptian merchant who was not even a Christian was saved from a storm at sea by calling on ‘the God of Martin’.

Martin may have flouted social convention but it is equally clear from what Sulpicius has to tell us that his network of contacts among the powerful in the Gaul of his day was extensive. He may have behaved boorishly at the emperor’s dinner table, but Maximus showed ‘the deepest respect’ for him, while on a subsequent visit Maximus’ wife sent the servants away and waited upon him with her own hands. The wife of the brutal Count Avitianus asked Martin to bless the flask of oil which she kept for medicinal use. It was the vir praefectorius Auspicius, an exalted official, who invited Martin over to the Senonais to deal with the local hailstorms. It was from the slave of an even grander man, the vir proconsularis Tetradius, that Martin exorcized a demon. Tetradius became a Christian as a result of this wonder. There is some reason to suppose that he went on to build a church on his estate near Trier. (John Chrysostom would have been pleased.) A letter written by Martin was believed to have cured the daughter of the devout aristocrat Arborius from a fever simply by being placed on her body. Arborius was a very exalted man, a nephew of the celebrated poet Ausonius of Bordeaux, who had been the Emperor Gratian’s tutor.

These connections were of significance in the activity to which Martin devoted so much of his energies. Here was a bishop who gave himself wholeheartedly to the task of bringing Christianity to the rural population of Gaul. His methods were violent and confrontational: disruption of pagan cult, demolition of pagan edifices. Here is Chapter 14 of the Vita Martini.

It was somewhere about this time that in the course of this work he performed another miracle at least as great. He had set on fire a very ancient and much-frequented shrine in a certain village and the flames were being driven by the wind against a neighbouring, in fact adjacent house. When Martin noticed this, he climbed speedily to the roof of the house and placed himself in front of the oncoming flames. Then you might have seen an amazing sight – the flames bending back against the force of the wind till it looked like a battle between warring elements. Such were his powers that the fire destroyed only where it was bidden.

In a village named Levroux [between Tours and Bourges], however, when he wished to demolish in the same way a temple which had been made very rich by its superstitious cult, he met with resistance from a crowd of pagans and was driven off with some injuries to himself. He withdrew, therefore, to a place in the neighbourhood where for three days in sackcloth and ashes, continuously fasting and praying, he besought Our Lord that the temple which human hands had failed to demolish might be destroyed by divine power.

Then suddenly two angels stood before him, looking like heavenly warriors, with spears and shields. They said that the Lord had sent them to rout the rustic host and give Martin protection, so that no one should hinder the destruction of the temple. He was to go back, therefore, and carry out faithfully the work he had undertaken. So he returned to the village and, while crowds of pagans watched in silence, the heathen sanctuary was razed to its foundations and all its altars and images reduced to powder.

The sight convinced the rustics that it was by divine decree that they had been stupefied and overcome with dread, so as to offer no resistance to the bishop; and nearly all of them made profession of faith in the Lord Jesus, proclaiming with shouts before all that Martin’s God should be worshipped and the idols ignored, which could neither save themselves nor anyone else.

There are several points of interest for us in the Levroux story. First, it is notable that Sulpicius admits the – unsurprising – fact that Martin met with resistance. Direct action was risky. In the year of Martin’s death three clerics who tried to disrupt pagan ceremonies in the diocese of Trent in the eastern Alps were killed. Their bishop, Vigilius, to whose letter to John Chrysostom describing the martyrdom we are indebted for knowledge of it, was himself stoned to death by furious pagans a few years later. When the Christian community of Sufetana in the African province of Byzacena demolished a statue of Hercules a pagan mob killed sixty Christians in reprisal. Second, one cannot help wondering a little about the soldierly-looking angels. It is usually fruitless to indulge in speculation about what might have been the ‘real’ basis of miracle stories, but the question can at least be posed, whether Martin was ever enabled to make use of the services of soldiers from local garrisons. It is worth bearing in mind that the fanatically anti-pagan Cynegius, praetorian prefect of the east between 384 and 388, used soldiers as well as bands of wild monks for the destruction of pagan temples in the countryside around Antioch. Martin’s exalted contacts would have been able without difficulty to arrange a bodyguard for him; even to lay on a fatigue party equipped with crowbars and sledgehammers. Third, we are told that these violent scenes at Levroux resulted in conversions; we should note that Sulpicius concedes that not all the people were converted. We have not the remotest idea what the people of Levroux might have thought about it all, but Sulpicius is clear that because their gods had failed them they were prepared to worship Martin’s God. On another occasion, at an unnamed place, Martin had demolished a temple and was preparing to fell a sacred tree. The local people dared him to stand where the tree would fall. Intrepidly, he did so. As the tree tottered, cracked and began to fall, Martin made the sign of the cross. Instantly the tree plunged in another direction. This was the sequel as Sulpicius related it:

Then indeed a shout went up to heaven as the pagans gasped at the miracle, and all with one accord acclaimed the name of Christ; you may be sure that on that day salvation came to that region. Indeed, there was hardly anyone in that vast multitude of pagans who did not ask for the imposition of hands, abandoning his heathenish errors and making profession of faith in the Lord Jesus.

Like it or not, this is what our sources tell us over and over again. Demonstrations of the power of the Christian God meant conversion. Miracles, wonders, exorcisms, temple-torching and shrine-smashing were in themselves acts of evangelization.

Martin was not alone in taking action. His contemporary Bishop Simplicius of Autun is said to have encountered an idol being trundled about on a cart ‘for the preservation of fields and vineyards.’ Simplicius made the sign of the cross; the idol crashed to the ground and the oxen pulling the cart were rooted immobile to the spot; 400 converts were made. Bishop Victricius of Rouen, like Martin an ex-soldier, undertook evangelizing campaigns among the Nervi and the Morini, roughly speaking in the zone of territory between Boulogne and Brussels. We have already met the ill-starred Bishop Vigilius of Trent. Across the Pyrenees in Spain Bishop Priscillian of Avila conducted evangelizing tours of his upland diocese before he was arraigned for heresy.

The interconnections of this clerical society are worth unravelling, if only because we shall repeatedly find in the course of this study that missionary churchmen, though sometimes loners, have tended to be sustained by a network of connections – kinsfolk, friends, patrons, associates in prayer – whose support was invaluable. Priscillian gained a following especially – and it became one of the counts against him – among pious aristocratic ladies. One such observer of his work is likely to have been the heiress Teresa, whose family estates seem to have lain in the region of Complutum (the modern Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid), a mere fifty miles from Avila. Teresa married the immensely rich, devout aristocrat Paulinus of Nola (who was connected to Ausonius). Paulinus knew Martin: he was the beneficiary of one of Martin’s miracles of healing by which the saint cured some sort of infection of the eye. Paulinus it was who introduced Sulpicius Severus to Martin. It is to Paulinus’ polite letter of congratulation that we owe our knowledge about the preaching of Victricius in the north-east of Gaul. Martin knew Victricius: we glimpse them together once at Chartres when Martin cured a girl of twelve who had been dumb from birth. (It would seem that Victricius was among the few Gallic bishops with whom Martin did not mind associating.) Martin also knew Priscillian and his work: he interceded with the Emperor Maximus on behalf of Priscillian when the latter had been found guilty of heresy.

Archaeological discoveries have furnished confirmation of the destruction of sites of pagan worship at this period which, in the words of Paulinus of Nola, was ‘happening throughout Gaul’. At a temple of Mercury at Avallon in Burgundy pagan statues were smashed and piled up in a heap of rubble: the coin series at the site ends in the reign of Valentinian I (364–75), which suggests that the work of destruction occurred shortly afterwards. The shrine of Dea Sequana, which marked the source of the river Seine not far from Dijon, was destroyed at about the same time. Sulpicius locates one of Martin’s temple-smashing exploits in this Burgundian area.

Martin did not only destroy: he also built. ‘He immediately built a church or monastery at every place where he destroyed a pagan shrine,’ tells Sulpicius. Martin’s distant successor as bishop, Gregory of Tours (d. 594), has left us a list of the places where Martin founded churches in the diocese, at Amboise, Candé, Ciran, Langeais, Saunay and Tournon. To these we must add the monastic communities he established at Marmoutier and Clion. These rural churches were staffed by bodies of clergy, as we may see at Candes. Such bodies were probably quite small and few members of them need have been priests; there was only one priest, Marcellus, at Amboise. These foundations were intended to have potential for Christian ministry over a wide area. Sulpicius refers to Martin making customary visits to the churches of his diocese, which would have enabled him to perform his episcopal duties, to check up on his local clergy, to nourish his network of contacts and to disrupt any manifestations of paganism which he might encounter. (It is notable that most of the stories told of Martin by Sulpicius Severus have a journey as their setting.) A structure, even a routine, of episcopal discipline is faintly visible.

Martin’s successors as bishops of Tours carried on the work he had started of building churches at rural settlements in the diocese. Brice, Martin’s first and very long-lived successor (bishop 397–444) built five; Eustochius (444–61), four; Perpetuus (461–91), six; Volusianus (491–8), two. We know of these because they were listed, like Martin’s, by Gregory of Tours towards the end of the sixth century. Gregory did not list these churches out of mere antiquarian interest: he listed them because they were episcopal foundations, the network through which the bishop supervised his diocese. What he does not tell us about, because he had no interest in so doing, was the progress of church-building by laymen on their own lands; estate (or villa) churches built by landowners for their own households and dependants. We hear about such churches only by chance. For example, Gregory introduces a story about the relics of St Nicetius of Lyons with the information that he, Gregory, had been asked to consecrate a church at Pernay. In another of his works we learn that it had been built by a certain Litomer, presumably the lord of the estate. Litomer must have been building his church at Pernay in the 580s. By that date Touraine was fairly densely dotted with churches. It has been plausibly estimated that by Gregory’s day most people in the diocese would have had a church within about six miles of their homes.

It must be emphasized that Touraine is a very special case as regards the extent of our information about it. Thanks to Gregory’s writings we know more about the ecclesiastical organization of the diocese of Tours than we do about any other rural area of comparable size in fourth-, fifth- or sixth-century Christendom. We should never have guessed that there was a church at the little village of Ceyreste, between Marseilles and Toulon, had its control not been disputed between the bishops of Arles and Marseilles: the dispute elicited a papal ruling in 417, the source of our knowledge. We hear about the church at Alise-Sainte-Reine, about ten miles from the ruined shrine of Dea Sequana, only because when St Germanus of Auxerre stayed a night there with its priest in about 430 the straw pallet on which he had slept was found to possess miraculous curative properties: his hagiographer Constantius recorded the fact and thus preserved the notice of the church. It is from the Vita Eugendi that we hear of the existence of a church at Izernore, between Bourg-en-Bresse and Geneva, and from the Vita Genovefae that we hear of a church at Nanterre, then about seven miles from Paris; both of these from the second quarter of the fifth century. At Arlon in Belgium, close to the modern borders with both Luxembourg and France, archaeologists have excavated what might have been a church of the late Roman period: caution is necessary because excavated church buildings from this period are difficult to identify as such. We know that Bishop Rusticus of Narbonne consecrated a new church at Minerve, which has given its name to the wine-growing district of Minervois, in 456 because an inscription recording the fact has survived. At Chantelle, near Vichy, a landowner called Germanicus built a church in the 470s: it is referred to in one of the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Clermont.

We hear of these churches because of the chance survival of a legal ruling, three pieces of hagiography, the buried foundations of a building, an inscription and a bishop’s letter-collection. It is a ragbag of odds and ends of evidence, some of them of rather doubtful status, characteristic of the coin in which the early medieval historian has to deal. So slender are the threads by which our knowledge hangs, so fragmentary and isolated its separate pieces, that we have to exercise the utmost caution in teasing out what it might have to tell us. To the question, How far may we press our evidence? different historians will give different answers. How representative was Touraine in respect of the building of churches? To what degree, if at all, may we generalize from its circumstances? Were the dioceses of Arles or Auxerre or Paris or Narbonne or Clermont as well provided with rural churches by the year 600 as was the diocese of Tours? These are – given our sources, these have to be – open questions. The reader is free to speculate.

We rarely know anything at all of the precise circumstances which brought any individual rural church into being. Here is an example, deservedly famous, of a case where we do know something: it also shows that not all bishops were as violently confrontational in their methods as Martin was.

In the territory of Javols [on the western edge of the Massif Central] there was a large lake. At a fixed time a crowd of rustics went there and, as if offering libations to the lake, threw into it linen cloths and garments, pelts of wool, models of cheese and wax and bread, each according to his means. They came with their wagons; they brought food and drink, sacrificed animals, and feasted for three days. Much later a cleric from that same city [Javols] became bishop and went to the place. He preached to the crowds that they should cease this behaviour lest they be consumed by the wrath of heaven. But their coarse rusticity rejected his teachings. Then, with the inspiration of the Divinity this bishop of God built a church in honour of the blessed Hilary of Poitiers [Martin’s patron] at a distance from the banks of the lake. He placed relics of Hilary in the church and said to the people: ‘Do not, my sons, sin before God! For there is no religious piety to a lake. Do not stain your hearts with these empty rituals, but rather acknowledge God and direct your devotion to His friends. Respect St Hilary, a bishop of God whose relics are located here. For he can serve as your intercessor for the mercy of the Lord.’ The men were stung in their hearts and converted. They left the lake and brought everything they usually threw into it to the holy church instead. So they were freed from the mistake that had bound them.⁶

This shrewd manoeuvre by the unnamed bishop of Javols probably occurred in about the year 500. It is a fine example of a technique of rural evangelization which became classic: the transference of ritual from one religious loyalty to another. Gregory of Tours, reporting the story, plainly thought that the bishop had thereby made his lakeside flock more Christian. Perhaps he had.

There is a further layer of interest in the story of the sacred lake of Javols. The episode demonstrates the local standing and authority of the bishop; it may have enhanced them too. We saw some signs of the beginnings of a change in the nature of a bishop’s public role in the career of Gregory of Pontus. Change was accelerated in the wake of Constantine’s conversion. Further impetus was given in the western provinces of the empire in the course of the fifth and sixth centuries. It was during this age that the last tatters of central imperial control were shaken from Britain, Gaul and Spain. As the distinctive marks of functioning Romanitas were whittled away – especially the army and the civil service and their economic underpinning – so bishops tended to become the natural leaders of their local communities.

Let one instance stand for many: Germanus of Auxerre, as presented in the biography by Constantius of Lyons composed about forty years after its subject’s death.⁷ Germanus, born in about 378, was a member of an aristocratic family of the Auxerrois who received a good education in Gaul and at Rome, married suitably, practised successfully as a lawyer and achieved high public office as governor of Armorica, the north-western region of Gaul. When the bishopric of Auxerre fell vacant in 418 Germanus was plucked from this entirely secular career by the Christian community of Auxerre, who insisted that he must be their next bishop. Constantius had read his Sulpicius Severus and knew how an episcopal biographer should present his subject to an admiring world. So we hear a good deal about Germanus’ austerities, virtues, miracles and so forth. Hence the story about the straw at Alise which seems to have been modelled in characteristically hagiographical fashion on a story told of Martin by Sulpicius. But we also hear from Constantius about the part played by Germanus in public affairs. He protected the people of Auxerre from a crushing burden of taxation. He restrained Goar, king of the barbarian Alans, from ravaging Armorica. He went to Britain to quell heresy and while there led a British army to victory over marauding Picts and Saxons. He interceded with the imperial court at Ravenna on behalf of the province of Armorica.

The opening up of gaps or fissures in the surface of late Roman imperial rule was perhaps the most telling symptom of the empire’s inability to cope with its traditional responsibilities. Bishops filled the gaps. Episcopal wealth became significant here. Some bishoprics – but no means all – became very rich indeed. The case of Tours is, again, instructive. Gregory of Tours chronicles a succession of legacies bestowed upon the see of Tours during the course of the fifth and sixth centuries. Legacies often came from the bishops themselves. Bishop Remigius (Rémi) of Rheims left his substantial fortune to the see of Rheims and Bishop Bertram of Le Mans left an even more substantial fortune to the see of Le Mans. Wealth brought local responsibilities and opportunities as well as temptations. All the diverse services which today we would classify under the heading of ‘welfare’ came to be the responsibility of bishops – poor relief, public works, education, health care, hospitality for travellers, prison visiting, ransoming of captives, the provision of public entertainments and spectacles. They even included, in one case that we know of, banking: Bishop Masona of Mérida, in southern Spain, established a bank in about 580 for making loans to the public. These day-to-day responsibilities gave the bishop authority and power, a position of leadership in the community. In addition, of course, and above all else, the bishop possessed spiritual power: control over the administration of the sacraments of salvation, leadership in the intercessory activity of prayer and rogation, power to bind with the threat of excommunication, access to divine medicine of exorcism and healing, opportunity to sanction, encourage and organize the cult of saints and their relics.

This upward drift in the public profile of the bishop and his evermultiplying staff was a matter for the attention not just of the citizenry within the walls of the cathedral city but also of the dwellers in the rural hinterland. If official Christianity was, increasingly with the passing years, what gave cohesion and identity to a community there was some inducement to throw in your lot with it. Rural conversion, like many other varieties of conversion to Christianity (or other faiths), partook of something of the nature of joining a club.

We must make allowance too for the steady reiteration by bishops of the kind of preaching that we have already met in the homilies of Maximus of Turin. Bishops hammered away at the same old themes throughout the fifth and sixth centuries. Here, by way of example, is Caesarius, bishop of Arles from c. 500 to 543.

We have heard that some of you make vows to trees, pray to fountains, and practice diabolical augury. Because of this there is such sorrow in our hearts that we cannot receive any consolation. What is worse, there are some unfortunate and miserable people who not only are unwilling to destroy the shrines of the pagans but even are not afraid or ashamed to build up those which have been destroyed. Moreover, if anyone with a thought of God wants to burn the wood of those shrines or to tear to pieces and destroy the diabolical altars, they become angry, rave with fury, and are excited with excessive frenzy. They even go so far as to dare to strike those who out of love for God are trying to overthrow the wicked idols; perhaps they do not even hesitate to plan their death. What are these unfortunate, miserable people doing? They are deserting the light and running to darkness; they reject God and embrace the Devil. They desert life while they follow after death; by repudiating Christ they proceed to impiety. Why then did these miserable people come to church? Why did they receive the sacrament of baptism – if afterwards they intended to return to the profanation of idols?⁸

Caesarius was an accomplished preacher. His 238 surviving sermons were composed in the straightforward Latin of daily speech in southern Gaul, not the elaborate literary Latin then fashionable among intellectuals. They were short, direct and pithy, fashioned to reach and influence an everyday audience of everyday men and women throughout the diocese. To this end Caesarius had extracts from the corpus copied for circulation among the local clergy. He spared no effort to ensure that Christian standards of behaviour were proclaimed loudly and unambiguously before his flock.

The sermons of Caesarius enjoyed a wide and a long circulation. In the official Homiliary – the standard collection of sermons for regular use – of the seventh-century Spanish church, nearly half of the homilies are those of Caesarius. It is from Spain too that there survives a work which specifically addresses itself to rural mission. This is the De Correctione Rusticorum of Martin of Braga. (It is a title which is a little hard to translate. The Latin word correctio, at this date, implies reform through punishment; and while the primary meaning of rusticus is ‘countryman’, the notion of ‘rusticity’ was not just a statement about locality but had overtones about behaviour and disposition as well. On the Castigation of Country-dwellers might do.) Martin, like his great namesake, was a native of Pannonia who had received a good education and had travelled in the east. In circumstances that remain shrouded in mystery he turned up in Spain about the middle of the sixth century. By the year 572 he had become bishop of Braga, now in northern Portugal, and he died in about 580. Braga, the Roman Bracara Augusta, was the capital of its province, Gallaecia (rather more extensive to the east and south than the modern Galicia), its bishop therefore the leading churchman of the province. Martin was an ecclesiastic of rank and influence.

De Correctione Rusticorum takes the form of a letter addressed to one of Martin’s fellow bishops, Polemius of Astorga, but the writer makes it clear that it was intended for public delivery as a sermon. Martin began with a brief sketch of sacred history, firmly locating the pagan gods among the demonic ministers of the Devil when he was cast out of heaven:

The demons also persuaded men to build them temples, to place there images or statues of wicked men and to set up altars to them, on which they might pour out the blood not only of animals but even of men. Besides, many demons, expelled from heaven, also preside either in the sea or in rivers or springs or forests; men ignorant of God also worship them as gods and sacrifice to them. They call on Neptune in the sea, on Lamiae in the rivers, on Nymphs in spring, on Dianas in woods, who are all malignant demons and wicked spirits, who deceive unbelieving men, who are ignorant of the Sign of the Cross, and vex them. However, not without God’s permission do they do harm, because the rustics have angered God and do not believe with their whole heart in the faith of Christ, but are so inconstant that they apply the very names of demons to each day and speak of the days of Mars, Mercury, Jove, Venus and Saturn …

His exposition merges into a catechism, with digressions to identify various sins such as celebrating the New Year with the pagan Roman festival of the Kalends of January (that is, 1 January), and looks forward to the end of the world. He dwells on baptism as ‘a pact you made with God’ and then turns to human betrayals of that pact:

And how can any of you, who has renounced the Devil and his angels and his evil works, now return again to the worship of the Devil? For to burn candles at stones and trees and springs, and where three roads meet, what is it but the worship of the Devil? To observe divinations and auguries and the days of idols, what is it but the worship of the Devil? To observe the days of Vulcan [23 August] and the first days of each month, to adorn tables and hang up laurels, to watch the foot, to pour out fruit and wine over a log in the hearth, and to put bread in a spring, what is it but the worship of the Devil? For women to invoke Minerva in their weaving, to keep weddings for the day of Venus [Friday], to consider which day one should set out on a journey, what is it but the worship of the Devil? To mutter spells over herbs and invoke the names of demons in incantations, what is it but the worship of the Devil? And many other things which it takes too long to say. And you do all these things after renouncing the Devil, after baptism, and, returning to the worship of demons and to their evil works, you have betrayed your faith and broken the pact you made with God. You have abandoned the sign of the Cross you received in baptism, and you give heed to the signs of the Devil by little birds and sneezing and many other things. Why does no augury harm me or any other upright Christian? Because where the sign of the Cross has gone before, the sign of the Devil is nothing …⁹

And he concludes with a call to repentance and the replacement of these pagan practices with Christian ones. Martin of Braga was not a man, we might judge, subject to self-doubt. But his castigation makes very plain the difficulty, not indeed for him but for the modern historian, of drawing hard-and-fast boundaries between Christian and pagan, religion and superstition, piety and magic, the acceptable and the forbidden. It is a salutary reminder of the penumbral ambiguities of our subject.

Martin’s tract, like the sermons of Caesarius, circulated widely: we shall meet it again. Admonition of this sort by individuals was reinforced by the collective voice of bishops assembled in church councils, formally condemning non-Christian practices and commending Christian ones. The sheer amount of attention devoted by the ecclesiastical authorities of this period to the quality of Christian observance is cumulatively impressive. Martin of Braga’s views on the sinfulness of celebrating the Kalends of January were echoed by the bishops assembled at Tours in 567, by a diocesan synod held at Auxerre in the latter part of the sixth century, and by the Spanish bishops gathered for the fourth council of Toledo in 633. All sorts of divination and soothsaying and augury-reading were repeatedly condemned. By way of example, consider one type of practitioner referred to in our texts as an ariolus (plural arioli). Isidore of Seville, whose great work, The Etymologies, was the nearest thing to an encyclopaedia that the early Middle Ages produced, informs us that ‘arioli are so called because they utter impious prayer at the altars [aras] of idols, and offer deadly sacrifices, and accept instructions from the swarms of demons.’ Caesarius of Arles and Martin of Braga told their hearers to shun the ariolus. So did the civil law: no one should consult an ariolus, ruled the Theodosian Code promulgated in 438. But people plainly did. Gregory of Tours tells a story that is apposite here.¹⁰ A young man named Aquilinus was out hunting with his father when he experienced some sort of seizure; he had a violent fit of trembling and then fell down in a coma. His kinsfolk recognized this as the work of the Devil and feared that a spell had been laid on him by an enemy. So they called in arioli, ‘as is the way of country people’ (ut mos rusticorum habet), who tied on ligatures and administered medicines; but in vain. Only then did the family take the boy to the shrine of St Martin at Tours where – need we say? – he was cured. This is a most interesting story. The ariolus in this context is the person of first recourse when the inexplicable disaster has occurred and foul play is suspected. We may call him, if we so desire, a witch doctor, but need to recognize that this is a loaded and therefore limiting term. There is no suggestion that the kinsfolk of Aquilinus were anything but Christian, yet it is to the ariolus that they first turn. Gregory reports this without apparent surprise or explicit condemnation, though there is implicit lamentation over their ‘rusticity’. But it wasn’t only rustics who resorted to arioli. In Spain at least it would appear that the clergy were not above doing so. The bishops assembled at Toledo in 633 – under the presidency of Isidore, no less – forbade bishops, priests, deacons or anyone whomsoever in clerical orders to consult arioli or other types of magician, augur, diviner or soothsayer. What intriguing complications are hinted at by this decree: further suggestions of frontiers obscurely blurred.

Now from the prohibitive to the positive: let us take, from manifold possibilities, sabbath observance and the sign of the cross. Church councils repeatedly enjoined the observance of Sunday by abstinence from labour: at Orléans in 538, at Mâcon in 585, at Narbonne in 589. So too did Martin of Braga in De Correctione Rusticorum. Moralists were at hand with gruesome tales of what might happen to transgressors. Gregory of Tours told a story of a man who, while on his way to church one Sunday, saw that animals had strayed into his field and done damage to his crops. He took up an axe to do some fencing to block the gap through which the beasts had strayed. His arm was instantly paralysed and remained so until it received massage treatment from the holy man Senoch. In another tale he told of a girl who combed her hair on a Sunday; the teeth of the comb rammed themselves into her palm, causing her great pain, until she prayed at the tomb of St Gregory of Langres.

Devotion to the cross was stimulated by the discovery of the. True Cross early in the fourth century, attributed to the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine. Having been rare before, from the fourth century the cross began to be a frequent motif in Christian art – for example, on gravestones. We have already seen Martin deflect a falling tree simply by making the sign of the cross. It was presented by Gregory of Tours as an unfailing source of help for the pious in any emergency. The hermit Caluppa was once cornered in his cave in the Auvergne by two dragons: he put them to flight with the sign of the cross (though one of them farted defiantly as it lumbered out of the cave’s mouth). When the holy abbot Portianus was forced to have a drink with the evil Sigivald he made the sign of the cross, the cup shattered and a snake slithered out of the spilt wine. Gregory also tells us an interesting story of some sceptics. It occurs in his account of the recluse Friardus.

He passed his whole life praising God, in prayer and in vigils. He took from the earth with his own hands what he needed for his subsistence, and although he excelled others by his hard work he never ceased to pray. And so for his neighbours and for strangers, for such is the way of country people [rusticorum], he was the object of much ridicule. One day he was in a field cutting corn and tying it into sheaves along with the other harvesters, and a swarm of those annoying and fierce flies which are commonly called wasps came by. They bitterly attacked the harvesters, pricking them with their stings, and surrounding them on all sides, and so the men avoided the place where the nest was. And they mocked the blessed Friardus, saying to him slyly, ‘May it occur to the blessed man, the religious man, who never ceases to pray, who always makes the sign of the cross on his ears and eyes, who always carries the standard of salvation with him wherever he goes, that he harvest near the nest and tame it with his prayer.’ The holy man took these words as a slur upon divine power, and he fell to the ground in prayer to his Lord. Then he approached the wasps and made the sign of the cross over them, saying ‘Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth.’ As this prayer left his mouth the wasps all hurried to hide themselves inside the hole from which they had come, and Friardus cut the stalks by the nest without harm, in the sight of all.¹¹

Friardus lived on an island in the estuary of the Loire not far from Nantes. Yet it is clear from what Gregory tells us of him that he had contact with the local people and influence upon them. It is also clear that there were perhaps surprisingly many such drop-outs from conventional society in the Gaul of Gregory’s day. Was this also the case in other western provinces of the former empire, which produced no Gregory of Tours to enlighten and enliven us? Cross the Pyrenees into Spain and consider the case of Emilian. We know a fair amount about him because his life was written by Braulio, pupil of Isidore and bishop of Saragossa, in about 635; Braulio’s brother Fronimian was abbot of the monastery which had grown up on the site of Emilian’s hermitage.¹² Emilian was a shepherd in the Rioja who was fired by a vision to devote his life to God. He sought out a hermit named Felix who lived near Haro for instruction. Having learned all that he could from Felix, Emilian returned to the Rioja and settled as a hermit at Berceo. Troubled by the multitude of people who flocked to him, Emilian retired (like Antony retreating further into the Egyptian desert) into the mountainous recesses of the Sierra de la Demanda. But his holiness could not be hidden. The local bishop, Didymus of Tarazona, sought him out, desiring to make him a priest. (Reading between the lines one may suspect a case of friction between bishop and hermit, not without parallels in this and other periods. Did the bishop want to regularize the position of this highly unconventional figure?) With reluctance Emilian agreed to be ordained to minister in the church of Berceo. We learn that he had clerics (in the plural) under him there, so we may infer that this was a small community of clergy with responsibility for a wide area round about, like the communities which served Martin’s churches in Touraine. He was an exemplary priest – ‘unlike those in our own times’, comments Braulio. Indeed in some respects he was too good, or perhaps he did not hit it off with his clergy, or perhaps he was just hopeless at administration. Whatever the reason, his clerics accused him before the bishop of squandering the possessions of his church (in charitable giving, as Braulio insists). The bishop relieved him of his cure and Emilian retired to his hermitage for the remainder of his long life. He died in 573.

The miracles and wonders worked through the holy Emilian before and after his death show him as a spiritual force in Riojan society. Here is an example. Strange goings-on were reported from the household of the senator Honorius. (It is far from clear what the term ‘senator’ might signify in sixth-century Spain, but Braulio, a good classical scholar, surely intends us to understand a man of high social rank. Emilian, like Martin, was cultivated by the aristocracy.) At his dinner parties, the plates and dishes would be found piled with the bones or even with the dung of animals; and while the household slept items of clothing were mysteriously abstracted from their resting places and hung from the ceilings. More was at stake than just a little local difficulty with the servants. Honorius called Emilian in to exorcize what was evidently an evil spirit. And Emilian succeeded, though the spirit hurled a rock at him before it was vanquished. Honorius’ gratitude was tangible. Emilian always did his best to feed the crowds of visitors who flocked to his refuge. On one occasion supplies of food were exhausted. Hardly had Emilian ceased to pray for assistance when suddenly carts loaded with food appeared at the door. They had been sent by Honorius.

Several more examples could be cited. There was the slave-girl of the senator Sicorius whose blindness he cured, the exorcism he performed on one of the slaves of Count Eugenius, the evil spirit which had taken possession of both the senator Nepotian and his wife Proseria cast out by him, the woman named Barbara who had travelled all the way from Amaya to seek a cure for her paralysis, the monk Armentarius whose swollen stomach was cured when Emilian made the sign of the cross over it – and so on. We need not linger over these. There is also one interesting case of scepticism. When Emilian foretold the conquest of Cantabria by the king of Spain and summoned all the local nobility – an interesting sidelight on his local influence – to warn them and upbraid them for their sins, one senator, by name Abundantius, said that Emilian was a delirious old fool. But he got his come-uppance; King Leovigild killed him shortly afterwards.

Emilian’s hermitage grew after his death into one of the most famous monastic houses of medieval Spain, San Millán de la Cogolla, ‘Saint Emilian of the Cowl’ (though there is no reason to suppose that Emilian was ever a monk). Others who sought a solitary ascetic life were compelled almost at once to organize their disciples into monastic communities. Take the case of Romanus, who settled at Condat on the edge of the Jura mountains of eastern Gaul in about 435. Here, in a region quite as inhospitable as Emilian’s Sierra de la Demanda, Romanus intended to live the solitary life of a hermit. But he was joined first by his brother Lupicinus, then by a trickle of other disciples which soon turned into a flood. Among them came that Eugendus, the son of the priest of Izernore, whose childhood vision of the monastic life is movingly described in the Vita Patrum Iurensium (The Life of the Jura Fathers), a work composed in about 515 which is our main source of information about these communities.¹³ We also learn that there were plentiful lay hangers-on who had to be fed – just as at Emilian’s hermitage. It was impossible for ascetics to cut themselves off altogether from the world. Indeed, it was a condition of their influence that they did not entirely cut themselves off from it. We see Lupicinus interceding with the secular authorities, like Germanus a generation earlier, on behalf of the unjustly oppressed poor. The monks of the Jura were bound to the world by economic need: at one point we catch a glimpse of them travelling all the way to the Mediterranean to buy salt. And they were sought out by petitioners. Solicited on behalf of a girl possessed by a demon, Eugendus dictated a letter to the evil spirit – we are given the text of it – commanding it to leave her; and it did, even before the letter was delivered. The lady Syagria, a member of the leading aristocratic dynasty of Lyons, gravely ill, was cured by eating a letter from Eugendus. Note the sequel: the whole city of Lyons rejoiced with her and her family.

Episcopal initiatives in spiritual and social welfare, preaching, legislation, the example of ascetic renunciation, the demonstrably superior power of Christian over other sorts of magic, miraculous cures worked by holy men: all have something to hint to us about how it was thought that rural conversion might best be effected. I am inclined to give most weight to the full-hearted commitment of the aristocracy to this task. Maximus of Turin and John Chrysostom had surely been correct in their prescriptions: get the landowners to build churches into which they can coax or bribe or lash their tenantry, and then bit by bit something – but what? – will start to happen. Two centuries later Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) was still thinking along these lines in the admonition he sent to Sardinian landowners to stamp out pockets of heathenism among their peasants. And if they show themselves reluctant to come to God, he wrote, jack their rents up until they do! Pope Gregory, the first pontiff to use the humble title ‘servant of the servants of God’, was quite capable of adopting the commanding tones of the great Roman aristocrat that by upbringing he was.

Here are two last sixth-century examples of the way in which locally prominent families could encourage and shape an emerging Christian character in the societies which looked to them for leadership. Samson was a native of Demetia, a kingdom of south Wales, who ended his life as a bishop in Gaul (later tradition would claim at Dol in Brittany). He was a part of that migration of British people from their own islands to the mainland of Gaul which transformed the province of Armorica into Brittany in the course of the fifth and sixth centuries. Samson is a somewhat shadowy figure, but his historical existence is attested to by the appearance of his name among a list of bishops who attended a church council held at Paris, probably in 561 or 562. It is assumed that his life fell within the first three-quarters of the sixth century. There exists a Vita Samsonis by an anonymous author which is difficult to date. The case for composition within about a century of its subject’s death is reasonably strong (though far from unassailable). The text will be used here, with caution, as a reliable source of evidence for at least the general outlines of Samson’s life.¹⁴

Samson was another, like Romanus or Emilian, taken by desire for the ascetic life. After receiving instruction from St Illtud at his monastery in Glamorgan, Samson sought a more arduous regime at a community recently founded on Caldey Island off the coast of what would later be called Pembrokeshire. Shortly after this, in the course of a visit to his family, Samson’s example seems to have persuaded most of its members to opt for the monastic life. As a family they took the plunge together: his mother and father, his five brothers, his paternal uncle with his wife and their three sons, and his aunt on the mother’s side. The family was a prominent one, ‘noble and distinguished as the world reckons these things’, in the words of Samson’s biographer. After the family’s conversion to monasticism they devoted all their property to the service of God; and there was plenty of it, ‘for they were the owners of many estates’. We know that they also built churches, because we are told that after he had become a bishop Samson consecrated them. Samson founded a monastery vaguely described as ‘near the river Severn’. He is said – in a section of the text which may be a later interpolation – to have travelled in Ireland, where he was given another monastery whose government he delegated to his uncle. Instructed in a vision that he must cross the sea and live as a peregrinus he sailed over to Cornwall, where he founded a further monastery. Continuing on his way he reached Brittany, where he established a monastery at Dol. Before his death he founded one more, apparently somewhere near the mouth of the river Seine.

The main lines of this account are credible. The commitment of this prominent family to a more intense form of Christian living was likely to have started ripples of influence which perhaps had effects, sadly hidden from us, within the churches which they built. Samson’s string of monastic foundations – and we shall see plenty more examples of such networks – had evangelizing potential. His journeys, foundations and miracles were associated by his biographer with conversion. In Cornwall, for example, in a district referred to as Tricurium, tentatively identified with the area formerly called Trigg in north Cornwall, Samson encountered people worshipping an idol. He admonished them, to little effect. Then it so happened that a boy was killed there in a riding accident. Samson pointed out that their idol could not revive the dead boy but that his God could; and would do so, provided that they promised to destroy their idol and for ever abandon its worship. They agreed to the bargain. Samson prayed for two hours, the boy returned to life, the idol was destroyed, and ‘Count Guedianus’ (? Gwythian) ordered all the people to be baptized by Samson. The holy man stayed in Cornwall for a little while longer, helpfully killing a serpent that was troubling the inhabitants and then founding his monastery, before resuming his journey to Brittany. The author of the Vita Samsonis had been to Cornwall and had seen ‘the sign of the cross which the holy Samson with his own hand had chiselled upon an upright stone’: the Cornish equivalent, we might think, of the creed written out by the hand of Gregory of Pontus in the cathedral of Neocaesarea. Samson’s travels in Trigg might be compared to Martin’s visit to Levroux.

Our last example takes us back to Gaul. Aredius was a slightly younger contemporary of Samson. A native of Limoges, he was born into a prominent family and as a young man was attached to the court of the Frankish King Theudebert (534–48). He was recruited by Bishop Nicetius of Trier – whom we shall meet again in a later chapter – under whom he studied and received the monastic tonsure. On the death of his father and brother he returned to the Limousin to look after his mother Pelagia, who had been left kinless and unprotected. Aredius dedicated himself and his property to the service of God, enthusiastically assisted by Pelagia. He built churches on his estates and founded a monastery at a place now named after him: Saint-Yrieix, a just recognizable derivative from Aredius, to the south of Limoges. The sick flocked to him and ‘he restored them to health by laying on of hands with the sign of the cross.’¹⁵

Gregory of Tours, our source for this, was a friend of Aredius and had good reason to be grateful to him. The church of St Martin at Tours was one of the principal beneficiaries of the will jointly made by Aredius and Pelagia in 572.¹⁶ It shows that the family was an extremely wealthy one, owning widespread estates, many of which came into the possession of the church of Tours: a further instance of pious largesse to set beside the examples quoted above of Remigius at Rheims and Bertram at Le Mans. Churches are mentioned at some of the estates. Although we cannot be certain that all of these had been built by Aredius, we can be reasonably sure of it in some instances, for example that of ‘our church dedicated in honour of St Médard [of Soissons] at Exidolium’, presumably Excideuil in northern Périgord, because Medard had died only some twenty years earlier and Aredius had been involved with the growth of his cult. The will also shows that Aredius and his mother possessed large amounts of ecclesiastical furnishings – embroidered linen and silk textiles (altar frontals, walland door-hangings), silver chalices and patens, and some very exotic items such as ‘the crown with a silver cross, gilded, with precious stones, full of relics of the saints … which crown has hanging from it eight leaves wrought from gold and gems’. It was presumably a votive, hanging crown, perhaps akin to the votive crown of the Spanish king Recesswinth (643–72) found in the treasure of Guarrázar, near Toledo. These textiles and treasures should alert us to the impact which the interiors of these churches might have made upon the senses of those who worshipped in them; a not insignificant element in considering the process of Christianization.

In the middle years of the sixth century John of Ephesus conducted an evangelizing campaign in the provinces of Asia, Caria, Lydia and Phrygia – roughly speaking, today’s western Turkey. In the course of several years’ work he and his helpers demolished temples and shrines, felled sacred trees, baptized 80,000 persons, built ninety-eight churches and founded twelve monasteries. And this was in the heart of the empire, an area where there had been a Christian presence since the time of St Paul, not in some out-of-the-way corner like Cornwall or Galicia. In 598 Pope Gregory wrote to the bishop of Terracina to express dismay at a report that had reached him to the effect that the inhabitants of those parts were worshipping sacred trees. Again, not a remote spot; Terracina is on the coast between Rome and Naples, its countryside traversed by the Via Appia, one of the busiest highways of the Mediterranean world.

These two reports remind us that the conversion and Christianization of the countryside was a very slow business. The point cannot be sufficiently emphasized. The evidence surveyed in this chapter has been largely normative, that is to say it lays out ideals or targets. Our sources speak with the official voice of the educated elite within the church; they do not describe the everyday reality of belief and observance among the laity. That reality will always be elusive. Can we make any assessment at all of what had been achieved? Any answer to this question must be cautious, but need not be blankly negative.

Our two earliest activists, Gregory of Pontus and Martin of Tours, were operating at times when and in places where Christianity had made no impact at all upon the countryside. We may guess that in this respect Pontus and Touraine were not untypical. Two centuries later, in the age of Gregory of Tours and Martin of Braga, conditions had changed. They were operating in a social world which was, in a formal sense, Christian. Paganism as overt, active, public cult no longer existed in Gaul or Spain (except among the Basques). Caesarius of Arles, Martin of Braga, Gregory of Tours, Pope Gregory the Great, had as their principal concern the problem of how to make people who were nominally Christian more thoroughly Christian, the more effectively to guard them from demonic assault which would threaten God’s protection of the whole community. These pastors were clear about the disposition and behaviour required of the good Christian and they did their utmost to set their standards and expectations clearly before the laity. Here, they are saying, is a pattern of godly behaviour to which you must try to conform. This is the message not just of the directly homiletic material (Caesarius, Martin) but also of much of what we are accustomed to think of as the ‘historical’ works of Gregory of Tours. They were also clear about what the good Christian should avoid. All four of these writers would probably have agreed in terming it rusticitas, ‘rusticity’. The notion of rusticity comprehended not just doing a bit of fencing or brushing your hair on a Sunday, not just boorish junketings at the Kalends of January, but potentially also something much more menacing in the guise of resort to alternative systems of explanation, propitiation and control. This is the lesson of the story about Aquilinus and the arioli. There existed an alternative network to the one presented by Christian teachers. There were other persons about, easily resorted to, claiming access to the means of explaining misfortune, curing sickness, stimulating love, wreaking vengeance, foretelling the future, advising when to undertake a journey, interpreting the flight of birds or the patterns on the shoulder-blades of sheep.

Historians have often written dismissively of ‘pagan survivals’, old beliefs and practices tolerated by a sagely easy-going church, which would subside harmlessly into the quaint and folkloric. But this is to miss the point. The men of the sixth century – and not just the sixth century by any means – were engaged in an urgent and a competitive enterprise. In a European countryside where over hundreds of years diverse rituals had evolved for coping with the forces of nature, Christian holy men had to show that they had access to more efficacious power. The element of competition emerges clearly in the tale of Aquilinus, or in the story about Samson and the Cornish boy killed in a fall from his horse: and, it may be said, in many others too. Competition involves an element of comparability, even of compromise. Thus there is scope for all sorts of nice questions about where and how to draw lines round the limits of the tolerable. Competition also involves the risk of overlapping perceptions of identity. How like to an ariolus was, say, Emilian or Friardus or Caluppa – in the eyes of contemporaries? Or in the eyes of historians?

Because this chapter has concentrated upon the period between the third and the sixth centuries the incautious reader might be left with the impression that the challenge of converting the countryside to Christianity was one that was faced and surmounted during that period. Not so. A start had been made; but the operation was one which would continue to tax the energies of bishops for centuries to come. Country people are notoriously conservative. We may be absolutely certain that more than a few generations of episcopal exhortation or lordly harassment would be needed to alter habits inherited from time out of mind. Ways of doing things, ways that grindingly poor people living at subsistence level had devised for managing their visible and invisible environments, were not going to yield easily, perhaps were not going to yield at all, to ecclesiastical injunction. But even granite will be dented by water that never ceases to drip. This is one way in which ’something will start to happen’. If there were country churches (as in Touraine), and if there were clergy to serve them (a big ‘if’, that one), and if the laity attended church (a practice for which we have only sporadic evidence) – would the people then become more Christian? The question mark stays in place because at this point a spectre rises to haunt us, the most troubling of the problems laid out in Chapter 1: what makes a Christian? Did Martin ‘make Christians’ by smashing a temple at Levroux? Sulpicius Severus thought so. Were the lakeside dwellers of Javols ‘made Christian’ when they diverted their offerings of local produce from lake to church? Gregory of Tours thought so. Did Samson ‘make Christian’ the people of Trigg by raising a boy from the dead and killing a snake? Count Guedianus thought so, if Samson’s anonymous biographer is to be believed, for he ordered them all to be baptized. This is what our sources tell us; we have to make of it what we can.

CHAPTER THREE
Beyond the Imperial Frontiers

Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;

But is there anything Beyond?

RUPERT BROOKE, ‘Heaven’, 1914

IN THE LATE ANTIQUE PERIOD, as we saw in Chapter 1, it was standard practice for Christian communities which had put down roots outside the frontiers of the Roman empire to be provided with bishops on request. To Patrophilus, bishop of Pithyonta in Georgia, who attended the council of Nicaea in 325 (see above p. 26) we can add others. There was Frumentius, for example, consecrated by Athanasius of Alexandria, author of the Life of St Antony, in about 350 as the bishop of a Christian community based at Axum in Ethiopia. There was Theophilus ‘the Indian’, apparently a native of Socotra in the Gulf of Aden, who was sent at much the same time to be the bishop of Christian communities in southern Arabia which seem to have originated as trading settlements. Patrophilus, Frumentius and Theophilus operated far to the east or south of the Roman empire. They are shadowy figures who have left but the faintest of traces. Most scholars, however, are agreed that they did exist and that they are witnesses to the flourishing of some very far-flung branches of the Christian church. They had western counterparts, marginally better documented, beyond the imperial provinces of the fourth and fifth centuries, who are the subject of this chapter. Among the earliest of them known to us was a man named Ulfila – or Wulfila, or Ulfilas; it is variously spelt. His name was Germanic and means ‘Little Wolf’ or ‘Wolf Cub’. Much later, he would come to be known as ‘the Apostle of the Goths’. This is not quite what he was, though his achievements were remarkable enough. To provide him with a background and a context we must go back for a moment to third-century Pontus and to Bishop Gregory the Wonder-worker.

The Canonical Letter of Gregory the Wonder-worker (above p. 35) was prompted by a crisis in the provinces of northern Asia Minor in the middle years of the third century. Upon this sleepy corner of the empire there had unexpectedly fallen the cataclysmic visitation of barbarian attack. Goths settled on the north-western shores of the Euxine (or Black) Sea had managed to requisition ships from the Hellenistic sea ports – such places, presumably, as Chersonesus (Sevastopol) in the Crimea – which enabled them to raid the vulnerable coastline of Asia Minor. The earliest raids took place in the mid-250s. The invaders came to pillage, not to settle. In their eyes human booty was as desirable as temple treasures or the jewel-cases of rich ladies; captives, some of whom might buy their release, others of whom would be carried off into a life of slavery. In the wake of these devastations and collapse of order Bishop Gregory was approached by a colleague, possibly the bishop of Trapezus (Trebizond), and invited to pronounce on the disciplinary issues which arose from the conduct of the Christian provincials during the disturbances. His reply has come down to us because its rulings came to be regarded as authoritative and were incorporated into the canon law of the eastern or Orthodox branch of the church.¹

Gregory’s letter casts a shaft of light upon the human misery and depravity occasioned by the raids as well as upon the responsibilities assumed by a bishop in trying to pick up the pieces of shattered local life in their wake. Had captives been polluted by eating food provided for them by the barbarians? No; for ‘it is agreed by everyone’ – Gregory had evidently made enquiries – ‘that the barbarians who overran our regions did not sacrifice [food] to idols.’ Women who had been the innocent victims of rape were guiltless, following the precepts of Deuteronomy xxii.26–7: ‘But unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing … for he found her in the field, and the damsel cried, and there was none to save her.’ It was different, however, noted the bishop, with women whose past life had shown them to be of a flighty disposition: ‘then clearly the state of fornication is suspect even in a time of captivity; and one ought not readily to share in one’s prayers with such women.’ One can only speculate about the grim consequences of this ruling in the tight little communities of the towns and villages of Pontus. Gregory’s sense of outrage is vividly conveyed across the seventeen centuries that separate him from us. Prisoners of the Goths who, ‘forgetting that they were men of Pontus, and Christians’, directed their captors to properties which could be looted, must be excommunicated. Roman citizens, ‘men impious and hateful to God’, have themselves taken part in looting. They have ‘become Goths to others’ by appropriating booty taken but abandoned by the raiders. It was ‘something quite unbelievable’, but they have ‘reached such a point of cruelty and inhumanity’ as to enslave prisoners who had succeeded in escaping from their barbarian captors. They have used the cover of disorder to prosecute private feuds. They have demanded rewards for restoring property to its rightful owners. Gregory commended to his correspondent the measures which he had taken in his own diocese: enquiries, hearing public denunciations, setting up tribunals (‘the assembly of the saints’) and punishments meted out in accordance with the extremely severe penitential discipline of the early church. There are parallels here with the fate of all later actual or suspected collaborationists. Many, however, were beyond the reach of Gregory’s ministrations. These were the captives who did not escape, who were not wealthy enough to buy their freedom, who were of insufficient status to command a ransom payment from kinsfolk or neighbours left at home. Borne offinto slavery among barbarians, the captives took with them the solace of their Christian faith. In this fashion little pockets of Christianity struck root among the Goths outside the frontiers of the empire.

The Goths matter to us because their crossing of the Danube frontier in 376 and subsequent settlement inside the empire symbolize the beginning of the process which since the time of Edward Gibbon we have known as the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Who were these barbarians?

Those whom Roman writers of the third and fourth centuries referred to as Goths were a variety of peoples who spoke a Germanic language, Gothic. Known to the Romans in the first century A.D., they were then living in the basin of the lower Vistula in what is now Poland. They migrated thence in a south-easterly direction towards the Ukraine in the latter part of the second century. At the time of the raids on Asia Minor they were settled most thickly in the lower valleys of the Dnieper and the Dniester. Some among them were expanding to the south-west, into what is now northern Romania. This brought them into proximity with the only province of the Roman empire which lay to the north of the Danube, namely Dacia; an area bounded on the south by the Danube between the Iron Gates and its confluence with the river Olt, spreading northwards to take in the uplands of Transylvania embraced by the Carpathian mountains. During the troubled middle years of the third century the Goths pressed hard on the frontiers of Dacia and launched raids into Thrace and even Greece. It was to some degree in response to this pressure that the Emperor Aurelian withdrew Roman rule from Dacia in the early 270s. Thenceforward this sector of the empire’s frontier lay along the Danube. The Goths moved into the abandoned but by no means deserted province. Dacia had experienced a century and a half of Romanization. Substantial elements of the Romano-Dacian population remained, and archaeological evidence suggests that a modest urban life with a modest villa economy to supply its needs limped along into the Gothic period. It is possible, though unproven, that there were Christian communities among the population of Dacia in the third century. The most extraordinary witness to the tenacity of Roman civilization is the survival there of the Latin language, the ancestor of modern Romanian.

3. To illustrate the activities of Ulfila during the fourth century.

Much has been revealed about Gothic culture in this period by the archaeologists. To the evidence of the so-called Sîntana de Mureş/Černjachov culture, so named from sites respectively in Transylvania and the Ukraine, may be added a little information from Roman writers. What these combined sources have to tell us is as follows. The Goths were settled agriculturalists who practised both arable and pastoral farming. They lived in substantial villages but not in towns. Their houses were of wood, wattle-and-daub and thatch; sometimes they had stone footings or floors. Traceable artefacts are pottery, wheel-thrown, of good quality clay; iron tools and weapons; buckles and brooches of bronze or silver; and objects made of bone such as combs. These artefacts, commonplace enough in themselves, suggest a degree of specialization and division of labour. The Goths disposed of their dead by both cremation and inhumation, and the remains were frequently though not always accompanied by grave-goods. Variations in quantity and quality of personal possessions (in graves), and in the size of dwellings, suggest communities wherein were marked differences of wealth and status. A few hazardous inferences about the religious beliefs of the Goths may be essayed by the imprudent on the basis of the archaeological materials. The written sources tell us of sacrificial meat – if not among raiding parties in Asia Minor – and of wooden images or idols. We hear of a war god and of seasonal festivals. Gothic political organization is scarcely documented at all, and therefore fiercely controversial among scholars. However, it is likely that among the group of Goths settled to the west of the Dniester and termed by a Roman contemporary the Tervingi there existed in the fourth century a hereditary monarchy and a nobility of tribal chieftains. The Goths cannot be said to have had a written culture, though they did possess a runic alphabet. Runic inscriptions have been found on some grave-goods and, most famously and enigmatically, on a great gold torque, or neck ring, found in the treasure of Pietroasa in Romania, unearthed in 1837. Finally, we must observe that their interactions with the Roman world across the Danube were close and not always hostile. Goths left their native land to serve in the imperial armies, sometimes rising to high rank. Large amounts of Roman coin circulated in Gothia. Archaeologists have found remains of the tall, narrow Mediterranean pots called amphorae in Gothic contexts: they were used for the transport of wine or oil, commodities more likely to be trade goods than plunder.

In sum, the Goths were in no sense ‘primitive’ peoples. The Tervingi in Dacia (who are our main concern) were neighbours of the Romans, living in a Romanized province, with Roman provincials – whether native or captive – living under their rule. On the periphery of the Roman world, they experienced cultural interactions with their imposing neighbour. Like all the other Germanic barbarian peoples, the Goths in peacetime found much to admire, to envy and to imitate in Roman ways. When the pressure of Roman might bore down on them too heavily, they defended themselves by adopting those political and military usages which they had correctly identified as buttressing Roman imperial hegemony. It is a familiar pattern: peripheral outsiders tend to model themselves upon the hegemonic power on whose flanks they are situated. When the defences of the Roman empire gave way the Germanic barbarians entered upon an inheritance for which they had long been preparing themselves. They came not to wreck but to join. In this manner the decline and fall of the western empire was to be not destruction but dismemberment, a sharing out of working parts under new management.

Matters did not present themselves in such a rosy light to the provincials who lived to the south of the Danube in closest proximity to the Tervingi in the fourth century; nor to the imperial government whose job it was to protect them. Although there would seem to have been uneasy peace for a generation or so after the Gothic settlement in Dacia, pressure on the imperial borders started up again during the first quarter of the new century. The lower Danube frontier was impressively defended. There was a string of forts along the southern bank whose garrisons numbered at least 60,000 men. Detachments of the imperial fleet regularly patrolled the river. There were arms and clothing factories a little way behind the frontier to supply the troops. A spirit of invention and experiment is attested to by a curious anonymous work from this period and, quite possibly, this region which sought government sponsorship for, among other things, a paddledriven warship powered by oxen, a piece of mobile field-artillery, a portable bridge made of inflated skins and a new and improved version of the scythed chariot drawn by mail-clad horses. In the 320s Constantine built a colossal bridge over the Danube – it was 2,437 metres long – a little above its confluence with the Olt and used it to reoccupy Oltenia, the land in the angle between the two rivers. From this base a campaign was mounted against the Tervingi in 332. It was completely successful: the Tervingi were defeated and reduced to client status, their ruler’s son carried off to Constantinople as a hostage. This peace lasted for thirty-five years with only small-scale violations, notably in the late 340s. In the 360s it broke down, and the Emperor Valens fought a less decisive war in the years 367–9 which brought about a further pacification. There matters rested until the arrival on the scene shortly afterwards of a terrifying new enemy, the Huns.

The Huns changed the terms of Romano-Gothic relations for ever. A nomadic people from central Asia, wonderfully skilled with horse, bow and lassoo and with a reputation as pitiless enemies, they began to move westwards – no one really knows why – in the second half of the fourth century. In the early 370s they collided with the Greuthingi, the eastern group of Goths settled between the Dniester and the Dnieper. The Greuthingi were defeated, the survivors among them enslaved. In the wake of these events the Tervingi sought asylum within the Roman empire. Reluctantly, Valens agreed to this request. In 376 the Tervingi crossed the Danube on to imperial territory. Relations between Goths and Romans broke down in the following year when the imperial government failed to keep its promises about supplying foodstuffs to the refugees. War followed in 378. A decisive battle was fought near Adrianople in August; the Roman army was defeated and the Emperor Valens killed at the hands of the Tervingi under their leader Fritigern. There ensued four years of confusion during which the Goths failed to take Constantinople and pillaged Thrace. In 382 a settlement was reached with the new emperor, Theodosius I: Fritigern and his followers were permitted to settle peacefully in the province of Moesia, south of the Danube and just west of the Black Sea. There they remained until 395 when a new leader, Alaric, would start the Goths on further travels which would take them to Italy, where they would sack Rome in 410; then to Aquitaine, where they were again settled under treaty arrangements in 418; and finally to Spain, where the Gothic monarchy would flourish until overthrown by the forces of Islam early in the eighth century.

Among those who were carried off into permanent captivity in the course of the Gothic raids into Pontus in the middle of the third century were the ancestors of Ulfila. The family evidently retained a memory of its origins. Ulfila knew that his ancestors had lived in a village called Sadagolthina, near Parnassus in Cappadocia, about fifty miles south of modern Ankara. (This is at least 150 miles from the nearest point on the Black Sea coast: it shows how far inland the Gothic raiders had penetrated and explains something of the terror they inspired.) We know too that this band of displaced persons in Gothia not only retained but also diffused their faith. ‘They converted many of the barbarians to the way of piety and persuaded them to adopt the Christian faith,’ tells the fifth-century historian Philostorgius, one of the principal sources for what little we know of Ulfila. It may be that the family intermarried with Goths; so much is suggested by Ulfila’s Gothic name: we do not know. Indeed, it must be stressed that we know absolutely nothing whatsoever about the conditions in which captives and their descendants lived among the Goths. This is one of several areas of puzzlement and uncertainty which necessarily render our understanding of Ulfila so hazy. Another concerns his education. Ulfila had been ‘carefully instructed’, recorded his pupil Auxentius. He was fluent in Greek, Latin and Gothic, in all three of which languages he composed ‘several tractates and many interpretations’. His translation of the Bible into Gothic was a towering intellectual achievement. In the world of late antiquity education to anything beyond the most elementary level was only for the rich, or those who could find a rich patron. How and where did Ulfila get his education? We have not the remotest idea.

At the age of thirty, when he had attained the rank of lector or reader, one of the minor orders of the church, Ulfila was sent to Constantinople by the ruler of the Tervingi as a member of a diplomatic mission. This would have been in about 340 or 341, some years after the peace of 332. The imperial throne was now occupied by Constantius II (337–61), son of the great Constantine. Again, we wonder why Ulfila was chosen to serve in this capacity. While in Constantinople he was consecrated a bishop by the patriarch. (There are formidable difficulties about the date of his consecration, which I here pass over.) His commission was to be ‘bishop of the Christians in the Gothic land’; to serve, that is, an existing Christian community – by whom indeed his episcopal consecration had presumably been requested – not to undertake specifically missionary activities.

His episcopate ‘in the Gothic land’ lasted for seven years, which takes us to 347/8. At the end of this period the ‘impious and sacrilegious’ (but unnamed) ruler of the Tervingi initiated ‘a tyrannical and fearsome persecution’ of the Christians under his rule. Ulfila evidently judged that discretion was the better part of valour and led a large body of refugee Christians across the Danube and into asylum on Roman soil. Welcomed by the authorities with honour and respect, Ulfila and his flock received from the emperor land on which to settle near the city of Nicopolis (Veliko Tǔrnovo in the north of modern Bulgaria), some thirty miles south of the frontier in the province of Moesia Inferior. We are told that Constantius held Ulfila ‘in the highest esteem’ and would often refer to him as ‘the Moses of our time’ because through him God had liberated the Christians of Dacia from barbarian captivity.

Ulfila spent the rest of his life at Nicopolis, ministering to his congregations, studying, teaching, translating the Bible. He was also drawn into the principal theological controversy of the day, the Trinitarian debate arising from the teachings of the Alexandrian priest Arius (d. 336). Arianism was the doctrine that the Son of God was created by the Father. Its opponents, who claimed the name of Catholic which literally means ‘general’ or ‘universal’ – taught that Father, Son and Holy Spirit were co-eternal and equal in Godhead. To put this in another way, Arius sought to avoid any dilution of monotheism by stressing the indivisibility, the majestic one-ness and omnipotence of God, and the subordination to Him of the Son. To those not attuned to theological debate, the relationship between the three Persons of the Trinity is an unrewarding topic. We must accept, first, that it was long and keenly debated in the fourth century and that it nourished some of the finest minds of the age. Second, we should bear in mind that at the time – whatever the dispute might have been made to look like by later commentators – it was not a simple matter of a straight fight between orthodoxy and heresy. Trinitarian orthodoxy was not something given, like the doctrines of the Resurrection or the Ascension. It was in the process of being hammered out by recourse to difficult scriptural texts which could yield diverse interpretations. The problem was to find a doctrinal formula which would satisfy several different theological factions. Third, the debate was one which necessarily had a political dimension. With the arrival on the scene of imperial patronage of the Christian church, theological controversy could no longer be simply a matter of intellectual debate. What was now also at stake was access to huge and unprecedented material resources, legal privileges and influence at the imperial court. The penalties of finding yourself on the losing side were therefore substantial. Constantine, having once publicly associated himself with Christianity, had taken an assertive if not always instructed role in ecclesiastical controversy. He it was who had summoned and presided over the council of Nicaea in 325, the first major attempt to find a doctrinal formulation which would be widely acceptable; the Nicene creed was the result. This settlement of the dispute held the field, though not unchallenged, until Constantine’s death in 337. But his son Constantius favoured the Arian tendency and under his patronage successive councils – Antioch in 341, Sirmium in 351, Rimini in 359, Constantinople in 360 – drafted credal statements which, though necessarily in the circumstances somewhat fudgy, leant away from the Nicene position towards the Arian one. Ulfila was consecrated a bishop by one of the leading spirits of this ‘court Arianism’, attended the council of Constantinople in 360 and was on close terms with an emperor who was widely held to be sympathetic to Arianism. The successor of Constantius in the eastern half of the empire, after the brief resign of Julian the Apostate (361–3), was Valens (364–78), who proved another protector of the Arians. One fifth-century historian, Sozomen, tells us that Ulfila was chosen to head the embassy to Valens which sought permission for the Tervingi to enter the empire in 376. If true, this report would suggest that Ulfila had contrived to maintain the connections with the imperial court which he had enjoyed in the time of Constantius. But the tide was turning against the moderately Arian or non-Nicene party. The Emperor Theodosius I (379–95) was an unswerving partisan of the doctrinal formulations of Nicaea. Decrees enjoining the acceptance of the Nicene creed were issued in 380. In the following year Arian churches were confiscated and handed over to the Catholics, and all meetings of the heretics were banned. The last glimpse we have of Ulfila is in 383, travelling to Constantinople to attend another church council in the company of two Danubian bishops, deposed for Arianism, whose cause he was going to plead with the emperor. He died in Constantinople shortly afterwards.

The main reason why we know so little of Ulfila lies in the victory, never to be reversed, of Nicene orthodoxy in official circles in his last years. It is a good example of the adage that history is written by the victors. The memory of Arius and his followers was systematically vilified, their writings hunted down and destroyed. Ulfila was too big to be ignored; but he could be, and was, belittled. Had the moderateArian creed to which he adhered come out on top, Ulfila would be remembered as one of the giants of the fourth-century church. As it is, we have to struggle with fragmentary and ambiguous texts to discern even the shadowy outline of a notable career.

What then was the significance of Ulfila? He was not a missionary in the generally accepted sense of the word. He did not go off to live among a heathen people in order to convert them to Christianity. Instead, he went as the bishop of an existing Christian community beyond the imperial frontier, a community which no doubt included persons of Gothic birth but which was principally composed of displaced foreigners living under Gothic rule. We need not doubt that this community made converts among the Goths in Ulfila’s day as it had done before; but conversion of the heathen was not perceived as its prime function. The Christians in Gothia were, in Gibbon’s words, ‘involuntary missionaries’.²

Ulfila was almost certainly not the first churchman to have been sent to serve Christian communities among the Goths beyond the imperial frontiers. Among the bishops who attended the council of Nicaea in 325 was a certain Theophilus ‘of Gothia’; it has been conjectured that he ministered to Christian communities among the Goths settled in the Crimea. A letter of St Basil of Cappadocia written in about 375 refers to a certain Eutyches, who had evidently lived at some time past but of whom nothing further is known, in terms which suggest ministry in Gothic lands. However, as we have already seen in the course of discussion in Chapter 1, there was at that period no sense that it was the duty of the Romano-Christian world to evangelize pagan barbarians beyond its borders. Christianity was not for outsiders. So we are told: yet the question may be probed a little further. The adhesion of Constantine to Christianity was followed by an ever more strident and assertive trend towards the near-identification of empire and church. Christianity thus became a part of the empire’s cultural armoury. Did it occur to the imperial establishment of the fourth century, as it would in later centuries, that the faith could be used to tame threatening barbarians in their homelands? We do not know, but it looks as though the Goths thought so. Each of the two known outbreaks of anti-Christian persecution by the Gothic authorities in the fourth century coincided with periods of military hostilities between Goth and Roman. The first of these was in 347–8, when Ulfila left Gothia to cross the Danube and settle at Nicopolis. The second came in the wake of Valens’ Gothic war of 367–9. We are rather well informed about it owing to the survival of an account of the sufferings of a Gothic martyr, Saba, who perished on 12 April 372. A recent authority has commented that ‘the Goths would seem to have been afraid that Christianity would undermine that part of Gothic identity which was founded in their common inherited beliefs, so that religion was not just an individual spiritual concern, but also a political issue standing in some relation to GothoRoman affairs.’³

All of which prompts further speculation about the role of Ulfila. His relations with the imperial Christian establishment were close: he was consecrated a bishop in Constantinople, given land near Nicopolis by his admirer Constantius, attended councils within the empire, was apparently confident of his intercessory powers with Theodosius I. It is impossible not to reflect that when he returned to the empire in 347–8 Ulfila must have been in a position to furnish the government with a good deal of useful intelligence concerning goings-on in Gothia: possibly on other occasions too. Does this mean that in going to Gothia as a bishop Ulfila was undertaking what has been called an ‘imperially-sponsored mission’? That is perhaps to go too far. Ulfila was not a Roman agent. We must remember that he was so far trusted by the Gothic authorities as to be commissioned to negotiate on their behalf on two occasions that we know of, possibly on others of which we are ignorant. Ulfila faced both ways. Missionary or quasi-missionary churchmen often do.

It is entirely appropriate, in the light of this, that his most enduring achievement should have been the translation of the Bible into Gothic, giving to his people, or his people by adoption, the holy writings of the Roman faith in their own Germanic tongue. Here is Philostorgius again: ‘He was the inventor for them of their own letters, and translated all the Scriptures into their language – with the exception, that is, of the books of Kings. This was because these books contain the history of wars, while the Gothic people, being lovers of war, were in need of something to restrain their passion for fighting rather than to incite them to it.’ Ulfila was not the first to undertake biblical translation; the so-called ‘Old Latin’ and Syriac versions were already in circulation. But these were existing literary languages current within the Roman empire. To no one had the notion occurred of translating the scriptures into a barbarian tongue which had never been written down before. Perhaps, as is often the case with simple but revolutionary and liberating ideas, it could only have come to one who was himself in some sense an outsider.

4. To illustrate the activities of Ninian and Patrick in the fifth century.

If we now direct our attention to the western extremities of the empire at a time a couple of generations or so after Ulfila’s day we shall meet two further instances of the same phenomenon, the sending of bishops to existing Christian communities outside the imperial frontier. We shall also encounter something altogether unexpected in a late-antique context: a churchman who experienced a missionary vocation to take the faith to heathen barbarians and who has left a precious account of how he came to engage himself in such an eccentric activity.

Our first instance is a very shadowy one, about whom we know far less than we do about Ulfila. Ninian, or Nynia, was the name of a British bishop sent to minister to a community of Christians in what is now Galloway in the south-west of Scotland. His episcopate is most probably to be placed somewhere in the middle years of the fifth century. By this time the Roman provinces of Britain were no longer part of the empire. As with Dacia in the 270s, so in 410 the government of the Emperor Honorius had taken the decision to withdraw the apparatus of Roman rule from Britain. It is unlikely that contemporaries imagined that this state of affairs would be permanent; both the imperial government and the British provincials probably anticipated that at some stage in the future, when times were easier, Roman control would be reimposed. Meanwhile, life in Britain seems to have gone on in much the same way until well into the fifth century.

Galloway was within reach, by way of the easily navigable Solway Firth, of the contiguous parts of what had been Roman Britain: the town of Lugubalium (Carlisle), the forts of the Cumbrian coast, and the farms of the Eden valley. A scatter of small finds – coins, pottery – of Romano-British material in south-western Scotland indicates that connections were established. How a Christian community grew up there we have no means of knowing, but that one was in existence by the fifth century is certain. It is attested by the so-called ‘Latinus’ stone at Whithorn, datable to c. 450, whose enigmatic Latin inscription may record – the latest suggestion by a leading authority – the foundation of a Christian church there by a man named Latinus.⁴ We have a context for Bishop Ninian. We might also have the names of two of his successors. Some twenty miles west of Whithorn, at Kirkmadrine in the Rhinns of Galloway, another inscribed stone, possibly of the early sixth century, commemorates ‘the holy and outstanding sacerdotes Viventius and Mavorius’. (Sacerdotes could mean either ‘priests’ or ‘bishops’: in the Latin of that period the second meaning was more common than the first.)

Ninian himself is not mentioned by name until the eighth century, when Bede devoted two passing sentences to him in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede was, as I have said in Chapter 1, a very conscientious scholar who in this instance dutifully reported what he had heard from persons whom he regarded as reliable sources. Among them was quite probably the English Bishop Pehthelm of the recently revived see of Whithorn. However, Bede was careful to qualify his report with a hint of uncertainty: ‘as they say’. What Bede had been told was that Ninian was a Briton who had received religious instruction at Rome, had gone as a bishop to Whithorn, where he had built a church of stone dedicated to St Martin of Tours, had converted the southern Picts to Christianity and had on his death been buried at Whithorn. This report presents all sorts of difficulties. It is generally though not universally agreed that some of what Bede tells us is more likely to represent what the eighth century wanted to believe about Ninian than any historical reality. As we shall see in due course, the eighth century was more interested in Roman connections and missions to barbarians than was the fifth. It may not be irrelevant that Bishop Pehthelm was a correspondent of the great St Boniface, strenuous upholder of Roman direction of the church’s overriding duty of mission to pagan barbarian peoples. All that is reasonably certain is that a Christian community had grown up beyond the imperial frontier in Britain and that Ninian had been appointed its bishop.

Our second instance of a bishop sent beyond the western extremities of the empire is a mite less shadowy. The contemporary chronicler named Prosper of Aquitaine – he whose De Vocatione Omnium Gentium occupied us briefly in Chapter 1 – informs us in his annal for the year 431 that (in his own words) ‘Palladius, consecrated by Pope Celestine, is sent as their first bishop to the Irish believers in Christ.’ Here at last is some ‘hard’ information. Prosper had visited Rome in that very year, 431, to consult Pope Celestine on a matter of theological controversy. He could even have met Palladius on the occasion of the latter’s visit to Rome for episcopal consecration. We may be as certain as we can be of anything in this period that in the year 431 an Irish Christian community received Palladius as its first bishop.

Ireland, notoriously, had never formed a part of the Roman empire. But as with Gothia or Galloway there was a degree of cultural interaction between Ireland and the neighbouring provinces which may plausibly be invoked in an investigation of Irish Christian origins. There were trading relations of long standing between Britain and Ireland. As long ago as the first century Tacitus could observe in his memoir of his father-in-law Agricola that Ireland’s harbours were known to the Roman forces in Britain ‘through trading and merchants’. A variety of artefacts provides archaeological confirmation of lively commerce between eastern and southern Ireland and her neighbours to the east, Britain and quite possibly Gaul too, throughout the Roman period and beyond. Irish mercenaries served in the Roman army in Britain. Refugees from Britain sought asylum in Ireland. Pirates from Ireland were raiding the western seaboard of Britain from the third century onwards, for the same reasons that Ukrainian Goths were striking deep into Asia Minor. Forts such as those at Cardiff, Caer Gybi on Anglesey, Lancaster and Ravenglass were built to protect civilian Britain from these predators. In 367 an unprecedented alliance of Irish, Picts (from Scotland) and Saxons (from north Germany) overcame the defences of Britain and plundered the provinces for nearly two years. A chieftain remembered in Irish legend as Niall Noígiallach, Niall ‘of the Nine Hostages’, was raiding Britain in the late fourth century.

There was in addition Irish settlement in south-western Wales, the modern Dyfed, then known as Demetia, from perhaps as early as the fourth century. The evidence for this comes from three different types of source. There are memorial stones in the area inscribed with Irish names, often in the linear script known as ogham, which seems to have originated in the south-east of Ireland at about this period. There are place-names with Irish elements, hard to date, whose distribution to a great degree overlaps with the inscribed stones. And there are legends, which may contain a kernel of historical truth, about the fourth-century migration of a tribe called the Déisi from south-eastern Ireland to Wales. It is by means of these settlers, presumed to have maintained contact with their kinsfolk in Ireland, that elements of Romano-British culture are most likely to have seeped back there. One such element was language, the borrowing of a number of Latin loanwords into Old Irish. Another was religion: the Irish settlers were near neighbours of Caerleon-on-Usk with its Diocletianic martyrs Aaron and Julius, and its Christian landed gentry in the villas of Gwent and Glamorgan. It was probably from south Wales that Christianity first came to Ireland.

It was to these Irish Christians that Palladius was sent in 431. Who was he? A person of the same name is mentioned in an earlier annal in Prosper’s chronicle, that for 429, which runs as follows: ‘Agricola, a Pelagian, the son of the Pelagian Bishop Severianus, corrupts the churches of Britain by the insinuation of his teaching. However, at the suggestion of the Deacon Palladius, Pope Celestine sends Bishop Germanus of Auxerre as his legate and he guides the Britons back to the Catholic faith after routing the heretics.’ The mission of Bishop Germanus to Britain in 429, and another one a few years later (perhaps 435/6), are attested in other sources. It is plain moreover from remarks made by Prosper in another of his works that there was anxiety that the taint of heresy might infect the Irish Christian community too.

Now the name Palladius was not particularly common in the western provinces of the empire. It is almost inconceivable that there were two different men called Palladius who both concerned themselves with the spiritual welfare of the Christian communities of the British Isles in the second quarter of the fifth century. We assume that there was a single Palladius, and we further assume that he held the office of deacon in one of the churches of northern Gaul, probably but not necessarily Auxerre, from which he was despatched to Rome in 429. That is all we know of Palladius. We do not know where the seat of his bishopric was, though we may suspect that it was in the south-east quarter of the island. We do not know how long his episcopate lasted, nor the names and doings of his successors (if any). But there he stands: the first known figure in the history of organized Irish Christianity. It is his misfortune to have been overshadowed by the next: Patrick.

Patrick is a famously difficult subject for the historian. It might be easiest to start by indicating some of the things which he did not do. He did not expel snakes from Ireland: the snakelessness of Ireland had been noted by the Roman geographer Solinus in the third century. He did not compose that wonderful hymn known as ‘Saint Patrick’s Breastplate’: its language postdates him by about three centuries. He did not drive a chariot three times over his sister Lupait to punish her unchastity: the allegation that he did first occurs in a life of Patrick which is a farrago of legend put together about 400 years after his death. He did not use the leaves of the shamrock to illustrate the Persons of the Trinity for his converts: true, he might have done; but it is not until the seventeenth century that we are told that he did.

It would be possible to list many more things that Patrick did not do. Enough has been said to indicate that we are dealing with a figure whose reality has to a great degree been obscured by the accretion of later legend – and, one might add, of later controversy, whether sectarian or nationalistic. It cannot be too strongly urged that in studying Patrick it is absolutely essential to focus attention upon the earliest texts only: all others are suspect because their authors had axes to grind of one sort or another – the primacy of the church of Armagh, the ultra-Catholic character of Patrick, the ultra-Protestant character of Patrick, the claim that there were two Patricks, the claim that there was no Patrick because he was Palladius, and so forth. The earliest texts are two, both of them securely attributed – despite some doubts by hyper-critical scholars – to Patrick himself. In chronological order of composition they are the Epistola (or ‘Letter’) and the Confessio (or ‘Declaration’). The Epistola is a letter addressed to the troops serving under the command of a certain Coroticus, denouncing them for the massacre of some of Patrick’s converts. The Confessio is a justification of his career and conduct, apparently in answer to critics or accusers. Both works contain autobiographical materials of which Patrician scholars have wrestled to make sense.⁵

The wrestling is necessary because Patrick’s writings are exceedingly difficult to interpret. This is partly because the texts might have been garbled in transmission, but above all it is owing to the language in which they are written. Patrick wrote in Latin, but of a very peculiar kind; indeed, his Latin is unique in the whole vast corpus of ancient or early Christian Latin literature. He had received little formal education – it was to cause him shame all his life – and he did not handle the Latin language with any facility. He longs, passionately longs, to make himself clear to his readers but has the utmost difficulty in so doing. His Latin is simple, awkward, laborious, sometimes ambiguous, occasionally unintelligible. It follows that there is a large latitude for debate about what his words actually mean, a latitude of which Patrician scholars have shown no bashfulness in liberally availing themselves.

All that is necessary here is to furnish a concise indication of what is generally agreed, except on the lunatic fringes of Patrician studies, about Patrick’s career. I deliberately refrain from entering into questions of chronology, which present the thorniest of all problems for those in quest of the historical Patrick. It is accepted that his adult life fell within the fifth century. His episcopate in Ireland must postdate 431 because Prosper tells us that Palladius was Ireland’s first bishop. Beyond that we need not go.

Patrick tells us in the Confessio that he was of British and landed birth. His family owned an estate at an unidentified place called Bannaventa. They were not only Christians but ecclesiastics: Patrick’s grandfather Potitus was a priest and his father Calpornius a deacon.* Patrick was brought up a Christian but on his own admission was not a good one during his childhood. When he was nearly sixteen he was taken captive by Irish raiders and carried off into slavery in Ireland. For six years he worked as a herdsman at a place which he refers to as ‘the forest of Foclut which is near the western sea’ (tentatively identified as the region of Killala in County Mayo). It was during this period of slavery that his Christian faith deepened. At the end of six years he managed to escape, and after much danger and hardship found himself in Gaul, where he appears to have spent some time. Then he returned to Britain and rejoined his family. It was at home that he had the most important of all the dreams through which, as he believed, God guided his life: he experienced a call to undertake the conversion of the pagan Irish to Christianity. After (presumed) preparation he was consecrated a bishop and returned to Ireland. Although this has to be inferred, the likelihood is that the zone of his missionary labours was the northern half of the island. He spent the rest of his life in Ireland, despite perils and privations making converts and establishing a church. He also had to face accusations and misrepresentations about the conduct of his mission, to which the Confessio seems to have been the reply.

Patrick recalled his vocation in a well-known passage which yet can bear repetition because it is such an extraordinary piece of writing. It occurs in Chapters 23 to 25 of the Confessio.

Again a few years later I was in Britain with my kinsfolk, and they welcomed me as a son and asked me earnestly not to go off anywhere and leave them this time, after the great tribulations which I had been through. And it was there that I saw one night in a vision a man coming from Ireland (his name was Victoricus), with countless letters; and he gave me one of them, and I read the heading of the letter, ‘The Voice of the Irish’, and as I read these opening words aloud I imagined at that very instant that I heard the voice of those who were beside the forest of Foclut which is near the western sea; and thus they cried, as though with one voice: ‘We beg you, holy boy, to come and walk again among us.’ And I was stung with remorse in my heart and could not read on, and so I awoke. Thanks be to God, that after so many years the Lord bestowed on them according to their cry. And another night (I do not know, God knows, whether it was within me or beside me) I was addressed in words which I heard and yet could not understand, except that at the end of the prayer He spoke thus: ‘He who gave His life for you, He it is who speaks within you,’ and so I awoke, overjoyed. And again I saw Him praying within me and I was, as it were, inside my own body, and I heard Him above me, that is to say above my inner self, and He was praying there powerfully and groaning; and meanwhile I was dumbfounded and astonished and wondered who it could be that was praying within me, but at the end of the prayer He spoke and said that He was the Spirit, and so I awoke and remembered the apostle’s words: ‘The Spirit helps the weaknesses of our prayer; for we do not know what to pray for as we ought; but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with unspeakable groans which cannot be expressed in words.’

No one can doubt the authenticity of the experience or fail to be moved by the writer’s efforts to describe it. In another passage Patrick linked his vocation to the missionary imperatives of the Bible.

For He granted me such grace that through me many peoples should be reborn in God and afterwards be confirmed and that clergy should everywhere be ordained for them, to serve a people just now coming to the faith, and which the Lord chose from the ends of the earth, as He had promised of old through His prophets: ‘The nations will come to you from the ends of the earth and will say, “How false are the idols which our fathers made for themselves; they are quite useless.” ‘ And again, ‘I have put you as a light among the nations, to be a means of salvation to the ends of the earth.’

And I wish to wait there for His promise (and He of course never deceives), as He promises in the gospel: ‘They shall come from the east and from the west and shall sit down at table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob’, as we believe that believers will surely come from the whole world. And so then, it is our duty to fish well and diligently, as the Lord urges and teaches us, saying: ‘Follow me, and I shall make you fishers of men;’ and again he says through the prophets, ‘See, I send many fishers and hunters, says God.’ And so it was our bounden duty to spread our nets, so that a vast multitude and throng might be caught for God and there might be clergy everywhere to baptise and exhort a people that was poor and needy, as the Lord says – He urges and teaches in the gospel, saying: ‘Go now, teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you.’

And there is much more in the same vein. Patrick could describe himself as ‘a slave in Christ to a foreign people’ and could pray that God should ‘never allow me to be separated from His people whom He has won in the ends of the earth.’

Patrick’s originality was that no one within western Christendom had thought such thoughts as these before, had ever previously been possessed by such convictions. As far as our evidence goes, he was the first person in Christian history to take the scriptural injunctions literally; to grasp that teaching all nations meant teaching even barbarians who lived beyond the frontiers of the Roman empire. Patrick crossed that threshold upon which, at the end of Chapter 1, we left Augustine and Prosper hesitating.

It is very difficult to assess Patrick’s achievement. We have his own word, which we do not need to doubt, that he made ‘many thousands’ of converts. These included persons of every social rank from the nobility to slaves. He travelled widely: evangelization took him ‘to the remote districts beyond which there was no one and where no one had ever penetrated to baptise’. He encouraged the adoption of the monastic way of life. He ordained priests, presumably after instruction. So much he tells us. It is reasonable to infer a little more: for example, that he established places where worship might occur, even if he did not build any churches (though he may have done); or that he encouraged his priests to acquire literacy in Latin and to multiply Christian texts.

Patrick initiated the conversion of the pagan Irish to Christianity and in so doing set an example to his successors in Ireland. A church which looked to Patrick as its founder would come to set a high value upon foreign missionary enterprise. This lay in the future. The immediate task of Patrick’s successors was to continue the work which he had begun. It is unfortunate for us that the century following the floruit of Patrick is the most obscure in the history of Christianity in Ireland. When the surviving evidence becomes more robust, begins to increase, to diversify and to gain in reliability – that is to say, roughly speaking, from the latter part of the sixth century – we find ourselves on the threshold of the great age of the Irish saints, of Irish Christian scholarship and Irish Christian art. Even if we had no other sources of information we should be able to infer that much had happened since the time of Palladius and Patrick. Happily we do have a little information about the growth and consolidation of Christian culture in sixth-century Ireland.

There survives a list of decisions taken by a synod or gathering of bishops known as the ‘First Synod of St Patrick’.⁶ This is misleading: the attribution to Patrick comes from a later period and is erroneous. It is impossible to pinpoint the real date of the synod with any degree of accuracy, though a plausible case can be made for somewhere in the first half of the sixth century. The interest of the rulings for us is that they display an Irish church in a society which was still to a great degree pagan. We hear of Christians taking oaths before soothsayers ‘in the manner of pagans’, of Christian clerics standing as legal sureties for pagans, and of pagans who attempt, intriguingly, to make offerings to Christian churches – they are to be refused. We get a sense of Christianity and paganism co-existing and in some sense interpenetrating in the Ireland for which the bishops legislated.

Two of the rulings concern the building of churches and two more seem to assume that episcopal visitation of the churches in a diocese will occur at least from time to time. No surviving church structures in Ireland may be assigned to so early a period as the sixth century. Place-names, however, come to our aid. Several Irish place-names derive from the Old Irish word domnach; for example Donnybrook, Dublin, or Donaghmore in Co. Tyrone. The word domnach is a loanword from the Latin dominicum, meaning ‘a church building’. Now dominicum in this particular sense was current in ecclesiastical Latin only between the years c. 300 and c. 600. It follows that placenames of this type indicate churches built before the seventh century. Another category of Irish names derives from Late Latin senella cella, Old Irish sen chell, meaning ‘old church’; this has yielded modern names such as Shankill. The term sen chell as a place-name element was current by about 670 at latest. It follows that ‘new churches’ were being founded in large numbers in the course of the seventh century; and that the ‘old churches’ which had preceded them were plentiful enough to be a recognizable category of building.

Christian churches imply Christian texts. Patrick was soaked in the Bible, as may be readily seen from passages in his Confessio quoted above, and he would have seen to it that the priests he ordained were too. Familiarity with the Bible and the Christian liturgy presupposed two things: learning Latin and acquiring the technology of writing. Ancient Ireland had a rich oral repertoire of poetry and narrative but early Christian leaders there seem to have been reluctant to translate Christian texts into the vernacular and write them down; possibly the Irish vernacular was held to be tainted by association with paganism. (It should be said that these inhibitions were overcome at a later stage and that in the course of time Ireland developed a rich Christian literature in Old Irish.) Whatever the reason, early Irish converts, unlike Ulfila’s Goths, were not presented with a vernacular Bible. So Patrick’s clerical disciples had to learn Latin. Moreover, they had to learn Latin as a foreign language. The Provencal audiences of Caesarius, the flock of Bishop Martin in Touraine, even the rustics of Galicia, all spoke Latin of a sort. The Irish did not. Learning Latin, for them, meant schools and grammar and a lot of hard work. It was the need to acquire facility in Latin – in an environment which lacked the educational system which was such a central feature of late-antique literary culture in the Roman empire – which made the pursuit of learning an essential feature of Irish Christian communities in the early Middle Ages. Much was to follow from this. Early results were impressive: the first Irishman who has left us a substantial body of Latin writings was St Columbanus. He was born in about 545 and devoted his youth to ‘liberal and grammatical studies’, in the words of his earliest biographer: this would have been in the 550s and early 560s. The Latin of Columbanus was confident, supple and elegant, altogether different from the raw uncouth Latin of Patrick. It is plain that by the middle of the sixth century it was possible in Ireland to acquire a really good Latin education.

The earliest Irish Latin texts that have survived to the present day date from about the year 600. The so-called Codex Usserianus Primus is a copy of the gospels, now preserved in Trinity College, Dublin, written in ink on parchment with a quill pen. The so-called Springmount Tablets, discovered in a peat bog in County Antrim and now in the National Museum of Ireland, are six little wooden tablets measuring about 7.5 x 20 cm, each of which has one face recessed and filled with a light coating of wax; on to the surface of the wax has been incised with a stylus the text of Psalms xxx-xxxii. Materials, script and technique differ as between the codex and the tablets, but in each case the writing is assured and accomplished. These artefacts are the product of an Irish clerical community which took writing in Latin for granted.

These diverse sources, a selection only, have something to tell us of the Christianization of Ireland: new disciplines, new buildings, new learning, new artefacts, were imported and naturalized. And subtly changed in the process? The church imported into Ireland had to adapt itself to Irish conditions. There was nothing surprising about this. Missionary Christianity has to have both resilience and adaptability if it is to be widely acceptable. In the Ireland of Palladius and Patrick, Christianity entered a social world which was rural in its economy, tribal and familial in its organization and pre-literate – ogham excepted – in its culture. These characteristics of Irish society were bound to affect both the way in which Christianity could be presented and the way in which it would be received. Despite the trading and other connections with Roman Britain, the characteristic tell-tales of Roman dominion and civilization were absent: towns, roads, coinage, written law, bureaucracy, taxation. One might reasonably guess that Patrick’s Irish congregations were a good deal less touched by Romanitas than the Tervingi of Dacia among whom Ulfila had ministered.

In Ireland the fundamental political unit – the very word ‘political’ is perhaps something of a misnomer in this context – was the tuath (plural tuatha): a human grouping held together partly by kinship, partly by clientage, in occupation of a shifting zone of territory under the presidency of a dynasty of kings maintained by tribute in kind. The role of the king was religious as well as secular. He had to defend his people and win fame and plunder in warfare with other kings (not unlike Edwin of Northumbria after him, though on a smaller scale); he also had to mediate between his people and the gods to ensure fat cattle and plentiful harvests. Tuatha varied greatly in area and population, but it may safely be said that none was very big for there were perhaps 150–200 of them in early medieval Ireland. There was nothing systematic and nothing static about authority in the Ireland of St Patrick. Like biological cells, tuatha were constantly on the move, splitting, fusing, splitting again, as one king achieved a temporary supremacy over his neighbours only to lose it after a few years.

How could a Christian ecclesiastical organization build its house upon such shifting sands? This was a question that had not arisen before. Within the Roman empire it had been normal for the church to graft itself on to the existing framework of civil administration. Thus, for example, the civil province of Gallia Narbonensis, administered from Narbo (Narbonne), turned into an ecclesiastical province: its chief bishop (or archbishop, or metropolitan) came to reside in Narbonne and his subject (or suffragan) bishops were those of the various towns within the civil province – Béziers, Carcassonne, Lodève, Nimes, Uzès, Toulouse and so forth. But in Ireland there were no towns, no provinces, no fixed boundaries. So what was to be done? One answer was to associate bishoprics with sites connected with particularly prominent dynasties which might be expected to show stamina and continuity. Armagh, for instance, was an early ecclesiastical foundation, whether correctly or not attributed to Patrick does not matter here; it is suggestively close to the secular stronghold of Emain Macha, ancient seat of Ulster kings. At Cashel in County Tipperary association is closer still; the cathedral stands right on top of the Rock of Cashel, seat of Munster kings.

Kinship and clientage, mentioned above as the cement of the tuatha, were the strongest social forces in early medieval Ireland. Patrick’s accommodation to one of these may perhaps be seen in his reference to ‘the sons of kings who travel with me’. Setting out the rights and obligations of kings, lords, kinsmen, the whole ordering (sometimes idealized) of a graded, complex, status-conscious society, was the responsibility of a class of specialists (brithem, plural brithemin) who memorized, pronounced and handed down the law. There were specialists in another branch of learning too, which cannot strictly be called literature because like the law it was orally transmitted: the bards (fili, plural filid) who recited poems, genealogies, stories, works such as the great Irish epic the Táin Bó Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley). Together the lawyers and bards buttressed the sense of identity, the custom and morality of early Ireland. How were Christian identity, custom and morality to infuse themselves into so stout and immemorial a texture?

There was one distinctive Christian institution which proved itself brilliantly capable of meshing and marrying with Irish social habits: monasticism. Despite the references to monks in Patrick’s writings it is likely that the implanting of monasticism in Ireland on any serious scale was a development of that crucial but obscure sixth century. It is also likely that the monastic impulse, though it could have reached Ireland by more than one route, was felt particularly strongly from south Wales. One of the decrees of the ‘First Synod’ concerns British clergy who travel to Ireland. The south Welsh St Samson, whom we encountered in the last chapter, was a famous monastic founder and traveller. His earliest biographer shows him visiting Ireland and making monastic recruits there: though the passage is now thought to be a later interpolation into the text (above, p. 60) it may preserve a reliable tradition of a Hibernian visit by Samson.

We must remember that we are in an age when there were many shades of monasticism. A time would come when to be a monk meant to follow the monastic rule compiled by St Benedict of Nursia (d. c. 550). But the gradual coming to dominance of Benedict’s Rule in the western church at large was a very slow business, spread over several centuries. The late antique and early medieval periods were characterized by a ceaselessly proliferating diversity of rules. A monastic founder devised his own rule for his own monks to follow. Monasticism was therefore extraordinarily adaptable and transplantable, an institution with a marked degree of flexibility. In this respect it contrasted with the ‘Roman’ structure of organization in the secular church.

In Ireland monasticism made its appeal largely because it proved capable of accommodating itself to the structures of kinship and clientage. Ancient Irish law did not know of individual property. Land belonged to a family and could not be alienated. Founders and benefactors wishing to endow monastic houses with land could not do so by outright grants of absolute rights in perpetuity such as were known to Roman law. Instead, monasteries endowed with family land became family concerns, family possessions. The founder’s kin would supply the abbot and more than a few of the monks; the community would service the kin by praying for them, furnishing hospitality to them, leasing land to them on easy terms, looking after them in old age. A successful monastery could give birth to daughter houses or could acquire a following of houses which chose to opt for its customs and fellowship, just as a king acquired lordship over retainers or over other tuatha. In their physical appearance monasteries even looked like the fort-farms of the secular aristocracy with their dry-stone enclosing walls and their scatter of buildings within for human and animal inmates.⁷ An exceptionally fine example, Inishmurray off the coast of Sligo, may be seen in plate 7.

These were not of course the only reasons why the Irish took to monasticism with such zest. The appeal of a life of ascetic self-denial was felt as strongly in Ireland as in other parts of Christendom. In an insecure and often violent world monastic communities were, or were intended to be, havens of security. They were rightly perceived as agents for the diffusion of Christianity in society. They were places where ‘sacred technology’ was practised, the crafts of writing and decorating books, of working in wood and stone and metal; places therefore where exchange could occur. In this respect the bigger monasteries came to be the closest thing to towns in early medieval Ireland.

There can be no doubting the fact that monasticism became enormously significant in Irish Christianity. Some historians have even gone so far as to claim that the Irish church became almost exclusively monastic in character. The argument is further advanced that branches of the Christian church in close proximity to Ireland, such as Wales, developed in the same manner; and that this distinctive model was exported to further neighbouring areas – from Wales to Brittany, from Ireland to western Scotland. Thus, the argument concludes, there came into existence a Celtic church which differed in its organization and customs from the Roman church.

It is now recognized that this is misleading. No church can be wholly monastic. The sacramental functions of a bishop (confirmation, ordination, consecration of churches, etc.) cannot be performed by an abbot, however holy and revered. The preponderance of writing generated in and for monasteries among the surviving written sources has given a biased impression of the standing of monasticism in Ireland. It is possible to detect – and some of the evidence has been glanced at above – the vitality of the secular, non-monastic church in the sixth and seventh centuries. There never was a ‘Celtic church’. Irish churchmen repeatedly and sincerely professed their Roman allegiances: and if there were divergent practices between Rome and Ireland, well, so there were between Rome and Constantinople – or Alexandria or Carthage or Milan or Toledo. The terms ‘Roman’ and ‘Celtic’ are too monolithic. In terms of custom and practice there were many churches in sixth- and seventh-century Europe, not One Church. Christendom was many-mansioned.

The sixth century saw the foundation of a number of communities which were to achieve great renown in the history of Irish spirituality and learning – Bangor, Clonard, Clonfert, Clonmacnois, Durrow, Kildare, Monasterboice, to name but a few. A feature of special significance for us is the appearance of monastic confederations spread over a wide area, chains of houses which owed their existence to a single founder and followed the rule drawn up by him. The founder best known to us is Columba (c. 520–597), who established three famous monasteries, at Derry, Durrow and Iona, and a number of lesser ones as well. A deservedly celebrated life of Columba was composed about ninety years after his death by Adomnán, ninth abbot of Iona and a member of the founder’s kin. It is to this wonderfully spirited and informative document that we owe most of what we know about Columba and the monastic regime which he favoured.⁸

Columba’s chain of monasteries crossed the sea: Iona lies off the island of Mull, itself off the western coast of Scotland. But it did not cross cultures. Iona was in the kingdom of Dalriada, which comprised the western islands and coastal hinterland from the Clyde to Ardnamurchan. This area had been settled by Irish migrants at a slightly later date than their settlements in Dyfed. In founding a monastery on Iona, therefore, Columba was among people of his own language and culture. There has been a good deal of discussion about his motives for the move to Iona, traditionally dated to 563, which need not delay us here. Adomnán, and the Iona community for whom he wrote, were clear about the principal reason: ‘In the forty-second year of his age Columba sailed away from Ireland to Britain, wishing to be a pilgrim for Christ.’ We have already met the idea of the Christian’s life as one of exile or pilgrimage in the writings of St Augustine of Hippo. Patrick had described himself in the Epistola as ‘an exile (profuga) for the love of God’. We encounter here another point of contact between Christian idealism and Irish social custom. Exile was one of the most severe penalties known to Irish law – severe because it removed the person so punished from the supportive network of kinsmen, lords, retainers and dependants. The exile was quite literally dis-integrated from the protective social and emotional fabric in which he had been cocooned and turned into a defenceless individual.

Columba’s exile was not lifelong. There is plentiful evidence in Adomnán’s biography that he went to and fro between Scotland and Ireland in the years after the foundation of Iona. But some went further down the path of lifelong pilgrimage or exile, cutting loose more decisively from earthly ties in the fashion which the author of Hebrews had commended in Abraham. The pioneer was Columbanus.*

We last glimpsed Columbanus (above, p. 88) receiving an excellent grounding in Latin in the middle years of the sixth century. In about 565 he entered the monastery of Bangor in County Down, recently founded by St Comgall. This was already a fairly considerable step on the road to exile. Columbanus was a native of Leinster, and in betaking himself to Bangor he was, as his biographer Jonas of Bobbio noted, ‘leaving his native country’.⁹ At Bangor he would have been well placed to hear the news of Columba’s exploits in Dalriada. His abbot, Comgall, was another founder who presided over a network of monastic houses, including at least one on the island of Tiree (though the source for this is late and perhaps doubtful), where there was also a monastery of the Iona network. However, exile to Bangor was not enough for Columbanus: as Jonas explained, he wanted to live out to the letter the commands uttered to Abraham. Accordingly, after gaining the reluctant assent of Comgall, he set off for Gaul, probably in the late 580s. There, helped by royal and aristocratic patronage, he founded three monastic houses at Annegray, Luxeuil and Les Fontaines on the edge of the Vosges mountains about thirty miles west of the modern town of Mulhouse. After a series of somewhat stormy brushes with the Frankish episcopate and Queen Brunhilde, Columbanus moved on to Bregenz, at the eastern end of Lake Constance, where he planned to found another monastery but in the event did not. His last move took him over the Alps to Italy, where he founded his last monastery at Bobbio, in the Apennines inland from Genoa. There he died in the year 615.

Pilgrimage, in the sense of ascetic renunciation of homeland and kinsfolk, is of special importance in our understanding of the phenomenon of conversion in the early Middle Ages. Pilgrimage merged insensibly into mission. The monasteries that were founded by the exiled holy men had something of the character of mission stations. It was not that they were established primarily among pagans; indeed, they could not have been, dependent as they were on wealthy patrons, necessarily Christian (if we except the case of the pagan would-be benefactors in Ireland), for their endowments. Columba settled among the Christian Irish of Dalriada, Columbanus in the Christian kingdom of the Franks. But their monastic communities were situated on the margins of Christendom, and had what might be called ‘diffusive potential’ among nearby laity who were Christian only in the most nominal of senses.

The point may be illustrated from episodes in the careers of Columba and Columbanus. Bede tells us that Columba came to Britain ‘to preach the word of God to the provinces of the northern Picts’, that is, to the peoples who inhabited north-eastern Scotland between (roughly speaking) Inverness, Aberdeen and Perth. It is unlikely that this was in fact Columba’s motive. He came as a pilgrim or exile. Columba was no more the apostle of Pictland than Ulfila was the apostle of the Goths. Bede’s comments on Columba fall in the same chapter as his two sentences on Ninian and like them may reflect the preoccupations of his own day more than they do the realities of Columba’s. However, we have the evidence of Adomnán that Columba had dealings with the Picts and that he did make some conversions among them. He visited the Pictish King Bridei at his stronghold near Inverness on more than one occasion and converted two households of (apparently) the Pictish aristocracy to Christianity. Here is the story of one conversion as told by Adomnán.

At one time when the holy man [i.e. Columba] was making a journey on the other side of the Spine of Britain [Adomnán’s term for the western Grampians which divided Dalriada from Pictland] beside the lake of the river Ness, he was suddenly inspired by the Holy Spirit, and said to the brothers who travelled along with him: ‘Let us hasten towards the holy angels that have been sent from the highest regions of heaven to conduct the soul of a pagan, and who await our coming thither so that we may give timely baptism, before he dies, to that man, who has preserved natural goodness through his whole life, into extreme old age.’ Saying this, the aged saint went as fast as he could, ahead of his companions, until he came to the farmland that is called Airchartdan [Urquhart]. And a certain old man whom he found there, Emchath by name, hearing and believing the word of God preached by the saint, was baptised; and thereupon, gladly and confidently, with the angels that came to meet him he departed to the Lord. And his son Virolec also believed and was baptised, with his whole house.

As the story of a conversion, it leaves something to be desired. We should not blame Adomnán for this: what he was interested in was (in his own words) ‘the manifestation of angels coming to meet the soul of Emchath’. For our purposes the tale is of interest in showing that Columba the monastic founder was also, on occasions, an evangelist.

From Jonas’ biography of Columbanus we may quote an episode of somewhat similar drift that occurred during his sojourn at Bregenz in or about the year 611.

And then they came to the place where they were going [i.e. Bregenz]. The man of God said that it did not really meet his requirements, but in order to sow the Christian faith in the heathen thereabouts he would stay there for a while. The peoples there were called the Suevi. And while he was there working among the inhabitants of that place he found them preparing to make a profane offering: and they placed a great barrel which in their language they called a cupa, which holds twenty measures or more of ale, in the midst of them. The man of God went up to them and asked what they proposed to do with it. And they said that they were going to sacrifice to their god Woden. He hearing their evil project blew on the cask and it burst with a mighty crack and the ale poured out. It was quite clear that there was a devil hidden in the barrel who by means of the evil drink took captive the souls of those who sacrificed. The barbarians saw this and were astonished and said that they had a great man of God among them who could thus dissolve a barrel fully bound with hoops as it was. He rebuked them and preached the word of God to them and urged them to refrain from these sacrifices. Many of them were persuaded by his words and turned to the Christian faith and accepted baptism. Others who had already been baptised but remained in the grip of pagan error heeded his admonitions as a good shepherd of the church and returned to the observance of gospel teaching.

Of course, we may again wonder – but did Jonas? – in what sense these Suevi had become Christians and what happened to their spiritual life after Columbanus had moved on to Bobbio in the following year. We do know that Columbanus’ disciple Gallus was left behind as a hermit beside Lake Constance and undertook evangelizing operations there. The site of his hermitage was to become one of the most celebrated of all medieval monasteries, taking its name from him – St Gallen.

We do not have to rely on his biographer to sense the apostolic impulse in Columbanus. It is attested in his own writings. In a letter written in 610 he spoke of ‘my vow to make my way to the heathen to preach the gospel to them’. Was Columbanus a monk or was he a missionary? The antithesis is misplaced. To be the kind of monk he was, in the age in which he lived, was also to be an evangelist.

* It should be borne in mind both here and in later chapters that clerical celibacy, though from a very early date regarded as praiseworthy, was not widely enforced within the western church before the twelfth century; and thereafter only with difficulty.

* It is tiresome that we have two near-contemporary saintly Irishmen with the same name, Columba, the Latin word for ‘dove’. The older of the two, Columba of Iona, is sometimes called Columba the Elder, sometimes by his Irish name Columcille, ‘Dove of the Church’. The younger is usually known by his Latin name in its masculine form, Columbanus, sometimes Englished as Columban. In this book I follow the convention of referring to the elder as Columba and to the younger as Columbanus.

CHAPTER FOUR
The New Constantines

My heart is white with joy; your words are great and good. It is enough for me to see your clothing, your arms and the rolling houses in which you travel, to understand how much intelligence and strength you have … I have been told that you can help us … You shall instruct us. We will do all you wish. The country is at your disposal.

Moshoeshoe, king of Lesotho, to Eugène Casalis, 1833

THE ENTRY OF the Tervingi into the empire in 376, the victory of Fritigern at Adrianople two years later, and the settlement of his people under treaty arrangements in Moesia four years after that proved to be but the opening scenes in the political drama which ended with the collapse of the Roman empire in the west and its replacement by a number of barbarian successor-states. It is as well to be clear about what this process was not before we go any further. The empire did not disappear in the fifth century. It is true that there was no emperor in the west after 476, but no one at the time could have guessed that this was more than a temporary hiatus. Authority reverted, at least in theory, to the emperor in Constantinople, where the Roman empire would survive for another millennium. But the western provinces did effectively come under new masters. They arrived by a variety of means. Whenever and wherever possible, the imperial government tried to control, or at least to influence and shape, the process of arrival. As we have seen, the descendants of Fritigern’s Tervingi were settled in Aquitaine in 418. We may now call them, as they had begun to call themselves, the Visigoths. In the course of the next half-century they were sometimes used as military federates in the name of the emperor of the day. For example, it was the Visigoths who bore the main brunt of the fighting at the battle of Châlons in 451, in which Attila and the Huns were defeated. Another contingent of Germanic troops at this decisive battle was furnished by the Burgundians. They too had been settled under treaty, with primary responsibility for defending the entry into Gaul by way of the upper valleys of the Rhône system against yet another Germanic people, the Alamans, who were pressing into the sensitive gap between Rhine and Danube in the Black Forest region. In the course of the fifth century the Burgundian kingdom expanded to include much of the Rhône valley and what is now western Switzerland. Another group of Goths, descendants of the Greuthingi who had been defeated by the Huns in the 370s, emerged in the northern Balkans out of the wreckage left by the collapse of the Hun empire in the 450s. They entered Italy under their leader Theoderic on behalf of the authorities in Constantinople to fight the empire’s enemies. The Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy established by Theoderic in 493 was notable for the harmonious co-existence within it of Goths and Romans.

The Burgundians, Ostrogoths and Visigoths constituted three successor-states in the western provinces of the empire which were founded to some degree in obedience to imperial political initiatives. Other peoples seized initiatives for themselves. In the winter of 406–7 the Rhine frontier collapsed and was penetrated by numbers of barbarian peoples, among them the Sueves and the Vandals. They made their way through Gaul, then in 409 moved south across the Pyrenees and made themselves masters of the provinces of Roman Spain. The Vandals crossed the Straits of Gibraltar in 429 and set up a kingdom for themselves, governed from Carthage, in what had been the imperial provinces of north Africa. Their place in Spain was subsequently taken by the Visigoths, while the Sueves were confined to a kingdom in the north-west quarter of the peninsula. All these peoples had lived in more or less close proximity to the empire’s frontiers before they crossed them. We may think of them as being in general not unlike the Gothic peoples among whom Ulfila worked in the fourth century, already touched to varying degrees by Roman culture. The process of acculturation to Romano-Mediterranean ways and values became for all of them more intense after entry into the empire.

What is specially relevant for us is that migration and settlement upon imperial soil were accompanied by conversion to Christianity. This had been a part of the agreement worked out between Fritigern and Valens before the crossing of the Danube in 376. Here is the fifth-century church historian Sozomen: ‘As if to return thanks to Valens, and as a guarantee that he would be a friend to him in all things, he [Fritigern] adopted the emperor’s religion and persuaded all the barbarians under his rule to adopt the same belief.’¹ We should understand this conversion, it has been observed, not as ‘adherence body and soul to a new set of beliefs’ but rather as ‘a determination to change public practice’.² Official thinking appears to have been: we’ll take these people, but they must accept our empire’s faith. This was a pattern that repeated itself. Burgundians, Ostrogoths, Sueves and Vandals all accepted Christianity soon after their entry into the empire. It is a process that has to be inferred, because – remarkably enough – our sources do not mention it as such. Reasons for the reticence of the sources can be offered, some more convincing than others. However, modern scholars are agreed that the inference is a sound one. The other notable feature of the conversion of these barbarian peoples was that they all adopted the heretical, Arian form of Christianity as opposed to the orthodox or ‘Catholic’ credal formulations of Nicaea. (There were some temporary exceptions to this rule. One of the early Suevic kings in the middle years of the fifth century was a Catholic, but his successors were all Arians. The Burgundian rulers seem to have been Catholic in the middle years of the fifth century but went Arian towards its end.) The reasons for this Germanic preference for the creed of Arius remain elusive: we have simply to accept it as part of the overlapping pattern of religious allegiance in these years. On top of the world of rural pagans slowly being coaxed into some semblance of Christian belief and observance by activists like Martin of Tours, alongside the Catholic bishops in their cities, the Catholic suburban monasteries, the Catholic gentry and the Catholic middle class, we must now make mental room for an Arian clerical hierarchy, Arian kings and queens and warrior aristocrats, Arian churches with Arian liturgies being sung within them. This religious apartheid persisted in the kingdoms concerned until their governing circles decided to go over to Catholicism. This occurred in Burgundy during the reign of King Sigismund (516–23), in the Vandal kingdom when it was reconquered by Justinian’s armies and re-united to the empire in 533–4, in the Suevic kingdom in the 560s, and in the Visigothic kingdom in the years 587–9. The Ostrogothic realm had been destroyed in the course of Justinian’s attempts to reconquer Italy as he had reconquered Africa. Hardly were these long and costly campaigns over – they lasted almost without a break from 535 to 553 – than Italy was invaded by another group of migrating Germanic invaders, the Lombards, from 568 onwards. The religious affiliations of the Lombards are not easy to follow, but there was certainly an Arian presence in the Lombard kingdom until the middle years of the seventh century: the last Lombard king known to have been an Arian was Rothari (636–52).

The barbarian peoples mentioned hitherto had in common a previous experience at fairly close quarters of Romano-Mediterranean cultural values. A partial exception must be made of the Lombards, but even they had lived for two generations in the former Roman province of Pannonia – rather like the Goths in Dacia – before their invasion of Italy. They also had in common the fact that they founded their kingdoms in the most Romanized provinces of the former western empire – Italy, Africa, Spain and southern Gaul. If we make a mental journey in the second half of the fifth century northwards from the Burgundian or Aquitanian-Visigothic kingdom we find ourselves entering a world where the shading is subtly different. The northern provinces of Gaul and the offshore provinces of Britannia had been less influenced by Roman culture than, let us say, the Gallia Narbonensis of Caesarius of Arles. The barbarians who took over these northern regions had experienced less previous contact with Roman ways than, for instance, the Goths. They took longer to integrate themselves with the culture of the empire into which they had blundered. Most notably, they did not adopt Christianity at once; and when they did, it was not the Arian but the Catholic variety which they chose. Who were these people? It is time to have a closer look at them, for they will occupy us much in this and the following two chapters. We shall start with the Franks.

Franci, Franks, was the name given in Roman sources from the second half of the third century to a variety of tribes settled opposite the Gallic province of Germania Inferior; that is, east of the Rhine in the area between, approximately, Confluentes (Koblenz, where Mosel meets Rhine) and Noviomagus (Nijmegen). They took advantage of the troubles of the empire to launch devastating raids into Gaul. One such raid, as we saw in Chapter 1, even penetrated as far as Spain. As on the Danube frontier, so on the lower Rhine, the fourth century witnessed intermittent hostilities between Roman and barbarian with long periods of relative peace in between times. Pacification of the Frankish tribesmen under Constantine and Julian gave rise to peaceful crossings of the frontier by merchants going to and fro and by Franks enlisting in the Roman army for garrison service in northern Gaul. Some of their cemeteries have been identified by archaeologists. One fourth-century tombstone neatly sums up this phase of Franco-Roman co-existence: Francus ego civis, Romanus miles in armis, ‘I am a Frankish citizen, a Roman soldier under arms.’ In the 350s the Emperor Julian settled one group of Franks, the Salii or Salians, inside the empire in the boggy and unappealing territory called Toxandria just to the south of the estuary of the Rhine, in the region which is now traversed by the Belgian-Dutch border north of Antwerp. In the collapse of order following the breach of the Rhine frontier by Sueves and Vandals in 406–7 a Salian Frankish principality obscurely emerged in Toxandria and spread over the area to its south in what is now northern Belgium. Another group of Franks coalesced further east in the Rhineland round Cologne. The latter group are usually known as the Ripuarian Franks.

Only fragments of information survive about the activities of the Franks in the desperately confused politics of fifth-century Gaul. Heroic attempts have been made to construct a plausible narrative. All founder on the rock of the simple but compelling rule that bricks cannot be made without straw. But in the last quarter of the century straws begin to accumulate. The first ruler of the Salian Franks of whom we can form any impression is Childeric, who seems to have died in 481 or 482. A contemporary who must have know what he was talking about, Bishop Remigius, lets us know in a surviving letter that Childeric administered the province of Belgica Secunda. The capital city of the province was Rheims, which was also the seat of Remigius’ bishopric. Belgica Secunda embraced a vast area of northern Gaul bounded by the Channel, the Seine, the Vosges and the Ardennes. It is plain that by Childeric’s time – and possibly owing to his agency – Salian dominion had expanded well beyond its early bounds in Toxandria. Childeric was buried at Tournai, another of the towns of Belgica Secunda. We know this because his grave was discovered there in 1653. It could be identified as his because it contained his signet-ring, which portrayed the full-face bust of a long-haired warrior in late Roman military uniform bearing a lance and surmounted by the legend CHILDERICI REGIS, ‘[by order] of King Childeric’. The signet-ring with its Latin inscription hints at acquaintance with Roman governmental routine. It was not the only object among the gravegoods which could be interpreted in a quasi-official light. There was a shoulder-brooch of the sort worn as a badge of rank by late Roman officials of high status and there was an enormous amount of gold in both coin – minted in the eastern half of the empire – and ornaments.* Some scholars have suggested that Childeric and his Franks might have been settled under treaty in northern Gaul, like the Visigoths in the south or the Burgundians in the east. Conceivably they had; in any case we should not rule out communications between them and the imperial government in Constantinople. These ‘Roman’ objects in Childeric’s funerary deposit must be balanced by others of different suggestiveness. There was jewellery of barbarian type, a throwing-axe, the severed head of his presumed favourite charger. Recent excavations at Tournai have revealed three pits close to the site of Childeric’s grave, each containing skeletons of about ten horses. Carbon-14 testing of these pits yielded a late-fifth-century date; and they were cut into by sixth-century burials. It cannot be demonstrated that these pits were connected with Childeric’s funeral rites but it looks extremely likely. Ritual slaughter of horses and the eating of their flesh were identified by early medieval missionaries as heathen customs. Childeric therefore (or those who buried him) looked both ways. Inside the Christian empire on its northern fringes, the Salian Franks yet maintained their ancestral observances. After all, Childeric’s gods had done very well by him. Who were his gods? It is a question to which no confident answer may be offered. Our ignorance of the Germanic paganisms of the early Middle Ages has already been lamented in Chapter 1. We must draw attention to it again here, with renewed lamentation. We can be reasonably sure, however, that for Childeric (as for Edwin of Northumbria) the cult of a god or gods of war, with the appropriate rituals, would have loomed large. There are hints too, in our early sources, that the veneration of ancestors was a part of the religious observance of the Frankish kings. The dynasty claimed a supernatural origin: Childeric’s father Merovech – whence the name Merovingian for the family – was held to have been the son of a sea-monster.

Childeric’s son Clovis succeeded his father as king of the Salian Franks in 481–2.* Clovis was a great warlord who expanded Salian dominion in every direction and he was the first Christian king of the Franks. Not only was he a convert to Christianity, he was a convert to Catholic Christianity. These features made Clovis significant for the writer who is our principal source of information about him, Gregory, bishop of Tours from 573 to 594. We have already encountered Gregory. He it was who listed the foundation of churches in Touraine, who was the friend of Aredius, who told moral tales warning against the perils of rusticity. Gregory’s most famous work was his Ten Books of Histories (often inaccurately called the History of the Franks).³ Justly renowned as the most readable of all early medieval narratives, the Histories are vivid, chatty, unbuttoned. With what art the bishop coaxes his readers into accepting his stories in the same relaxed fashion as he tells them! But the Histories had a serious purpose too; or rather, several serious purposes. If we confine ourselves to what Gregory had to say about Clovis, we need to take account of three things. First, Gregory felt concern about the squabbling kings of his own day and their endless internecine wars: he wished to hold up their ancestor before them as an example of strenuous valour. Second, Gregory wanted to show how God had helped the Catholic Clovis in all his wars, not just in some of them: this affected his chronology of the king’s reign and conversion. Third, we must make a large allowance for ignorance: like every historian Gregory was at the mercy of his sources, which were meagre. Writing as he was a century later, Gregory of Tours did not know much about Clovis. Because he didn’t, we can’t either.

Gregory has, however, left us a great literary set piece on the conversion of Clovis. We must attend to it not because of its claims to tell us what really happened – they can be shown to be ill-founded – but because it shows us how Gregory thought it appropriate to present a king’s conversion, and because of its literary influence upon other descriptions of royal conversions. As Gregory tells it the story of the conversion of Clovis goes like this. Clovis’s queen, Clotilde, was a Burgundian princess and a Catholic Christian. She wished to have their first-born son baptized and nagged her husband to permit it. She chided him for his attachment to the pagan gods but he was firmly loyal to them. The queen had the infant baptized. He promptly died, whereupon the king rounded on her, seeing in his son’s death a demonstration of the impotence of her Christian God. Clotilde had another son, whom also she caused to be baptized. The baby began to ail and Clovis predicted a second death. But the queen prayed and the infant survived. She continued her pressure upon the king to bring about his conversion. Eventually there came a time when Clovis took the field against the Alamans. Finding himself hard-pressed in battle, Clovis called upon ‘Jesus Christ … Thou that art said to grant victory to those that hope in Thee’, promising to believe and to undergo baptism in return for victory. The Alamans were defeated. At the queen’s prompting Bishop Remigius of Rheims began to instruct Clovis; but secretly, because Clovis feared that his subjects would not permit their king to forsake the ancestral gods. But his apprehensions proved baseless, for his people spontaneously decided ‘to follow that immortal God whom Remigius preaches’. All was made ready, and Clovis ‘like a new Constantine’ was cleansed in the waters of baptism. Three thousand of his armed followers were also baptized; so too his sister Albofleda; and another sister Lantechildis, who had previously been an Arian.

There are four essentials in this account: the role of a Christian queen in converting her pagan husband; the power of the Christian God to give victory in battle; the king’s reluctance, springing from anxiety as to whether he could carry his people with him; and the happy conclusion in the baptism of the king, some members of his family and large numbers of his following. We shall encounter these themes again. If they seem, with repetition, to betray something of the character of a topos or conventional literary formula, we need not doubt their fundamental plausibility.

Gregory’s account was intended to be straightforward but it hints at complexities. It is of great interest to discover that one of Clovis’s sisters was already a Christian at the time of his baptism, albeit an Arian one. This snippet of information acquires more significance when considered alongside a strictly contemporary source. There survives a letter to Clovis from Bishop Avitus of Vienne in which the writer congratulated the king upon his conversion. Avitus wrote in a convoluted and rhetorical Latin, but what he seems plainly to say at one point is that the conversion of Clovis which he celebrates was not a conversion from paganism to Christianity but one from heresy to orthodox Catholicism. In the context, the heresy can only have been Arianism.

This complicates the picture considerably. It raises the near-certainty that Arian proselytizers were at work among the Frankish elite. Had they taken initiatives which their Catholic rivals had been sluggish to grasp? Another surviving letter, already referred to, is from no less a man than Bishop Remigius of Rheims.⁴ It seems to date from 4812, and it was written to welcome Clovis’s succession to the administration of Belgica Secunda in the wake of his father Childeric’s death. In it the bishop proffered advice as to how the young man should conduct himself as king. He should, among other things, endeavour to keep on good terms with the bishops of the province: sound advice, in view of the enhanced status of the episcopate in late-antique society at which we glanced in Chapter 2. What is conspicuously lacking from the letter is any suggestion that Clovis might care to become a Christian. Some find this surprising; but it neatly exemplifies one of the attitudes we investigated in Chapter 1. The letter of Remigius to Clovis is a late example of the traditional Roman view that Christianity was not for barbarians.

One letter is not much – indeed it’s precious little – to go on. But the historian of a dark age must be thankful for the smallest mercies. The letter of Remigius permits us to envisage a Catholic episcopate initially aloof from evangelizing their new Salian masters. Arian clergy took advantage of this. The king himself was in no hurry and was prepared at the very least to dally with heresy before entering the Catholic fold. This we may be sure he finally did; no one doubts that in the end it was Remigius who baptized Clovis. ‘Finally … in the end’: the implication that the king’s approach to the baptismal font was a slow and cautious one is there in Gregory’s narrative and finds confirmation in yet another episcopal letter. Bishop Nicetius of Trier composed a letter of advice to Clovis’s granddaughter Chlodoswintha (Clotsinda, Lucinda) in about 565, when she was on the point of leaving Gaul to be married to the Lombard Prince Alboin. Let her remember how her grandmother Clotilde ‘led the lord Clovis to the Catholic faith’, even though ‘because he was a very shrewd man he was unwilling to accept it until he knew it was true’.⁵ Clovis had taken his time. The assigning of precise dates remains problematical. Victory over the Alamans, traditionally placed in the year 496, may indeed have been regarded by the king as God-given. Good reasons have been advanced for placing his baptism quite late in the reign; a strong case for 508 has been made.

Royal conversion was a complicated business. A first stage might have been marked, as suggested here, by the prospective acceptance of a Christian deity – possibly without any very clear awareness of His exclusive claims upon the believer’s allegiance. The final stage was baptism itself, full entry into the Christian community. The journey from first to last stage could have taken up to a dozen years, and there were plenty of intermediate stages. Clovis would have needed to be watchful, especially of his warrior following. He would have wanted to be quite sure that a new God could deliver the goods he had been led to expect. Bishop Nicetius was clear about these in his letter to Chlodoswintha. Look how your grandfather defeated the Burgundians and the Visigoths – and, he might have added, the Alamans, the Thuringians, the Ripuarian Franks and not a few of his own kinsmen. Look how rich their plunder made him. Look at the miracles which so impressed him, worked at the shrines of the saints of Gaul, of Martin at Tours, of Germanus at Auxerre, of Hilary at Poitiers, of Lupus at Troyes. For Clovis it must all have been reassuring and perhaps awe-inspiring. We must allow time, too, for Remigius’ instruction.

There may have been other forces at work as well. The long arm of east Roman diplomacy reached as far as northern Gaul. After his victory over the Visigoths at Vouillé in 507 Clovis received letters from the Emperor Anastasius conferring the office of honorary consul, with its insignia and uniform, upon him. During the last years of his reign the ‘new Constantine’ performed actions which recalled the first Constantine; and surely not coincidentally. Like Constantine he established a new capital for himself, at Paris. Like Constantine he built there a church dedicated to the Holy Apostles. Like Constantine at Nicaea he presided over a church council, at Orléans in the year 511. Like Constantine he was generous to the Catholic church, and there is just a little evidence that like Constantine he was masterful in his government of it. Like another emperor, Theodosius II, Clovis issued a code of law, written in Latin, the so-called Pactus Legis Salicae, the first surviving version of the famous Lex Salica or Salic Law, the law of the Salian Franks. A newly arrived barbarian warlord had been patiently shepherded into the Christian fold and a start had been made in schooling him in the ways of Christian kingship.

One of the chapters of Clovis’s law code deals with runaway or stolen slaves. It considers the contingency that slaves might be carried off trans mare, ‘across the sea’, and lays down the procedure to be followed in foreign courts of law to effect their recovery. For a king who ruled in northern Gaul the nearest sea is the English Channel and the most obvious way of understanding the phrase ‘across the sea’ is as a reference to south-eastern England. Like the Frankish king we too must turn our attention across the sea.

The fifth and sixth centuries are the most obscure in British history. In 410 the Emperor Honorius had instructed the civitates, as we might say the local authorities, to look after themselves when the imperial army and administration were withdrawn. For a generation or so they appear to have managed reasonably well: the British church, which was visited by Germanus, which could despatch Ninian to Galloway and to which Patrick was answerable, was not the church of a society in collapse. But this fragile stability did not last. Britain had long been the target of predators, like any vulnerable part of the Roman world. Her attackers came from the west, the Scotti or Irish; from the north, the Picts from what is now Scotland; and from the east, the peoples of the north German coastlands from the mouth of the Rhine to Jutland. Since the days of Bede these latter have been pigeon-holed as Angles, Saxons and Jutes, but it can be shown that several other tribal groups were involved, such as Frisians or Danes. Here I follow time-honoured convention in referring to them generally as the AngloSaxons. These were barbarian peoples whose homelands were well beyond the frontiers of the Roman empire. They had been less exposed to Roman ways than their neighbours the Franks, let alone the Goths. This is not to say that they had had no contact with the empire at all: archaeology has shown that trading relations were widespread; the settlement excavated at Wijster, in Drenthe in the northern Netherlands, a substantial village of at least fifty dwellings by the fourth century, seems to have subsisted by production for the market provided by the garrison towns of the lower Rhine about sixty miles distant. Recent excavations on the Danish island of Fyn have yielded abundant artefacts indicative of trade with the empire. Roman coin circulated as freely in northern Germania as it did further south in Gothia. Nevertheless, due allowance being made for commerce, it remains true that of the barbarians who took over the western imperial provinces those from the North Sea littoral were the least touched by Roman influence, the most uncouth.

Their taking over of much of eastern Britain occurred in the period of deepest obscurity between about 450 and 550. Valiant attempts to pierce this darkness have been and are being made by historians, archaeologists and place-name scholars. We do not need to consider these very difficult and intricate matters here. It is enough to reckon with the emergence in eastern Britain by the latter part of the sixth century of a number of small kingdoms under Germanic royal dynasties and warrior aristocracies, a ruling class whose members were, of course, like the Franks, pagan in their religious observances. Our immediate concern will be with the most south-easterly of these, the kingdom of Kent.

The degree to which Christianity was obliterated in those parts of eastern Britain occupied by the Anglo-Saxons is a matter of debate. It is not impossible, indeed it is quite likely, that there was some considerable survival of the Romano-British population under English rule, a state of affairs which would have been congruent with the circumstances elsewhere in the western provinces of the former empire. What we do not know is how thoroughly Christianity had permeated British society before the Germanic takeover occurred. If the area of Kent – restricting ourselves at present to the south-east – was anything like the Touraine of St Martin we might expect to find, around the year 400, some urban Christianity, some rural Christianity at gentry level, and a lot of rustic paganism. The early Christian archaeology of Kent does indeed present this impression. There is evidence of Christianity in late Roman Canterbury and at a few rural sites, of which the best known is the villa at Lullingstone with its private chapel. It is difficult to gauge to what degree this Kentish Christianity survived the disruptions of the fifth and sixth centuries. The Roman town of Canterbury seems to have experienced severe if never complete depopulation. Urban life in any generally accepted sense of the phrase seems to have died. This need not mean that Christianity disappeared from Canterbury altogether but it could mean that its presence there was insubstantial. The Roman villa at Lullingstone was destroyed by fire early in the fifth century: accident? arson? barbarian raiders? We have no means of telling: but we do know that it was not rebuilt. It has long been a plausible hypothesis that the landowning classes of eastern Britain made themselves scarce as their province drifted into insecurity and disorder as the fifth century advanced. They withdrew westwards into Wales, Cumbria or the south-western peninsula, where Christian principalities would survive independently of the Anglo-Saxons, in some cases for centuries; or they emigrated to safer parts of what was left of the empire. However, this should not exclude the possibility that some of them stayed. Near Aylesford, and suggestively close to another Roman villa, there is a settlement named Eccles. This placename has been borrowed, via British, from the Latin ecclesia, ‘church’ or ‘Christian community’. A pocket of Christians must have survived there long enough for the name by which they were known to their (non-Christian?) neighbours to have been adopted into the Germanic speech of the new overlords.

All of which gives food for thought but does not greatly advance our understanding. We can at least say that we must not rule out the possibility that there were Christians among the subjects of the pagan Kentish kings of the sixth century. These kings also had Christian neighbours. It is well known that the Anglo-Saxon peoples were great seafarers; it is sometimes forgotten that the Franks were too. For seafaring folk the Channel unites rather than divides. It was the highway from the north German coastal homelands to the rich pickings of Gaul for the raiders of the third and fourth centuries and for the settlers of the fifth and sixth (as for the Vikings later on). Saxons settled on both sides of it. They settled the southern parts of Britain to which they gave their name – the East Saxons of Essex, the South Saxons of Sussex and the West Saxons of Wessex. On the opposite side of the Channel Saxons were settled in three known areas (and possibly in others as well) – round Boulogne, round Bayeux and near the mouth of the Loire. The Saxons of the Loire were converted to Christianity by Bishop Félix of Nantes, who died in 582, a change in their culture which their insular kinsfolk in Britain would surely have got wind of. Did Franks also settle on both sides of the Channel? It is practically certain that Frankish settlement did occur in Kent, Sussex and Hampshire, though in the last resort the evidence, mainly archaeological, is inconclusive. This evidence undoubtedly does show that there was a lively exchange of goods to and fro across the Channel at this period. Whether these things travelled as commodities of trade, as plunder, tribute, dowries, gifts, we do not know. All we know is that they travelled in abundance and that many of them were objects of high intrinsic value or status such as jewellery or glassware. We should take care to remember too the perishable commodities which leave no archaeological trace. What are we to suppose that the Anglo-Saxon nobility of Kent drank out of their handsome glass goblets imported from the Rhineland?

It would also appear that at least from time to time Frankish royal power was claimed – which is not to say that it was exercised – over parts of south-eastern England. The contemporary Greek historian Procopius tells of a Frankish embassy to Constantinople in about 553 which included Angles in it in order to demonstrate the Frankish king’s power over the island of Britain. A generation later Pope Gregory I could imply in correspondence with two Frankish kings that the kingdom of Kent was somehow within their range of influence. The one report may be explained away as misunderstanding, the other as diplomatic flattery – perhaps. What we cannot dismiss is sound evidence of dynastic contact, the marriage of a member of the heathen royal family of Kent to a Christian Frankish princess.

Ethelbert of Kent married Bertha, a bride ‘of the royal stock of the Franks’, in the words of Bede.⁶ His information can be supplemented from the Histories of Gregory of Tours, a strictly contemporary witness, and one who had probably met Bertha herself. He certainly knew her mother Ingoberga, whose piety, and generosity to the church of Tours, he warmly commended. Her father Charibert (d. 567) had been king of Neustria, that is the western portion of the Frankish realms with its capital in Paris (and including the Saxon settlements near Bayeux and Nantes). Unfortunately for us, Gregory has practically nothing to tell us about Bertha’s marriage. She was joined, he says, ‘to the son of a certain king in Kent’ – and that is all. Gregory stands at the beginning of a long and still-flourishing tradition of French historical scholarship which is wont to pay as little attention as possible to the history of the neighbouring island. He could have told us so much more. Was this the first such cross-Channel dynastic marriage, or had it been preceded by others? We do not know. When did it take place? We do not know, though it is possible to work out that it is unlikely to have been before the late 570s. What did the marriage mean for the relations between the two royal families? We do not know, though because Bertha as an orphan could not have ranked highly as a matrimonial catch and because Gregory seems to allude dismissively to the bridegroom we may suspect that Frankish royal circles would have looked down on Kentish ones.

We do know that Bertha’s kinsfolk had been able to insist that Ethelbert permit his wife to practise her religion. She came to Kent accompanied by a bishop named Liudhard (and presumably some subordinate clergy) whose role was to act, in Bede’s words, as her adiutor fidei, her ‘faith helper’ or private chaplain, not to attempt any wider evangelizing ministry. Her husband put at her disposal ‘a church built in ancient times while the Romans were still in Britain, next to the city of Canterbury on its eastern side’. There are two candidates for the identification, St Martin’s and St Pancras’, both extramural churches to the east of Roman Canterbury, beneath both of which excavation has revealed Roman brickwork and mortar. Near St Martin’s there was excavated in the nineteenth century a medallion attached to a late-sixth-century necklace: it was die-stamped with the name LEUDARDUS, presumably Bertha’s Bishop Liudhard. What is interesting, if Bede’s informants at Canterbury were correct, is that there were persons in Kent at the time of Bertha’s arrival who could identify a certain building as a Christian church. It suggests the presence of a Christian community at Canterbury.

Thus far, the antecedents of Ethelbert’s conversion are reminiscent of those of Clovis’s. A Germanic king, ruling a sub-Roman kingdom in which a little Christianity survives, enjoying close relations with Christian neighbours, married to a Christian wife, becomes a Christian. Yes, but with regard to Ethelbert there was an additional personage involved – Pope Gregory the Great, of whom we have already caught a fleeting glimpse offering robust advice to Sardinian landlords about how to convert their peasantry (above, p. 59).

Gregory was born into an aristocratic Roman family in about 540, into circles accustomed to wealth and authority. His relatives included two recent popes. An excellent traditional education was followed by a few years (c. 572–4) of high administrative experience as praefectus urbi, prefect of the city, the supreme civic official in Rome. Converted to the monastic life in 574–5, Gregory turned the family palazzo on the Caelian Hill into a monastery dedicated to St Andrew. He installed in it the magnificent library of Christian writers assembled by his kinsman Pope Agapetus I (535–6), who had envisaged founding a school of advanced Christian studies in Rome. Gregory also founded monasteries on some of the family estates in Sicily. In 579 he was sent by Pope Pelagius II to Constantinople as the papal apocrisarius, ambassador or nuncio, where he served until 585. It was a time of critical importance in the relations between Rome and Constantinople, during which the imperial government was striving to concert measures against the expansion of Lombard power in Italy. It was while he was en poste in Constantinople that Gregory met Leander of Seville, the elder brother of Isidore the etymologist, who was there on a diplomatic mission from the Catholics of Spain. From their discussions together there was born Gregory’s greatest work of biblical exegesis, the Moralia, a commentary on the book of Job. Returning to Rome he was retained as the pope’s secretary until Pelagius’ death in 590. To his dismay, Gregory was chosen to succeed him. He accepted with genuine reluctance and served as pope until his death in 604.

Rome, Constantinople, Seville: Gregory’s world was Roman, imperial, Mediterranean. Within that world Gregory’s career was, on a superficial view, a glittering one. He was one of those rare multitalented persons who are successful in all they undertake: administrator, diplomat, organizer, negotiator, writer. But Gregory would have been dismayed at the prospect of being remembered in this fashion. His priorities were different. He believed that God’s Day of Judgement was imminent. This conviction gave edge to his overmastering concerns, which were pastoral and evangelical. These concerns gust like a mighty wind of spiritual force through all his writings: the Moralia, the Dialogues, in which he commemorated St Benedict and other saints, his sermons, many of his 850-odd surviving letters, and the book he composed for the guidance of those who exercise the cure of souls, the Liber Regulae Pastoralis (Book of Pastoral Care). The pastoral impulse in Gregory surfaces in some unlikely places. It can be seen in some of his dealings with the Lombards, ‘that abominable people’ (in his own words) whose invasion of Italy had brought hardship which he devoted much time and energy to relieving. It even shines through his hard-headed instructions for the management of the papal estates. It can be glimpsed in his correspondence with Queen Brunhilde, the Spanish wife of Clovis’s grandson Sigibert (and aunt, by marriage, of Bertha).

Gregory’s pastoral impulse was translated most memorably into action in his sending of a mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. The earliest biography of Gregory, composed at Whitby about a century after his death, contains the first version of the story of his encounter with English boys in Rome before he became pope.⁷ The meeting moved Gregory to the most famous series of puns in English historical mythology. Of what nation were the boys? They replied that they were Angles. ‘Not Angles but angels.’ What was the name of their king? Alle. ‘Alleluia! God’s praise must be heard in his kingdom.’ What was their kingdom called? Deira [the southern half of Northumbria, roughly equivalent to the Yorkshire of today]. ‘They shall flee from the wrath [de ira] of God to the faith.’ According to the anonymous author Gregory himself tried to set out on this mission during the pontificate of Benedict I (575–9) but was prevented from going more than three days’ journey from Rome. It is highly unlikely that Gregory would have wished to leave Italy at that time, when he was busy founding and nurturing his monasteries. The story as told by the anonymous author and subsequently (in a slightly different form) by Bede was an oral tradition which had been circulating for some time among the Anglo-Saxons before it was committed to writing at Whitby in the early eighth century. The puns which Gregory is said to have made probably tell us more about the taste of the eighthcentury Anglo-Saxons for punning wordplay than they do about the gift for verbal repartee of a sixth-century Italian cleric.

Bede’s telling of the story sets it in the market-place of Rome and alleges that the English boys were up for sale as slaves. There is nothing intrinsically implausible about this. We need to remember that the slave trade was probably the most widespread business activity of the early medieval world. It is not inconceivable that some of the Frankish luxury objects excavated from the cemeteries of Ethelbert’s Kent were paid for with English slaves. In this connection it is of great interest to find that Pope Gregory wrote in September 595 to his agent Candidus, who was on his way to administer the papal estates in southern Gaul, ordering him ‘to buy English boys of seventeen or eighteen years of age in order that they may, dedicated to God, make progress in monasteries’.⁸ The context makes it clear that the pope had in mind his own or other monasteries in Italy, because he requests that the boys be sent to him: ‘and because they are pagans who are to be found there, I wish a priest to be sent with them so that, should illness strike in the course of the journey, he may baptise those whom he sees to be at the point of death.’ It is not easy to interpret this letter. Some have assumed that the pope’s intention was to train the boys as missionaries who could then be sent back to evangelize the Anglo-Saxons: but there is not a hint of this in the text. A commonsensical reading might suggest that the pope simply wanted Candidus to get a supply of domestic slaves for use in his monasteries, though this is not an interpretation that commends itself to the pope’s admirers. It is unwise to use this letter in support of the view that Gregory was planning a mission to the Anglo-Saxons as early as 595 – though he may have been. In a letter to Bishop Syagrius of Autun written in July 599 Gregory said that he had been thinking about the mission to England ‘for a long time’ (diu).⁹ At the least we may safely say that the letter shows that in the late summer of 595 the pope’s mind was busy with thoughts of the English and their paganism.

He will also have been aware that the Anglo-Saxons inhabited an island that had once been part of the empire. Gregory was a Roman through and through. He came from a family with a proud tradition of public service, he had respect for Roman order and administration, and – despite his strong Augustinian leanings – he had been trained to familiarity with ideas about the providential role of the empire in the divine scheme. His was a world in which it was inconceivable not to take the empire for granted. It is worth recalling that still in Gregory’s day and for much of the century to come Constantinople continued to cast long shadows of influence across the western provinces. We should remember too that after the Justinianic reconquests of Gregory’s childhood the empire still governed Sicily, north Africa as far as the Straits of Gibraltar and a sizeable chunk of south-eastern Spain. Furthermore, Gregory looked out upon a world in which, by the 590s, all the barbarian successor-states had adopted Christianity excepting only the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England.

Combine this with Gregory’s sense of pastoral urgency and we have a context, what could be termed a temperamental context, for the initiative he took with regard to England. That initiative was the despatch in 596 of a party of missionaries to the court of King Ethelbert of Kent. Bede, our prime narrative source, tells us that Gregory did this ‘on the prompting of divine inspiration’. It may have been so; but we must beware of ascribing the initiative solely to the pope or to God, even though this has been the received interpretation of the origins of the mission from Bede’s day onwards. But even Bede’s account is not without its difficulties. He tells us – and the information certainly came to him from Canterbury – that Ethelbert died twentyone years after he had received the faith. Now since Ethelbert died on 24 February 616 it is evident that this ‘reception’ (whatever it may have consisted of) occurred in the year 595; or, to be pedantically accurate, between 24 February 595 and 23 February 596. If this piece of information is accurate it may fittingly be considered alongside a remark made by the pope himself. Writing to the royal Frankish brothers Theudebert and Theuderic in July 596 – it is the letter in which he referred to Frankish influence in Kent – Gregory put it on record that ‘we have heard that the people of the English wishes to be converted to the Christian faith.’¹⁰ One could not ask for a more explicit, authoritative and of course strictly contemporary statement that some approach had been made from the English side. It looks as though Gregory was responding to an appeal rather than launching a mission into the unknown. We might care to cast our minds back – as perhaps Gregory did also – to earlier such responses: the sending of Ulfila to the Christian communities of Gothic Dacia, for example, or of Palladius to the Christians of Ireland.

If an approach was made to the pope in 595 or early 596 one must ask how it was transmitted, and our thoughts turn at once to Queen Bertha and Bishop Liudhard. Bertha would have known of her greatgrandmother’s part in the conversion of her husband Clovis. She may well have received a hortatory letter reminding her of it, like the one which Chlodoswintha got from Nicetius of Trier, when she went off as a bride to Kent. Her assistance in the conversion of Ethelbert was acknowledged by Pope Gregory in a letter he sent to her in 601. When something happened in 595 which made it clear to Bertha that the king was ripe for conversion – perhaps it was a victory in battle, as in the case of Clovis – she turned – to whom? Not to the pope directly, for surely we should have heard of this in Gregory’s correspondence. Most likely it was to her royal relatives in Francia. After all, it was in a letter to Theudebert and Theuderic that Gregory said that he had heard of the English desire to be converted.

Theudebert and Theuderic were children. The regent for them was their grandmother Brunhilde, the most powerful presence in Frankish Gaul in the 590s. Her ghastly end – torn apart by wild horses on the orders of her nephew-by-marriage King Chlothar II after a prolonged struggle for power – and the subsequent blackening of her reputation must not blind us to both her political skill and her piety. When Columbanus arrived in Gaul in about 590 it was Brunhilde and her son Childebert who gave him land and royal protection for his early monastic foundations in Burgundy. (Brunhilde later quarrelled with Columbanus, but that is another story.) Columbanus came from an Irish church where the memory of Patrick was kept green; he had his own vivid sense of mission. He touched the minds of his royal patrons. They in their turn were in contact with Pope Gregory. Childebert and the pope exchanged letters in the summer of 595. Gregory wrote to Brunhilde and Childebert again in September, commending to them his agent Candidus (to whom he was writing at the same time about purchasing English youths). They were again in touch in 596 when Brunhilde’s priest Leuparicus passed between them, bringing relics of St Peter and St Paul as a present from the pope for the queen on his return journey. In 597 she asked for a book which Gregory sent her. Brunhilde founded a monastery at Autun to which the pope granted privileges at her request in 602. The bishop of Autun, Syagrius, was close to the queen: Gregory rewarded his services to the English mission with a special mark of papal favour in 599. The scene was thus more complicated than Bede’s narrative suggests: there was an English king who wanted to become a Christian and a pope with an overwhelming desire to save souls. Linking them was the Frankish royal court, provider of information and later, through the bishops, of practical help.

We know very little of the earlier life of the man chosen by Gregory to head the mission of King Ethelbert. Augustine of Canterbury – named after the great Augustine of Hippo – was a monk and by 596 prior of the monastery founded by Gregory in Rome. Although the prior is formally second-in-command of a monastery after the abbot, in this instance he would have been effectively running the community because its abbot would have been too busy with his duties as pope to supervise the day-to-day life of the house. Gregory was a shrewd judge of men and we must assume that he thought very highly of Augustine to have appointed him to a position of considerable spiritual and administrative responsibility. Gregory commended Augustine’s knowledge of scripture in a letter to Ethelbert in 601. It is not surprising, given Gregory’s priorities, that he should have picked a man of distinguished intellect in that particular field of study to head the mission. That is all we know of Augustine before the departure of the mission in 596. We are left wondering what additional talents or experience he might have possessed which commended him to Gregory for the task of barbarian evangelization. Had he, for instance, assisted or advised the pope in his dealings with the Lombards? Possibly: as so often, we simply do not know. But we do know one thing for certain about the mission: it was big and it was well equipped. Canterbury tradition recalled that Augustine’s companions had numbered ‘about forty’ – a prodigious number. We do not know what they brought to England on the initial journey, but we do know that Gregory reinforced them in 601 with at least four more men, together with vestments, altar cloths, church plate and ornaments, relics and ‘numerous books’. Gregory could command resources well beyond the capabilities of, say, Patrick.

Augustine reached Kent in the spring or early summer of 597. Ethelbert was hesitant at first but did in time consent to be baptized. (We are as uncertain of the exact date of his baptism as we are of that of Clovis.) On 20 July 598 Gregory wrote to the patriarch of Alexandria: in his letter he reported, among other matters, that he had heard from Augustine that ‘at Christmas last more than 10,000 Englishmen had been baptised’.¹¹ Whether or not we wish to take the figure with a pinch of salt, we can surely accept that a large number of converts had been made. The scale of the thing is what is significant. It is incredible that so many could have been baptized had their king not given a lead. Therefore we may infer that Ethelbert had been baptized a Christian before 25 December 597. What did it mean for him as a king?

Flattering letters arrived from the pope, skilful as ever in handling barbarians.¹² Ethelbert was numbered among the ‘good men raised up by almighty God to be a ruler over nations’. Gregory played on a Germanic king’s lust for fame. ‘For He whose honour you seek and maintain among the nations will also make your glorious name still more glorious even to posterity.’ (How right he was.) Let Ethelbert be zealous for the faith ‘like Constantine … [who] transcended in renown the reputation of former princes.’ In his letter to Bertha he compared her to Helena, mother of Constantine, and assured her that her fame had come even to the ears of ‘the most serene emperor’ in Constantinople.

Ethelbert gave Augustine a church in Canterbury – another survivor – to restore as his cathedral church, which it still is. He provided Augustine with land on which to found a monastery dedicated to the apostles Peter and Paul just outside the Roman walls. This was also to be the royal mausoleum wherein he and his queen would lie entombed, prayed for and remembered until the approaching Day of Judgement about which the pope had written to him. And something started to happen at Canterbury in the wake of Ethelbert’s conversion: a Roman city began to come back to life. Bede called it, rather grandly, ‘the metropolis of his [Ethelbert’s] whole empire’. It was now a Christian city and, in Bede’s words again, ‘a royal city’.

Ethelbert’s generous endowments of his churches may have been recorded in documents drafted in Latin according to the norms of Roman conveyancing. The matter is contentious because the surviving documents are copies of a much later date whose texts have evidently been tampered with: but genuine originals probably lie behind them, the first deeds of this sort ever issued by an English ruler. What is not in doubt is that Ethelbert promulgated a code of law. In Bede’s words, much discussed and therefore translated here as literally as possible, ‘following models of the Romans he established decrees of judgements for his people with the advice of his wise men which were written down in the language of the English’.¹³ These survive (in a late but reliable copy), the earliest piece of English prose. Ethelbert’s code of law is a simple tariff of offences and compensations: ‘If a man strike another on the nose with his fist, 3 shillings [shall be paid as compensation].’ There was little here that Justinian’s great jurist Tribonian would have recognized as Roman. But it was written down; it was in the king’s name; and it made new law as well as simply declaring existing custom – churchmen and church property, new arrivals on the Kentish scene, were woven into the social network of protection and compensation. The coming of Christianity gave the first impulse to the process by which the custom of the folk became the king’s law. The implications for royal authority were far-reaching.

Royal authority helped to diffuse Christianity both within Ethelbert’s kingdom of Kent and beyond it. Bede tells us that though the king did not compel any of his subjects to accept the faith, nevertheless he showed greater favour to those who did. Quite so. At another point in his narrative he let fall the information that some of Ethelbert’s subjects became Christians ‘through fear of the king or to win his favour’. A second Kentish bishopric was founded at Rochester and provided with endowments by the king. Ethelbert was also able to influence other Anglo-Saxon rulers. He might have appeared insignificant in Frankish eyes but in England Ethelbert was a considerable force, ‘a most powerful king whose supremacy reached as far as the river Humber’. Among his subject-kings was Saeberht, king of the East Saxons (i.e. Essex), who was also his nephew, the son of his sister Ricula. The East Saxons accepted Christianity and a bishopric was founded for them at London in 604. The next kingdom to the north was that of the East Angles. Its king, Redwald, was converted on a visit to Ethelbert’s court but on his return home was talked out of the sincerity of his faith by his wife. He tried to have the best of both worlds by putting up a Christian altar in his pagan temple. Ethelbert was able in addition to help the missionaries in their negotiations with the Christian clergy of neighbouring British kingdoms to the end of securing their collaboration in the work of evangelization; even though in the event these negotiations failed disastrously.

Our third princely barbarian convert was Edwin of Northumbria, baptized at York on Easter Day in the year 627, as we saw in the opening pages of this book. Here it is necessary only to emphasize that the background to Edwin’s conversion, and its aftermath, bore some likeness to the circumstances surrounding the conversions of Clovis and Ethelbert. Edwin knew something of the faith of his Christian bride before she reached him, accompanied by Paulinus – her Liudhard – in about 619. Before fighting his way to power in Northumbria in 616 Edwin had spent many years in exile; it is very probable that he had had encounters with Christians in the course of it. Later Welsh tradition claimed that part of that exile had been spent under the protection of the British King Cadfan of Gwynedd, or north-west Wales, ‘wisest and most renowned of all kings’, as his tombstone at Llangadwaladr in Anglesey described him, and certainly a Christian. Part of his exile had been spent with King Redwald of East Anglia, at whose court Edwin might have met Paulinus, as is related by the anonymous monk of Whitby in his life of Pope Gregory. Edwin’s subjects certainly included Christians, for at some date unknown he had conquered the British kingdom of Elmet, that area of south-west Yorkshire whose earlier history is still commemorated in the placenames Barwick-in-Elmet and Sherburn-in-Elmet. British tradition would claim that Edwin was actually baptized a Christian by a British bishop named Rhun, the son of King Urien of the northern British kingdom of Rheged, or Cumbria. This is unlikely. On the other hand it is highly probable that there would have been clerics among the delegations from Edwin’s sub-kingdoms who paid tributary visits to his court. Bishop Rhun could have been a not unfamiliar figure among the revellers at Edwin’s palace of, shall we say, Yeavering.

As in Ethelbert’s case there was also papal encouragement. There survive two letters from Pope Boniface V (619–25) addressed to Edwin and his consort.¹⁴ The king was urged to abandon paganism and embrace Christianity. The pope made the point early on that Christianity was the faith of ‘all the human race from the rising to the setting of the sun’ – with verbal reminiscence of a key missionary text in Malachi i.ll: because God has melted ‘by the fire of His Holy Spirit the frozen hearts of races even in the far corners of the earth’. Patently mendacious though the writer must have known these words to be – one need look no further than the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean world – the sort of effect that they were intended to have on Edwin is plain. The king was being encouraged to come in, literally, from the cold. Diplomatic presents of rich apparel, gold embroidered, cunningly hinted at the splendid trappings of Christian civilization. Queen Ethelburga was firmly reminded of her duty as wife and queen to bring about Edwin’s conversion. She was sent a silver mirror and an ivory comb ornamented with gold. Perhaps it looked somewhat like the silver-chased comb of her elder contemporary, Queen Theodelinda of the Lombards, now preserved at Monza.

The aftermath of Edwin’s baptism shows features with which the reader will by now be familiar. We see him assisting in the diffusion of Christianity in Northumbria, accompanying Paulinus as he taught and baptized at Yeavering, Catterick and the unidentified Campodunum. Royal ‘assistance’ did not just mean being present. Alcuin, the great eighth-century scholar, wrote of Edwin in his poem on The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York that ‘by gifts and threats he incited men to cherish the faith’.¹⁵ Edwin was active in pressing Christianity upon the rulers subject to him. He ‘persuaded’ (Bede’s word) Eorpwald, son and successor to Redwald of East Anglia, to become a Christian. One may suspect that Paulinus’ success in preaching the word in the kingdom of Lindscy (Lincolnshire) owed not a little to Edwin too. It is just possible that Edwin, like Ethelbert and Clovis, issued laws. This seems to be hinted at in some lines of Alcuin’s poem; but it should be stressed that Bede says nothing of any legislative activity and that no written lawcode attributable to Northumbria survives. Bede tells us something of the peace which Edwin maintained and of the royal state he kept. If historians have made heavy weather of the reference to ‘the standard which the Romans call a tufa and the English a thuuf the point surely for Bede was that there was now some ‘Roman’ quality about Edwin’s style of kingship.

The narrators of these episodes of royal conversion were, of course, churchmen: Gregory of Tours, a bishop; Bede, a monk at Jarrow – what we might call ‘professional Christians’. Is it ever possible to shift the angle of vision and open up a different perspective? Is there, for example, any statement about conversion attributable to a king? By a happy chance there is. It takes the form of a letter from the Visigothic king of Spain, Sisebut, to the Lombard king of Italy, Adaloald, and it was written at much about the time that Ethelburga was travelling north to meet her bridegroom Edwin. The letter was not indeed about conversion from paganism to Christianity but about conversion from one form of Christianity to another. Sisebut was urging Adaloald to abandon Arianism and embrace orthodox Catholicism.¹⁶

Care is always needed in handling writings attributed to royalty. Kings have opportunities denied to others of availing themselves of literary assistance. Whose voice, whose style are we hearing? Not necessarily that of the king. There is a further difficulty. A letter such as this was a public document, a piece of diplomatic correspondence. Surely we should be correct in assuming that even though it ran in the king’s name it would have been drafted by officials. But Sisebut was no ordinary king. He had received an advanced education and was a friend of the polymath Isidore of Seville, who dedicated one of his books to him. It was in response to this gesture that Sisebut honoured Isidore with a Latin verse epistle on the subject of eclipses. Sisebut was also the author, most surprisingly, of a work of hagiography celebrating the life of Bishop Desiderius of Vienne, recently murdered at the instigation of Queen Brunhilde. (There were more sides to her character than the piety to which attention was drawn a few pages back.) Sisebut also wrote a number of letters which have survived and probably more which have not. They are on a variety of subjects ranging from diplomatic correspondence to counselling for a bewildered bishop. Tone and style are even and consistent. I think we may take it that this remarkable man’s letter to Adaloald was his own composition or, at least, expressed his own convictions.

Sisebut was clear about the advantages that had accrued to his people when they had moved from Arianism to Catholicism in 587–9. Before that they had suffered daily from calamity: frequent wars, famine and plague. However, ‘As soon as the orthodox faith had enlightened their darkened minds … God willing, the power of the Goths now thrives. Those who once were torn by the sickled cohorts of thorns, wounded by the barbed stings of scorpions, poisoned by the forked tongue of the serpent, to these atoned ones the Catholic church now devotes her motherly affection.’ It is a long letter, in high-flown diction of which this is a representative sample, and much of it is unsurprisingly taken up with theological argument and scriptural quotation. But at its heart lies the simple boast that ‘the power of the Goths now thrives’. King Sisebut believed that conversion to correctness of religious observance had made his kingdom more powerful. Crude we may think it, but it is consistent with what we have seen elsewhere.

The contemporary written sources bearing upon the conversion of kings prompt reflection on a number of themes. First, we observe the repeated assurance that acceptance of Christianity will bring victory, wide dominion, fame and riches. This was what Germanic kings wanted to hear, because their primary activity was war. It was the easier for the missionaries to preach this with conviction in the light of what the historical books of the Old Testament had to tell about the victorious wars of a godly Israelite king such as David. Not for them the scruples of Ulfila who, it may be recalled (above, p. 77), omitted the books of Kings from the Gothic Bible. Nor would it have profited them to dwell upon facets of Christian teaching which kings might have found unappealing. The injunction to turn the other cheek would surely have fallen on deaf ears if addressed to Clovis. Pope Honorius I urged King Edwin to employ himself ‘in frequent readings from the works of Gregory, your evangelist and my master’.¹⁷ One may wonder whether Paulinus, as he opened his copy of the Moralia or the Liber Regulae Pastoralis, would have thought this the most appropriate juncture to explain that Pope Gregory had taught that rulers should be humble. Bede could tackle the problem of a king, like Edwin, who became very powerful before his conversion to Christianity by claiming this as an augury; in the words of a modern scholar, Edwin got his power ‘on account so to say’.¹⁸ More problematic was the successful king who remained obstinately heathen. Such was Penda, king of the midland kingdom of Mercia, who defeated and killed Edwin in 633. Bede sidestepped the problem by saying as little as possible about him.

Second, we might care to notice the role of the Christian queen in bringing about the conversion of her pagan husband. Here too there was an apposite scriptural reference. ‘The heathen husband now belongs to God through his Christian wife’ (I Corinthians vii.14). St Paul’s words were quoted both by Bishop Nicetius in his letter to Chlodoswintha and by Pope Boniface V in his letter to Ethelburga. This was a role for the queen which was to have a distinguished future. Much later on, when coronation rituals were devised in Francia in the ninth century, it would be emphasized that it was the duty of a queen ‘to summon barbarous peoples to acknowledgement of the Truth’. One may wonder whether we have something of a topos here. How important really was Clotilde in bringing about the conversion of Clovis? We cannot answer this question, it need hardly be said. But there can be no doubting the fact that royal conversions did frequently follow the marriage of a pagan king to a Christian wife.

It was not always so. Here is Bede on the (unnamed) wife of King Redwald of East Anglia.

Redwald had been initiated into the mysteries of the Christian faith in Kent, but in vain. For on his return home he was seduced by his wife and by certain evil teachers and perverted from the sincerity of his faith, so that his last state was worse than his first. After the manner of the ancient Samaritans, he seemed to be serving both Christ and the gods whom he had previously served; in the same temple he had one altar for the Christian sacrifice and another small altar on which to offer victims to devils.

It is an interesting story. Another way of interpreting it would be to see Redwald’s acceptance of Christianity simply as the addition of a new god to his pantheon of deities. It may well have been that the exclusive claims of the Christian God were ill-understood at first by royal converts.

Royal hesitation, thirdly, is a notable feature of our narratives. Clovis, Ethelbert and Edwin all took their time. Abandonment of the old gods was no light matter. Consultation with counsellors was prudent. How would the pagan priesthood react? Coifi is the classic case of the poacher turned gamekeeper. Redwald’s men seem to have been less pliable. There are difficult questions here about the dynamics of a king’s authority over his kinsfolk, his realm and his vassal kingdoms. It is hard to judge whether conversion came about through individual choice or through pressure exerted by the solidarity of a group. Arguments can be marshalled in support of both propositions. For example, the interesting information preserved by Bede that eleven members of the royal entourage were baptized with the infant Eanflaed in June 626 – ten months before Edwin’s baptism – might suggest that in Northumbria at least there was scope for individual choice. Doubtless the truth is that both individual and group motivation co-existed side by side; even, at different times, in the same person. We can be sure that a royal lead for others to follow was effective, even though the conversions it prompted may have been less than wholly sincere, as Bede was aware. We must note too that giving a lead did not always work even within the royal family. Ethelbert’s son Eadbald remained a pagan throughout his father’s life; the heathen Penda’s son Peada became a Christian.

Finally, we may observe the manner in which conversion was accompanied or quickly followed by royal actions which marked entry into the orbit of Romanitas. This is not to say that Roman culture was not already to some extent familiar and in prospect before conversion – one need think only of Bishop Remigius and the young Clovis – though doubtless more for some kings than for others. Convert kings acquired, in their missionary churchmen, experts who could school them in what was expected of a Christian king. The results are to be seen in the Pactus Legis Salicae and the council of Orléans, in Canterbury cathedral and Ethelbert’s charters, in Edwin’s thuuf and the timber structure like a wedge of Roman amphitheatre revealed by the Yeavering excavations.

Is there an ‘archaeology of royal conversion’? Perhaps. The graves of some royal persons and of some who may have been royal persons in Frankish Gaul and early Anglo-Saxon England have been discovered. They range in date from 481/2 (Childeric) to 675 (his namesake Childeric II). In the past, archaeologists were confident that it was easy to distinguish a Christian from a pagan grave. Pagans cremated their dead and furnished them with grave-goods. Christians buried their dead on an east-west axis and did not deposit grave-goods in the tomb. Nowadays archaeologists are much more cautious. In northern Gaul and Anglo-Saxon England the shift from a predominant but not exclusive use of cremation to the custom of inhumation seems to have preceded the coming of Christianity. Orientation is no longer interpreted as a clue to belief: some apparently pagan graves are oriented and some certainly Christian ones are not. Neither is the presence or absence of grave-goods a sure indication of religious loyalties. Indeed, among the Frankish aristocracy the fashion for furnishing graves in this manner became widespread only after their conversion to Christianity. It follows that any inferences about changing beliefs founded on archaeological evidence of funerary practice are hazardous.

The most famous, and certainly the most puzzling, among the apparently royal graves of this period is an English one: the deposit beneath the so-called Mound 1 in the cemetery at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. For nearly sixty years now, since its excavation just before the beginning of the Second World War, discussion has raged about this burial, unparalleled among early medieval graves for the number, richness and variety of its contents. It is widely accepted that this was the grave of a king of the East Angles and that it cannot have been dug earlier, or much later, than about 625. Regardless of which king might have been buried there – there are four principal candidates – this is exactly the period when the ruling dynasty passed in a formal sense from paganism to Christianity. Is this change of religious affiliation one that can be detected in the archaeology of Mound 1? (We could ask the same question of the cemetery as a whole but that is not my present purpose.) It is hard to claim with any conviction that such a change is detectable. The burial rite may have been traditional, but that does not make it pagan. There may have been objects in the grave decorated with Christian symbolism, but that does not make it Christian. The most promising, and not the least enigmatic, objects on which to base an affirmative answer to the question posed above are two silver spoons (illustrated in plate 10). They bear on their handles the names SAULOS and PAULOS in Greek characters, each name preceded by a small incised cross. The names not only have a clear Christian association but would seem, in their allusion to St Paul’s change of name, to refer to a conversion. It has been suggested that these were baptismal spoons which had been presented to the man buried beneath Mound 1 at the time of his conversion to Christianity. But the case is not clear-cut. The letters of the name SAULOS were so incompetently executed that it might have been no more than a blundered attempt to copy the name PAULOS on the other spoon by a craftsman who was illiterate. The spoons may have no reference at all to the conversion of an East Anglian king. They remain puzzling – as does the burial as a whole. Its latest investigator sees in it ‘an extravagant and defiant non-Christian gesture’.¹⁹ His judgements invite respect but need not command assent. I am more impressed by the religious neutrality of Mound 1. This very neutrality, or inconclusiveness, may in itself have something to hint to us about the hesitant process of royal conversion.

Moshoeshoe of Lesotho, whose words are quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, was far removed in time and space from the new Constantines of early medieval Gaul and Britain. His kingdom and its people were widely – but not unrecognizably – different from those of Clovis or Edwin. Yet his encounter with that Christian faith presented to him by the representatives of the Société des Missions Évangéliques de Paris echoes some of the themes that are sounded for us in the pages of Gregory of Tours and Bede.²⁰

The most disruptive chain of events in the life of south-east Africa in the early nineteenth century was the rise of the Zulu empire under Shaka. It was aggressive and organized for war. Before Shaka’s death in 1828 his Zulus had had a destabilizing effect upon the neighbouring peoples, long remembered by them as the Faqane or the Mfecane, literally ‘forced migration’, by extension ‘the crushing of the peoples’. Roughly speaking, the rise of the Zulu empire had the same sort of effects upon nearby peoples such as the Sotho as the rise of the Hun empire had upon the German peoples in the fourth and fifth centuries. Moshoeshoe, often abbreviated to Moshesh, created a kingdom for some of these Sotho people which he ruled with skill and statesmanship for nearly fifty years until his death in 1870 at the age of about eightyfour. This kingdom was the nucleus of the state we know today as Lesotho.

In 1824 Moshoeshoe had established a new royal settlement at Thaba Bosiu, an isolated tableland protected by cliffs which rose above the upper waters of the river Caledon some hundred miles above its confluence with the Orange river. It was there that three members of the Paris Société approached him in 1833, and at the foot of this natural fortress that they established their first mission station. It was a proximity that echoes the close spatial association of royalty and mission so often found in early medieval Europe. Thus in 635 St Aidan would establish his monastic mission station at Lindisfarne, within sight of the royal rock-fortress of Bamburgh. Moshoeshoe had wanted the missionaries to come to his kingdom for reasons that arose from the Zulu Faqane. Its effects of destabilization and demoralization had led him, a thoughtful man (as Bede presents Edwin), to wonder about the efficacy of his traditional religious observances. How could the ancestors and spirits have let these things occur? – if they really were as powerful as he had been taught to believe. Second, the Faqane had pushed his people into closer proximity to the white man. The British government at the Cape was a long way off but the Afrikaners were close at hand, some of them even beginning to cross to the northern side of the Orange river in search of new pastures for their flocks. The missionaries were outsiders, neutrals. They might help Moshoeshoe to cope with this unfamiliar world which threatened to encroach upon his people. They were baruti, teachers, who might initiate him into the secrets of the white man’s power.

Circumstances were such, therefore, that a friendly rapport was established between king and missionaries at the outset. With one of the three in particular, Eugène Casalis, Moshoeshoe struck up a warm friendship. The king showed a keen interest in Christianity. He would discuss the faith for hours on end with Casalis, encouraged his people to listen to the missionaries’ teaching, and put no obstacles in the path of individual converts. Every Sunday Moshoeshoe would don European clothes and descend from Thaba Bosiu to attend divine service at the mission chapel which had been built by workmen supplied by him free of charge. At the end of the sermon he would add his own comments on it for the edification of the congregation. One of the missionaries recorded that these royal glosses ‘often conveyed the essence of what they had been saying in words that made it more intelligible to the rest of the congregation without distorting it’. After church the king would dine with Casalis and his Scottish wife at the mission house.

Clothes and dinners were not the only trappings of Christian civilization which appealed to Moshoeshoe. He developed a taste for European horses, saddlery, wagons, firearms, agricultural implements and household utensils. He employed a deserter from the British army to build him a house of stone. Another mason whom he employed, Josias Hoffmann, later became the first president (1854–5) of the Orange Free State. He planted wheat, fruit trees and vegetables under missionary guidance. He had the greatest respect for literacy, but though he struggled hard he never quite mastered the art of writing. He adopted the European habit of issuing written laws ‘with the advice and concurrence of the great men of our tribe’: these edicts were printed in the Sesotho vernacular on a missionary printing press.

The presence and skills of the missionaries enhanced Moshoeshoe’s prestige. Under his rule the kingdom found stability and began to enjoy prosperity. The king was convinced that this was the fruit of Christianity. ‘It is the Gospel that is the source of the prosperity and peace which you enjoy,’ he told his subjects in 1842. Trade prospered under royal encouragement, regulated in one of Moshoeshoe’s written ordinances. Coin began to replace barter as a means of exchange. Casalis and his colleagues encouraged the peaceful consolidation and expansion of Moshoeshoe’s power: both parties profited from it. The string of mission stations gradually founded as offspring of the original at Thaba Bosiu was rightly perceived as useful by the king. They helped to encourage peaceful nucleated settlement; they assisted to consolidate the royal hold upon new territory; they performed a defensive function for local people and livestock in troubled times. As for the outside world, Casalis acted as a kind of secretary for foreign affairs to Moshoeshoe. Surviving diplomatic correspondence is in Casalis’s hand, subscribed by the king with a cross. Everything looked as if it were going the missionaries’ way.

Casalis and his colleagues made many converts in Lesotho. But the king, finally and after much anxious hesitation, was not among them. In deference to missionary teaching Moshoeshoe decreed changes in some of the most intimate areas of Sotho life, affecting marriage customs, initiation rituals, resort to witches and burial practices. Some of these initiatives provoked opposition. Moshoeshoe had to restore the traditional initiation rituals in all their gruesomeness, and his attempts to change marriage customs met with resentment and resistance. One of the leaders of the opposition was Tsapi, Moshoeshoe’s chief diviner, a man respected and feared for his power to foretell the future and to communicate with the spirit world. In 1839 there was an epidemic of measles. Moshoeshoe’s ancestors appeared to Tsapi and told him that ‘the children of Thaba Bosiu die because Moshoeshoe is polluted and because the evening prayers offend the ancestral spirits’. The king’s son Molapo accepted Christianity and was baptized, but apostasized a few years later. Even though three of Moshoeshoe’s wives and two of his leading counsellors became Christians, there was strong opposition at court. Moshoeshoe realized that to commit himself to Christianity would be to split his kingdom. So he never did.

There is much for the early medievalist to ponder in the story of the coming of Christianity to Lesotho. How much more we might learn could we but eavesdrop on some heavenly conversation between Casalis and Augustine, or Moshoeshoe and Ethelbert. Whimsical fancies aside, all we need note here is that early medieval missionaries were in general successful in persuading kings to declare themselves adherents of Christianity. However, as they were well aware, this was just a first step. Round and behind these new Constantines were ranked their warrior aristocracies. How were these men, and their often formidable womenfolk, to be brought to the faith? Some answers will be suggested in the next two chapters.

* The ornaments included some 300 golden bees, later to be interpreted as a symbol of French royalty and adopted as part of his imperial insignia by Napoleon I.

* A momentary digression on his name, usually rendered Chlodovechus in our Latin sources, representing a vernacular Chlodovech, with two strong gutturals. In the course of time the gutturals softened, to give something like Lodovec, which could be Latinized as Lodovecus, Ludovicus. From this descend the names Ludwig, Ludovic and Louis, all synonyms of Clovis.

CHAPTER FIVE
An Abundance of Distinguished Patrimonies

Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life.

LORD MELBOURNE, 1800

BARBARIAN KINGS like Edwin might make judicious use of ‘gifts and threats’ to bring pressure to bear upon their leading subjects. But we should not suppose that these persons became Christians only ‘through fear of the king or to win his favour’. The acceptance of Christianity by the men and women of the barbarian aristocracies was critical in the making of Christendom because these were the people who had the local influence necessary to diffuse the faith among their dependants. John Chrysostom, Maximus of Turin and Augustine of Hippo had been correct in perceiving the pivotal role of local elites, and in this respect (if not in others) the seventh and eighth centuries were no different from the fourth and fifth. This chapter and the next will examine some aspects of the conversion of the barbarian aristocracies, first in Gaul and Spain in the seventh century, then in the British Isles in the seventh and eighth, and attempt to point up significant common features. One word of warning. Surviving sources tend to be more concerned with kings than with their nobilities. It is accordingly more difficult – even more difficult – to get to grips with aristocratic than with royal conversion.

Germanic settlement in what had been imperial Roman territory wrought changes in Europe’s linguistic boundaries. The eastern frontier of the empire on the continental mainland had been marked, roughly speaking, by the course of the rivers Rhine and Danube. Within that line the language of everyday speech for many, and of authority for all, had been Latin, the ancestor of the Romance languages of today. The influx of Germanic peoples in the fourth and fifth centuries pushed Latin westwards and southwards and substituted Germanic speech in a swathe of territory within what had once been the imperial frontiers. That is why Austrians and many Swiss speak varieties of German to this day. It need hardly be stressed that the pattern of linguistic change is neither neat nor simple. It therefore affords plentiful opportunity for lively academic debate. Philologists are a combative lot, and scholarly wrangling has been made the fiercer by the nationalistic dementia of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Particularly has this been so in relation to the area upon which we must first concentrate attention in this chapter, the valleys of the Rhine and its western tributary the Mosel (or Moselle – which neatly encapsulates the debate). The linguistic frontier was never static. However, as a very rough approximation the map facing page 136 shows the state of affairs in the latter part of the sixth century. It will be seen that Germanic speech was current as far west as Boulogne and as far southwest as Metz and Strasbourg, with outposts further to the west, for example among the Saxon settlers in the Bayeux region and near the mouth of the Loire. And there were enclaves of Latin/Romance further to the east, for example at the city of Trier.

There is every reason to suppose that the fortunes of Christianity had run in tandem with those of its Roman language. We can detect a flourishing urban or suburban Christianity in the late fourth century. Trier, as befitted a city which was then the imperial capital in Gaul, was emphatically Christian. We might recall the community which had so impressed Augustine’s friend Ponticianus (above, p. 27). The sense of burgeoning vitality imparted by that story is confirmed by the archaeological evidence of Christian building activity in Trier – and elsewhere. At Bonn, for example, a Christian church was rebuilt at the end of the fourth century, replacing on a more generous scale an earlier chapel. Matters were different, of course, in the rural hinterland. But there were grounds for optimism. Martin had visited Trier and made an impression upon members of the local elite such as Tetradius. His friend Bishop Victricius of Rouen was making sorties into the pagan countryside of Artois.

Quite suddenly the light was snuffed out. The seat of government was removed from Trier to Arles – with all that this implied for influential concern and wealthy patronage. The Rhine frontier was pierced by the barbarian invasion of the winter of 406–7. Trier was attacked by the Franks four times in thirty-four years. Roman order collapsed, and with it the apparatus of organized Christianity. This is not to say that the faith itself entirely disappeared. It withdrew into little enclaves here and there, where best it could survive under the protection of town walls or powerful men. We know little of its fortunes, for the written sources give out almost as completely as they do in fifth-century Britain: a silence which is itself eloquent. There are gaps in the episcopal lists. At Cologne, for example, no bishop is known between Severinus in about 400 and Carentius, attested in 566. We catch glimpses of Christianity in the occasional Rhineland tombstones, some of them illustrated in plates 11 and 12. The sorrowing parents of the eight-year-old Desideratus could commission a gravestone, at Kobern near Koblenz, inscribed with Latin hexameters and Christian symbols, at some point in the fifth century. Sometimes we can spot the new arrivals embracing the faith of Rome. The parents of Rignetrudis – presumably Frankish, from her name (though this argument is not without its difficulties, as we shall see presently) – erected an elegant Christian tombstone with a Latin inscription to mark the grave of their beloved sixteen-year-old daughter at Brühl-Vochem, a little to the south of Cologne, sometime in the sixth century. But frequently the signals are ambiguous. Consider the Frankish nobleman buried at Morken, between Aachen and Cologne, a likely contemporary and a near neighbour of Rignetrudis. His relatives buried him in a wooden chamber with weapons and whetstone and shield, with jewellery and coin, with vessels of glass and bronze, bit and bridle and bucket, hefty joints of pork and beef. Was he a pagan or a Christian? There is no conclusive evidence either way. And what of the warrior commemorated in the famously enigmatic stone (plates 13 and 14 at Niederdollendorf, a bit further up the Rhine, at some point in the seventh century? What did he believe in? It may be that these are the wrong sort of questions: well, less appropriate than some others. The antithesis pagan/Christian may be too neat and simple. Reality tends to be fuzzy. (It will be a part of the argument of this and the following chapter that fuzziness is an essential and important part of the process of barbarian conversion. But this is to anticipate.) For the moment let us simply observe that grave-goods and uninscribed tombstones are at best ambiguous witnesses to belief.

Gregory of Tours, however, is not. He tells a story of his uncle Gallus (not to be confused with Columbanus’ disciple of the same name), set in Cologne in about the year 530. Gallus had gone there in the company of King Theuderic I, son of Clovis.

There was a temple there filled with various adornments, where the barbarians of the area used to make offerings and gorge themselves with meat and wine until they vomited: they adored idols there as if they were gods, and placed there wooden models of parts of the human body whenever some part of their body was touched by pain. As soon as Gallus learned this he hastened to the place with one other cleric, and having lit a fire he brought it to the temple and set it alight, while none of the foolish pagans was present. They saw the smoke of the temple going up into the sky, and looked for the one who had lit the blaze; they found him and ran after him, their swords in their hands. Gallus took to his heels and hid in the royal palace. The king learned from the threats of the pagans what had happened, and he pacified them with sweet words, calming their impudent anger. The blessed man used to tell this often, adding with tears, ‘Woe is me for not having stood my ground, so that I might have ended my life in this cause.’¹

The evidence, such as it is, leaves us with a sense that in north-eastern Gaul the Frankish invasions and settlement had obliterated much, though not all, of the Christian culture of the region. An effort of ‘re-Christianization’ was called for. In about 500 or shortly afterwards Bishop Remigius of Rheims sent a man named Vedastus (Vedast, Vaast), a native of Aquitaine who had been living as a hermit near Toul, to become bishop of Arras. His biographer, writing in about 640, tells of how he found his cathedral church overgrown with brambles and defiled by animals, the city deserted since its sack by Attila the Hun: Vedastus had to expel a bear from the town, commanding it never to return. These are hagiographical commonplaces, not to be taken literally. (Attila never went anywhere near Arras but he was a convenient hate-figure to whom acts of destruction could unhesitatingly be attributed.) However, they convey vividly a sense of what the seventh century thought had been going on in the sixth. We know little if anything for certain of what Vedastus might have achieved in the course of his long episcopate at Arras – he died in about 540. It was probably not much. But it was a start.

The most famous churchman to concern himself with reChristianization was Nicetius (Nizier), bishop of Trier from c. 525 to c. 565. We had a sighting of him in the previous chapter, sending a letter of advice to the Frankish princess Chlodoswintha upon the occasion of her marriage (above, p. 105). Like Vedastus, he was a native of Aquitaine. It was a time when King Theuderic I was encouraging clerics from Aquitaine to go to work in the languishing churches of the Rhineland: an interesting sidelight on the shortage of suitable clergy in the north-east. It was under Theuderic’s patronage that Nicetius became bishop of Trier. As long-lived as Vedastus, he devoted his episcopate to the restoration of church life there. We hear, for example, of how he imported Italian craftsmen to build churches in the city. (A further indication of his mission civilisatrice was his planting of vineyards on the hillsides above the Mosel. This was another act of restoration: the region’s wine had been celebrated two centuries before by Ausonius in his poem Mosella; but viticulture as well as Christianity had been a casualty of the fifth century.)

All the tales told of Nicetius by Gregory of Tours (on the authority of his friend Aredius, Nicetius’ pupil) have an urban setting. The point is not without significance. An episcopal city with a distinguished and very visible Roman past; its churches; its wine supply: these were at the heart of his concerns, at any rate as celebrated by the poet Venantius Fortunatus, Italian born but domiciled in Gaul. These were the characteristic concerns of the Aquitanian contingent of the sixth century. Men like Vedastus and Nicetius – and, we might add, Aredius and Gallus and Gregory of Tours – came from a part of Gaul which had suffered less disruption than the north-east. Beyond the Loire in Aquitaine city life had maintained an unbroken continuity, there had been little Germanic settlement, much of the administrative and legal routine of daily life was still recognizably Roman, and the church had experienced few of the tremors which had caused it to crack and crumble further north. We must not undervalue the contribution of the Aquitanian clergy in restoring church life in the north-east. They brought determined personnel – Nicetius was clearly a very formidable personality; they brought endowments, books, cults. With royal help they breathed new spiritual life into cities such as Trier. But, an important reservation, they failed to fling out any very attractive spiritual lifeline to the new masters of the region, the local Frankish aristocracy. The re-establishment of a Roman, city-based ecclesiastical pattern was not of itself going to win over the hearts and minds of a rural, tribal warrior aristocracy. The man buried at Morken may have been a Christian – indeed, it is almost inconceivable that a Frankish nobleman of the late sixth century could not have been formally a Christian, serving as he did kings who had been conspicuously Christian for nearly 100 years. He and Nicetius might even (who knows?) have met one another. But one cannot help feeling that their worlds scarcely overlapped or interpenetrated at all.

In the age of Nicetius it is likely that kings were more influential than Gallo-Roman bishops in bringing the aristocracy to adhere to Christianity. As we saw in the last chapter, kings set an example which their aristocracies were likely to follow, if only because it was useful to be in good standing with your king. Frankish kings were becoming more assertively Christian in the course of the sixth century. Childebert I (511–58) issued an edict ordering the destruction of idols: it was more than his father Clovis had done. He brought back relics of St Vincent of Saragossa from a military campaign in Spain and built a church in the saint’s honour in Paris, in which he was later buried. (It is now Saint-Germain-des-Prés.) Other leading members of the Merovingian dynasty were buried in Christian churches in the course of the century. The grave of one of them, Childebert’s sister-in-law Arnegund, was excavated from beneath the church of Saint-Denis in 1959. (The identification has been doubted: whatever the truth of the matter, the woman buried there was clearly of very high social rank.)

A Frankish church many of whose bishoprics were generously endowed, their incumbents therefore rich and powerful, must have been attractive to a predatory aristocracy. The prevalence of simony in sixth-century Gaul – that is, the practice of buying church office – shows this: people will pay for something worth having. Gregory of Tours was worried about simony and Pope Gregory I wrote several letters to Gallic kings and bishops condemning it in severe terms. Yet these simoniacs were Gallo-Roman, not Frankish aristocrats. When did bishops start to be drawn from Frankish, as opposed to Gallo-Roman families? It is a difficult question to answer because the enquirer is dependent almost entirely on the evidence of personal names, and a ‘Roman’ name need not indicate Gallo-Roman blood any more than a ‘Germanic’ name need indicate Frankish blood. Even so impeccable a Gallo-Roman nobleman as Gregory of Tours – and one who was very proud of it too – had an uncle who bore the Frankish name Gundulf. Frankish names among the bench of bishops are rare before the latter years of the sixth century, when we start to encounter such bishops as Magneric of Trier or Ebergisel of Cologne. They become common in the seventh century. After the dynasty’s acceptance of Christianity Frankish rulers came rapidly to exert a large measure of control over episcopal appointments. Kings used this power of patronage to reward loyal servants. Service to the crown became the standard route to episcopal office. We shall see plentiful examples of this in the seventh and later centuries.

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