Anglo-Saxon Conversion – Lost in Translation?

I will shortly post the first of six articles on the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons. The series gives a voice to a king, an aristocrat, a farmer, a slave and a missionary. In this way, I hope, we might see and feel more clearly the mix of hopes, fears, pressures and incentives – worldly and spiritual – that motivated individuals and moulded their beliefs.

I have often wondered what shifted when, starting in 597AD, missionaries from Rome under Saint Augustine looked at the ‘pagan’ (short-hand for non-Christian) English through evangelical Christian eyes and the English looked at the missionaries through pagan eyes. Where was the fertile soil in which the seeds of faith could be planted? We know that the resulting crops struggled for decades, and weren’t simply clones from Rome HQ. They absorbed and perpetuated many things peculiarly English.

Spiritual conversion in 7th and 8th century England was far from plain sailing and success never inevitable. I feel for the multitude of peasants jeering at the monks whose boats were being swept out to sea at the mouth of the River Tyne. Bede recounts how the great saint, Cuthbert, rebuked the crowd but they would have none of it and shouted back (expletives deleted):

‘Nobody shall pray for them! May God save none of them! For they have robbed us of the old religion and nobody knows how to cope with all these changes!’ (Edwards, D.L., 1982: p45).

Here are some key questions tackled in the articles.

Who Were the English?

Were there large numbers of Anglo-Saxon immigrants to Britain, who brought their ancient pagan beliefs, pushing aside the native, Celtic Britons, many of whom were of Christian stock? Or, were what we term the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ basically a cultural, rather than a genetic, group. Did they comprise a relatively small number of elite pagan immigrants and their followers, and those native Britons who decided to adopt the immigrants’ pagan culture and beliefs?

If it were the former, then Augustine confronted an army of hard-bitten pagans. I tend to side with the weight of archaeology (see Pryor, 2005) and modern genetics studies (see Wellcome Trust2015: p8) on this. While there is debate on this issue, the evidence suggests that the indigenous Celtic peoples were not pushed aside to the Atlantic fringes. They coexisted with the immigrants. Thus a reasonable element of the population already had some tradition of Christianity.

What Were the Implications of the Pope’s Strategy?

When the enlightened Pope, Saint Gregory, advised Augustine not to destroy pagan temples but to purify them and replace their idols with Christian images and relics, his intention was to be conciliatory on peripheral matters to draw folk to deeper conversion.

One of the positive outcomes was a bloodless conversion for the mission but there were other long-lasting impacts that proved difficult for the nascent English Church to manage. The landscape itself was sacred and many landscape features served as pagan temples. Although many of these were nominally ‘Christianised’, this proved inadequate to demolish the popular connections to pre-Christian sacred sites and their associated deities and spirits. Many of these links remained for generations to come.  The spiritual power of special places in the landscape is well attested by the resilience of the spiritual connection between Indigenous Australians and the land.

‘The natural world was fundamental to pre-Christian and post-Conversion popular beliefs (Semple, 2010, p21).

There were many other instances where Christianity, especially at the local level, developed as a hybrid of Christian and pagan beliefs. Deep-seated pagan beliefs are not removed by overnight and little-understood actions, including baptism. This is especially so if the decision is not taken voluntarily. What went before wasn’t wiped out; many aspects were incorporated.

Was Conversion of Kings Successful?

It’s said that if one converts a king, one converts a people. Certainly, their subjects owed them allegiance and little could happen, or happen quickly, without approval of their rulers. So to the incoming mission, conversion of a king was often seen as a short-cut to mass adherence and a path to political and practical support.

However, most kings could not afford to be authoritarian. Complex spiritual and worldly influences weighing on their decision to convert. The nature of successful kingship required the building and sustaining of relationships of active mutual support between a king and his leading men. These were drawn from the kingdom’s political/military elite (Tyler, 2007: pp147, 148). Moreover, the aristocracy were conservative and stubbornly proud of their pagan heritage.

The potential impact of conversion – if carried out to the letter – would have been profound, including the replacement of the panoply of spiritual guardians of numerous generations by a single new God. To turf them out was a perilous matter, potentially of grave consequence to the kingdom. It was a decision that a wise king would discuss with his leading councillors.

While there were spiritual and worldly benefits to conversion, the royal success rate was not that great and Christianity struggled to gain a foothold with the next generation of rulers. How deep was their conversion if many kings didn’t instill the faith into their heirs?

‘A striking feature of the conversion period in England is that many of the earliest Christian kings were succeeded by sons who had either never been baptised or who became apostate immediately after the deaths of their fathers’ (Tyler, D., 2007: p157).

If kings struggled with the changes, so did the populace. Mass conversion at the behest of their rulers may have got bums on seats but through allegiance to an earthly, not heavenly, ruler. Were important elements of the Christian message lost in translation?

A Risk

The Anglo-Saxons were a deeply spiritual people. It is vital that we don’t over-rationalise conversion, looking solely through secular 21st century eyes. We risk simply reflecting our own mental frameworks. If all we look for are power structures, calculations of costs and benefits and psychological motivations for conversion then all we will see is political and social control. We will miss the heart of spirituality and be incapable of understanding it.

Part 1: ‘Eadwulf’s Confused Story’ coming soon.

Also, check out my debut novel, ‘Under Lynden Church’, set in the Kingdom of the East Angles during the Viking invasions in the second half of the 9th century AD.

Bibliography

Edwards, D. L., Christian England, Volume 1, Its Story to the Reformation, Collins, London, 1982.

Pryor, F. Britain AD, Harper Perennial, London, 2005.

Semple, S. In the Open Air, in Signals of Belief in Early England, Carver, M, Sanmark, A. and Semple, S., (eds.) Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2010.

Tyler, D. Reluctant Kings and Christian Conversion in Seventh Century England, in History, Vol. 92, No. 2 (306) (APRIL 2007).

Wellcome Trust, People of the British Isles, Newsletter Issue 6, March 2015.

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