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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?

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