LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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