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The Conversion of Europe. Richard Fletcher
Читать онлайн.Название The Conversion of Europe
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isbn 9780007502967
Автор произведения Richard Fletcher
Издательство HarperCollins
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