Which invasion converted england into christianity

By a curious custom, not found elsewhere, each chief missionary going abroad brought with him twelve companions, but sometimes they went in much larger bodies. On every side we meet with evidences of the activity of the Irish in Great Britain.

Iona was founded in by St. Columkille, a native of Donegal, and from this illustrious centre, he and his monks evangelised northern and western Scotland. The whole western coasts of England and Wales abound in memorials of Irish missionaries. Numbers of the most illustrious of the Irish saints studied and taught in the monastery of St. David in Wales ; St. Dunstan was educated by Irish monks in Glastonbury, as his biographer, William of Malmesbury, testifies; and there is good reason to believe that Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, one of the most illustrious of the saints of Britain, was a native of Ireland.

Lanigan, in his "Ecclesiastical History" II. Christianity was just one cult amongst many, but unlike the cults of Rome, Christianity demanded exclusive allegiance from its followers. It was this intolerance of other gods, and its secrecy, which rattled the Roman authorities and led to repeated persecutions of Christians. Christians were forced to meet and worship in secret. But a single religion with a single God appealed to the Roman Emperor Constantine. He saw that Christianity could be harnessed to unite his Empire and achieve military success.

During the 4th Century, British Christianity became more visible but it had not yet won over the hearts and minds of the population. Pagan beliefs still abounded and Christianity was a minority faith. It looked as if Paganism might again get the better of Christianity when, after the departure of the Romans, new invaders arrived: Angles, Saxons and Jutes.

It could be argued that it was Augustine's famous mission in AD from the Pope in Rome to King Aethelbert of Kent that really set up the future course of Christianity in Britain, creating a strong alliance between Christianity and Kingship.

Certainly the Venerable Bede wanted to see it this way. For Bede, a Christian England was part of God's master plan. It was Providence that meant it was the destiny of the Anglo-Saxons to become Christians, united in a single Christian nation. But how would this come about? In the account of the Synod of Whitby in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People , Bede describes the showdown between the Irish Christianity epitomised by Saint Columba and the international Roman brand of Christianity which had been brought by Augustine.

Bede ends his Ecclesiastical History bemoaning the laziness of the Anglo-Saxons who he saw as half-hearted Christians still holding onto Pagan practices. An organised and disciplined parish life which would regulate the beliefs and behaviour of the British people was still to mature. Christianity rose from a minor cult to demonstrate the potential to be a major national religion, but had yet to win the hearts and minds of the population. The faith had already proved that it was able to survive invasion and attack.

But just as Christianity's rise looked to be unstoppable, the Viking invasion of Lindisfarne in AD marked the start of a series of attacks which threatened to destroy the Christian church. Monasteries and churches were plundered, and priests fled for their lives. It looked as if Paganism would again crush Christianity. It was Alfred, the Christian King of Wessex, who turned things round.

Alfred saw the Viking attacks as punishment from God. Once Alfred had secured a victory over the Viking warrior Guthrum at the Battle of Eddington, he set about creating a new system of Christian learning that would reach the illiterate country people. It was Alfred's hope that this would enable Christianity to begin to capture the imagination of the ordinary people.

In the 10th Century, lords began to provide small chapels on their land where local people could use the services of a priest. This sowed the seeds of the parish system, still in existence today.

It was the Norman Conquest that really cemented the power of the church in England. William the Conqueror implemented a colossal building project at both monastic and parish level. In Winchester, for example, the old Saxon Minster made way for a new Norman building. These new stone churches continued to play a central role in community life: they acted as schools, market places and entertainment venues. The medieval period in Britain is really a story of how Christianity came to dominate the lives of the ordinary people, both at home and on the long and perilous journeys of pilgrimage.

But it would be wrong to think of medieval Christians as devout church-goers who flocked to church every Sunday. Professor Ronald Hutton of Bristol University suggests that on average people would go to church just a few times a year, when there was a real spectacle to take part in.

But even those who weren't regular churchgoers could not escape regulation by the Church. As Dr Sarah Foot of Sheffield University explains, you could argue that Christianity had an impact on "every single aspect of every member of the population's lives".

Indeed "the Church regulated lives by controlling what people did during the day and what they did in bed". From the cradle to the grave, and every stage in between, the Church could be your ally or your foe, and ultimately your passport to heaven or hell.

At the beginning of the 16th Century there was nothing inevitable about the Reformation in England. England was not bound to turn Protestant like its Northern neighbours - indeed a bookmaker would have given pretty high odds against it. No one could predict what was to happen over the next years, least of all the king who started the process. Reform movements on the Continent were successfully influencing their governments to bring about change.

In England reformers were a tiny minority: people who wanted changes in the medieval Catholicism that had dominated for centuries. There was criticism of the 'magic-like' qualities of medieval Catholicism, the rituals that cluttered up the relationship between the individual and God.

There was talk of corruption and money-making that had distorted the true and simple meaning of the gospels. Henry wanted to divorce and re-marry in order to try and secure an heir, but the Pope would not grant him permission.

So Henry divorced England from the Pope instead. He was happy to endorse a few religious changes so that his decision to split from the Catholic Church didn't look too blatantly driven by self-interest. Religious changes under Henry were minimal in comparison to those wanted by the reformers wanted but they made a big difference to the individual believer. Until then the Bible had been in Latin: the priest alone told people what it meant. Oswald appealed to the island monastery of Iona to provide these missionaries — Bishop Aidan was sent to Northumbria in , founding the monastery of Lindisfarne and spending the rest of his life traveling the length of the kingdom, converting its population until his death in Not only did Aidan enjoy a close relationship with the elites of Northumbria, but his monks were active amongst the general population of the kingdom, making his conversion efforts highly successful.

With Christianity becoming more entrenched, the rest of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms slowly converted to the new faith. In Essex became Christian again when Sigeberht the Good was convinced to convert by King Oswy of Northumbria — despite relapsing into Germanic paganism in the s, King Sighere was the last pagan King of Essex, dying in His successor, King Ine, was Christian. Therefore, by the end of the 7 th century, Christianity had spread across Britain. Never again did any of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms openly relapse into paganism, and their kings continued to be baptized into the 8 th century and beyond as Christianity became increasingly entrenched in Saxon culture.

Despite the narratives that we have from Bede and other writers that detail the baptismal dates of nobles and monarchs, we have very little information regarding how the conversion would actually have been achieved, either theologically or at a grassroots level amongst the general population. This implies that although Christianity was easily spread amongst the elite in the 7 th century, it may have taken decades or even centuries for the faith to be taken up by the general population.

We must remember that conversion was used as a political tool as well — it was a very convenient way for a ruler to establish symbolic hegemony over his neighbors. However, elite patronage was clearly crucial for the establishment of Christianity, and it was elite patronage that aided missionaries and made their efforts possible. What is also striking is the Irish influence on the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England.

Although the Gregorian mission succeeded in baptizing several Saxon kings, it was the traveling Irish missionaries in East Anglia and Northumbria that paved the way for the grassroots conversion of the general population.

Through their foundation of monasteries, Fursey and Aidan created bases from which they could spread Christian doctrine amongst the pagan Anglo-Saxons surrounding them. By Jack Crawford Jack is a contributing writer with a primary interest in Medieval History, in particular the early medieval period.

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