THE GOLDEN DAYS

OF THE

EARLY ENGLISH CHURCH

CHAPTER I

ST. OSWALD AND ST. AIDAN IN NORTHUMBRIA AND ST. BIRIN IN WESSEX

In a previous volume I have endeavoured to give a fairly complete account of the famous missionary venture of Pope Gregory the Great under the leadership of St. Augustine and his companions, and have tried to treat it, not merely as a local incident, but as part of the history of the Latin Church. I followed the fortunes of the mission until they became much qualified and seriously paralysed, and until the line of bishops initiated by St. Augustine was exhausted. The story is not a cheerful one, but rather that of a gallant effort which failed, and was perhaps doomed to fail. The seed was planted, the soil was in a measure tilled, but the harvest that was gathered was a scanty one, and it needed a fresh plough and a fresh type of

VOL. I.—I

husbandmen with a wider experience of the world and larger ideas to secure a worthy crop.

The next venture that was made in this behalf was not initiated by missionaries from Rome. It was part of an extraordinary movement, which must always fill the student with wonder. It was inspired by the fervour and the burning zeal of the Irish In Celts, and displayed itself in two different ways. one by the determination of large numbers of those of good birth and of worldly position among them to cast everything away which men had hitherto deemed worth fighting for, and to retire from the crowded world and its pleasures into the anchorite's cell, each individual searching out a more and more rigid seclusion, with more and more desolate surroundings, and a more and more painful trial for the passions, emotions, and pleasures of life. They thus sought mental and bodily suicide in pursuit of a moral idea, based on self-martyrdom. The cherished fruit of this was the filling of the minds of the votaries with visions, dreams and phantasms which they interpreted as a foretaste of an everlasting life beyond the grave, in which this world and its ways should have as little part as possible.

Another section of these devotees, or rather another side of the life of some of them, betrayed an extraordinary passion for covering the world with their propaganda. We find them continually wandering with books and bells and preaching on the gloomy and monotonous text of the great Jewish preacher, namely, the vanity of all worldly

things; building churches, founding schools, working, praying and fasting, and by their extraordinary earnestness and reality compelling the homage of all ranks and of all types of men. It was by these Irish missionaries that the work of evangelising England was restarted, and it began not in the south but in the north, which for many a day became the real source of the revived Christianity of the Anglian race.

As we saw, the Roman missionaries did not entirely neglect this northern region. They sent one of their number, Paulinus, who had a short and qualified success there so long as he was supported by the strong arm of King Edwin. With his death it really came to an end, and the unseemly and unheroic flight of the missionary from a threatened martyrdom proved how very nominal his huge

conversions" had really been. In a previous volume I described the gathering of a few fragments of the fugitive Bishop's handiwork by the Deacon James. These must have been very small, and were, doubtless, limited to the villages of Richmondshire and North Yorkshire. Neither the man Paulinus nor his foreign ways and speech had been very inviting or inspiring to the rude Northumbrian folk, and any welcome or success he got was in fact due to the personal effort of the king and of his Kentish wife.

Let us now try and shortly trace the political results of Ædwin's death. We may gather from Bede's language that the real head and front of the