Parish Priests and Their People in the Middle Ages in England

by Edward Lewes Cutts

he history of the conversion of our heathen forefathers has happily been told so often in recent times that it is not necessary to repeat it here. It is sufficient for our purpose to recall to mind how when Augustine and his Italian company came to Kent, they addressed themselves to King Ethelbert, who had married a Christian princess of the House of Clovis, and were permitted by him to settle and preach in his kingdom; how King Oswald, on his recovery of his ancestral kingdom of Northumbria, sent to the Fathers of Iona, among whom he had learnt Christianity during his exile, for missionaries to convert his people; how Sigebert, King of the East Saxons, and Peada, sub-King of the Middle Angles in Mercia, obtained missionaries from Northumbria; how Sigebert, King of the East Angles, invited Bishop Felix to give to his people the religion and civilization which he had learnt in exile in Burgundy; how the Italian Bishop Birinus came to the Court of King Cynegils, and converted him, and taught among the men of Wessex; and, finally, how Wilfrid of York began the conversion of the South Saxons.

The Ruined Cathedral, Iona.

In the Apostolic Age, the conversion of people in a condition of ancient civilization began among the lower classes of the people, and ascended slowly man by man through the higher classes, and it was three hundred years before the conversion of the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the religion of the empire. In the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the work began in every case with the kings and the higher classes of the people; and the people under their leadership abandoned their old religion and accepted Christianity as the national religion, and put themselves under the teaching of the missionaries, as a general measure of national policy.

The explanation of this probably is that their Teutonic kinsmen, Goths, Burgundians, and Franks, who had carved for themselves kingdoms out of the body of the Roman empire, having accepted the religion and the civilization of the people they had conquered, were growing rapidly in prosperity and the arts of civilized life. Christianity was the religion of the new Teutonic civilization, and heathenism was a part of the old state of barbarism. The Angles and Saxons, when they fastened upon this derelict province of the empire, were too barbarous to appreciate civilization, and destroyed it; but by the time that they had been settled for some generations in their new seats they had outgrown their old wild heathenism; and their kings had become sufficiently politic to desire to learn how to raise the new kingdoms which they governed to an equality with those of the kindred Continental nations. Hence, some of the heptarchic kings sought for Christian teachers to help them, and others were willing to receive them when they offered themselves.

Our previous study of the organization, religion, and customs of the people will help us to understand the process of the revolution. The kings, when converted, put the matter before the constitutional council of chiefs and wise men, and with their assent, and perhaps after a reference of the question to a folk-mote, formally adopted the new religion. The history which Bede gives of the first acceptance of Christianity in Northumbria, under the teaching of Paulinus, affords a profoundly interesting example of the process—the long hesitation of the king, the discussion in the witan, the general acceptance of the new faith, the zeal of the chief priest in destroying the national temple, the flocking of the people to the preaching of Paulinus, and their baptism in multitudes in the neighbouring rivers.

In no instance were the missionaries persecuted; in no instance did the kings coerce their people into the acceptance of the new religion.[14] In such a wholesale transition from one religion to another, it is not surprising that there occurred partial and temporary relapses, as in Kent and Essex, on the death of King Ethelbert, 616, in Wessex on the death of Cynegils, 643, and again in Essex, after the plague of 664; still less surprising that old superstitions retained their hold of the minds of a rude and ignorant people for centuries.[15]

If we are right in our conjectures that every kingdom had a national temple at the principal residence of the king with a small staff of priests, and a few smaller temples with their priests under the patronage of some of the subordinate chiefs, and that these temples were resorted to by the people for special acts of common worship at the great festivals three or four times in the course of the year, then it would not be difficult for the new religion to supply to the people all that they had been accustomed to of religious observances. Churches on the sites of the old temples, with their clergy, and services on the great festivals of the Christian year, would satisfy the customs of the people; and, in fact, the circumstances of the Christian missionaries led in the first instance to arrangements of this nature.

In every kingdom the king, who had been the patron of the old religion, took the new teachers under his protection, and made provision for their maintenance by the donation of an estate in land with farmers and slaves upon it; thus Ethelbert gave to Augustine a church and house in Canterbury, and land outside the city for a site for his monastery, and estates at Reculver and elsewhere for maintenance; Oswald gave to Aidan the isle of Lindisfarne, under the shadow of his principal residence at Bamborough; Ethelwalch gave Wilfred eighty-seven hides at Selsey, and Wilfrid began his work, as probably the other missionary bishops did, by emancipating his slaves and baptizing them; Cynegils, on his baptism, gave Birinus lands round Winchester, and his son Coinwalch endowed the church there with three manors; a little later, Wulfhere of Mercia gave Chad a wild tract of a hundred thousand acres between Lichfield and Ecclesfield. This was the “establishment” and beginning of the “endowment” of the Church in England.

The bishop in every kingdom first built a church and set up Divine service, then simultaneously set up a school, and invited the king and chiefs to send their sons to be educated. Aidan took twelve youths of noble birth as his pupils, and added slaves whom he purchased. The young men of noble families showed themselves eager to avail themselves of the teaching and training of the missionaries, and readily offered themselves to training for Holy Orders. The ladies at first, before there were monasteries for women in England, went to the monasteries at Brie and Chelles near Paris, and at Andelys near Rouen, which were under the government of members of the Frankish royal families. From his central station the bishop went out and sent his priests on missionary journeys to the neighbouring townships, to teach and baptize.