By the third quarter of the seventh century the first fervour of the English conversion had cooled down, and circumstances produced a kind of crisis. One of those plagues which at intervals ravaged mediæval Europe—it was called the Yellow Pest—during the summer of 664 swept over England from south to north. Earconbert, King of Kent, and Deusdedit, the first native bishop of the Kentish men, died on the same day; Damian, Bishop of Rochester, probably died a little before his brother of Canterbury. In the north, Tuda, recently appointed Bishop of Northumbria, died, and Cedd, Bishop of the East Saxons, then staying at his monastery of Lastingham. The half of the East Saxons who were under the rule of the sub-king Sighere, thinking the pest a result of the anger of the ancient gods, apostatized from the faith. The differences between the two “schools of thought,” the Continental in the south of the country, and the Scotic in the north, were causing friction and inconvenience, so much so that the bishops elect of the Continental school hesitated to receive consecration from the bishops of the Celtic school; Wilfrid of York had at this very time gone to seek consecration from the Frankish bishops. In this crisis, Oswy, King of Northumbria, agreed with Egbert, who succeeded Earconbert in Kent, to send a priest acceptable to both schools to Rome, to study things in that centre of Western Christendom, to get consecration from the Bishop of Rome, and then to return and reduce the ecclesiastical affairs of England to a common order. Wighard, a Kentish priest, sent in pursuance of this wise plan, died in Rome; and, to save time, at the request of the English Churches, Vitalian, the Bishop of Rome, selected Theodore of Tarsus, a learned priest of the Greek Church, consecrated him, and sent him to be archbishop of the English.
With Theodore (668-690) begins a new chapter in our history. His antecedents, as a member of the Eastern Church, eminently qualified him to look impartially upon the two schools, the Italian and the Scotic, into which the religious world of England was divided, and to address himself with broad views of ecclesiastical polity to the task of organizing the Heptarchic Churches into a harmonious province of the Catholic Church.
In 673, at the instance of Theodore, and under the presidency of Hlothere, King of Kent, a synod was held at Hertford, attended by all the English bishops but one, and by the kings and many of the principal nobles and clergy, at which the independent national Churches agreed to unite in an Ecclesiastical Province, with the Bishop of Canterbury as its metropolitan; it was further agreed that the bishops and clergy should meet in synod twice a year, once always in August at Clovesho, the other was probably left to the convenience of the moment as to time and place, but was usually held at Cealchyth. Augustine and his successors at Canterbury had never been practically more than bishops of the Kentish men, with the titular distinction of archbishop which Gregory gave them. Theodore, says Bede, was the first archbishop whom the Churches of the English obeyed. This gave Theodore the authority necessary for the carrying out of his plans for the peace and progress of the Church.
One feature of Theodore’s policy was the breaking up of some of the larger sees. This was not done without opposition. There was much to be said in favour of the idea of “one king one bishop;” it fell in with the political organization and it had the prestige of ancient use. But Theodore, looking at the subject from his point of view, as the ruler of an ecclesiastical province, saw the desirableness of breaking it up into dioceses of more manageable size. He was opposed by Wilfrid of York, who resented the diminution of his great position as Bishop of the Northumbrian kingdom, by the division of the diocese into four, York, Lindisfarne, Hexham, and Whithern; but his opposition was overborne by the firmness of the King of Northumbria and the archbishop. Wilfrid carried his complaint to Rome, which is the first example of an appeal from the English to the Roman Court, and raises the question of the relations of the English Church to the Bishop of Rome. It is sufficient to say here in reference to the Roman decision in Wilfrid’s favour on this and subsequent occasions, that neither Archbishop Theodore, nor the clergy, nor the king and thanes of the Witan, showed any disposition to accept the intervention of the Bishop of Rome, or to defer to his judgment in the matter; and that Wilfrid was punished by the king with imprisonment and exile for his contumacy.
The Bishop of Mercia, backed by the king, resisted the subdivision of that vast diocese; and it was not until after Theodore’s death that his plan was carried into effect of dividing it into four, Lichfield, Hereford, Worcester, Leicester, with Sidnacester for Lindsey, recently reconquered from Northumbria. It was not till 705 that the great diocese of Wessex was divided into two, Winchester and Sherburn, and further subdivided in the time of Alfred the Great by the erection of sees for Somerset, Wilts, and Devon. A new English see in Cornwall, on its conquest by Athelstan, completed the list of Saxon bishoprics.
The annual meeting of the Churches in synods was a very important consequence of their organization into a province. Kings and their councillors and great thanes came to the synods, as well as bishops and clergy. It is probable that the laymen had no formal voice in the ecclesiastical legislation, but their attestation and assent would add to the authority of the acts of the councils in the estimation of the people. The general synods would promote the regular holding of diocesan synods.[31] One direct result of these frequent assemblies would be to give a stimulus to the work of the Church all over the land. Another incidental result would be to afford a stable centre of affairs, and to promote the growth of a sentiment of nationality. Political affairs were in a state of great disturbance. In some of the kingdoms rival pretenders waged civil war, and now one, now another won the throne, while the bishop maintained his position undisturbed. Nations warred against one another, now Mercia reduced other kingdoms to dependence, and again Wessex asserted a supremacy over others; but the synods continued to unite the bishops and clergy of the kingdoms south of the Thames in frequent consultation for the common good.
Theodore’s idea in setting himself to divide the national bishoprics was to multiply episcopal centres of orderly Church life, adequate to the needs of the Christian flock. The settling of priests among the scattered people to take pastoral charge of them was a natural sequel to the former movement. The practical way of effecting it was to induce the landowners to accept and make provision for a resident priest who should have the pastoral care of their households and people.
It is not historically true that Theodore invented this idea of parochial organization, because it already existed in countries where the church had been longer established. Rome was virtually divided into forty parishes before the end of the third century. The system of appointing a priest to take charge of all the souls within a definite district existed in the city of Alexandria in the time of Athanasius, and in some country districts of Asia Minor at a very early period; it was a natural outcome of the Christian idea of the pastoral office of the ministry. The Emperor Justinian[32] had encouraged the system, by a law of 541, which decreed that a man who should build an oratory and furnish a competent livelihood for a priest, might present a clerk thereto, by himself and his heirs, and the bishop finding him worthy should ordain him. To come nearer home, a Synod of Orleans, in A.D. 541, ordained that, if any one desired to have a “diocese” on his estate, he should first allot sufficient lands for the maintenance of the church and of the clerks who should fulfil their offices there.[33] In Italy parishes were beginning to be founded in the time of Gregory the Great. From one of his letters it appears that Anio “Comes Castri Aprutiensis,” having built a church in his castellum, wished to have it consecrated;[34] and the Bishop of Fermo had referred to Gregory on the question. He allows it to be done on condition that the count shall provide a proper endowment for a resident priest. His business-like statement of what the endowment is to consist of, gives a kind of standard of what, in the circumstances of that time and in the judgment of a wise and practical bishop, was a proper endowment of a country parish. It was to consist of a farm with its homestead and a bed, a yoke of oxen, two cows, and fifteen head of sheep, and the proper implements of a farm, and four pounds of silver as the working capital. In another letter Gregory bids Felix, Bishop of Messina, to consecrate a church built by Subdeacon Januarus in the city, on the condition that it be properly endowed; and in this case he expressly denies the founder any rights (e.g. of patronage), except admission to Divine service.
The canons of the Council of Toledo, a little earlier than this, and a capitulary in 823 of Charlemagne,[35] a little later, show that it was about this period that country parishes, with their separate endowments and legal rights, were being founded throughout Europe.[36] Theodore knew what had been done in the East, and he is said to have encouraged the great landowners to adopt the system here. We may accept it as highly probable that we owe to Theodore the diocesan and parochial organization of the Church of England, which provides a pastor to look after every soul in his own home, as against the previous system of monastic centres from which missionaries went forth for occasional ministrations, and to which the people resorted in their spiritual needs.