In A.D. 664, a synod was held at Streaneshalch; the subject of the proper time of keeping Easter was discussed in the presence of King Oswy of Northumberland by Bishop Colman and Wilfrid. In the same year Deusdedit, Archbishop of Canterbury, died. The result was that the king espoused the Roman style.[58] Then followed an interregnum of four years. Wilfrid’s strong opinions about Easter kept him out of the archiepiscopate.
It is vitally important to note this turn of the tide to Rome. I take all particulars from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. If this turn had not occurred there would have been two separate and independent Churches in England, the Celtic and the Roman.
In 664 a synod was convened in the monastery of Streaneshalch (Whitby) presided over by King Oswy, who was at first a follower of the Celtic ritual, for the discussion of the proper time for keeping Easter. Bishop Colman spoke for the Celtic Church; Priest Wilfrid for the Roman time. The latter had previously gone to Rome to learn the ecclesiastical doctrine. Colman traced the Celtic time to the teaching of St. John the Evangelist; Wilfrid traced his to St. Peter, and then quoted, “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build My Church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it; and to thee I will give the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven.” This quotation turned the scales, as will be seen from what followed. “Is it true, Colman,” said the King, “that these words were spoken to Peter by our Lord?” “It is true, O King!” “Can you show,” said the King, “any such power given to your Columba?” Colman answered “None.” “Then,” added the King, “do you both agree that these words were principally directed to Peter, and that the keys of heaven were given to him by our Lord?” They both answered, “We do.” Then the King concluded, “And I also say unto you that he is the door-keeper, whom I will not contradict, but will, as far as I know and am able in all things, obey his decrees, lest when I come to the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven, there should be none to open them, he being my adversary who is proved to have the keys.” The King having said this, all present resolved to conform to the Roman ritual.[59] This was not the first nor the last case in England in which St. Peter and the power of the keys did good duty for the Church of Rome. The result of this discussion turned the scales from Irish to Roman Christianity as the religion of England.
King Oswy had, before the synod met, held the Celtic views. His son, who was present, held the Roman views. The result of this discussion led to serious changes in the Church of England, for in the same year, A.D. 664, the archbishopric of Canterbury became vacant, and Kings Oswy and Egbert sent to Rome Wighard, an Englishman, whom they appointed, there to be consecrated archbishop by the Pope, because there was no metropolitan in England to perform this duty of consecration. He died there, and then the Pope was empowered by the same kings to select and consecrate a suitable person himself. “We have not been able,” writes Pope Vitalian, “now to find a man docile and qualified in all respects to be a bishop according to the tenor of your letter.”[60] Again, “King Egbert, being informed by messengers that the bishop they had asked of the Roman prelate was in the kingdom of France.”[61]
From these two quotations, it is beyond all doubt or question that the English kings did ask the Pope to select a qualified person for the see of Canterbury. And it is absurd for Protestant writers, such as Soames, in the face of these quotations, to assert that Theodore’s appointment was a piece of skilful manœuvring on the part of the Pope. It was nothing of the sort. It is but reasonable to assume that when Wighard died in Rome, Vitalian wrote at once and informed the English kings of the event, and that they then, although we have not their letters, asked the Pope to choose a man for them. He therefore consecrated Theodore, a Greek by birth and education. We all know what followed. In the same year the Pope conferred on Theodore the “supremacy over all England.”[62] He landed in England in 669, and held his see for twenty-one years. The Churches of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were independent of each other up to the arrival of Theodore, who had energetically worked to unite all the Churches under the metropolitan power of Canterbury. Here then we are on solid ground. The Pope’s supremacy over all the Churches in England dates from the archiepiscopate of Theodore.
There is no reference to tithes from the publication of Theodore’s “Penitential,” probably about A.D. 686, until the two legates came to England in 787, or a period of one hundred years, Archbishop Boniface of Mentz, writing to Archbishop Cuthbert between 746 and 749, refers to tithes having then been received by English bishops, “In daily offerings,” he says, “and tithes of the faithful, they receive the milk and wool of the sheep of Christ, but they take no care of the Lord’s flock.” [“Lac et lanas ovium Christi oblationibus cotidianis ac decimis fidelium suscipiunt; et curam gregis Domini deponunt.”[63]] Here is an early instance of endowed bishops neglecting their flocks.
This brief sketch will enable the reader to follow further particulars.
King Offa.
Pope Adrian I. had risen from the position of a subject of the empire to that of a sovereign prince through the instrumentality of Charlemagne. Jaenbert, archbishop of Canterbury, thought that by the same person he could exercise sovereign authority, like the Bishop of Rome, over the kingdom of Kent as feudatory of Charlemagne. Offa, the Mercian king, had assumed the title of King of Kent and treated it as a province of Mercia. The King of France was too shrewd a diplomatist to encourage such a foolish idea as that of the Archbishop against the terrible and powerful Offa. But Offa found out this prelate’s intrigues, and instead of sending an army to Kent to crush Jaenbert, he adopted another line of policy of dividing his ecclesiastical province, and having a full-blown archbishop in his own kingdom of Mercia, with his seat at Lichfield, and endowed with the revenues which Jaenbert had drawn from that part of his province.[64]
Offa had thus touched Jaenbert’s pocket, a very sore point with some people. In order to carry out his design of changing the bishopric of Lichfield into an archbishopric with metropolitan powers, he sent a special mission to the Pope, and it was during this negotiation that the shrewd Adrian came on the scene in English history. Adrian had reason to fear Offa’s power, for there is a letter from Offa to Charlemagne, intriguing to depose Adrian, and put a Frenchman in the chair of St. Peter.[65]