An Introduction to the History of Western Europe

by James Harvey Robinson

The Benedictine monks, as well as later monastic orders, were ardent and faithful supporters of the papacy. The Roman Church, which owes much to them, appreciated the aid which they might furnish and extended to them many of the privileges enjoyed by the clergy. Indeed the monks were reckoned as clergymen and were called the "regular" clergy because they lived according to a regula, or rule, to distinguish them from the "secular" clergy, who continued to live in the world (saeculum) and took no monastic vows.

Monks and secular clergy supplement each other.

The Church, ever anxious to maintain as far-reaching a control over its subjects as that of the Roman Empire, whose power it inherited, could hardly expect its busy officers, with their multiform duties and constant relations with men, to represent the ideal of contemplative Christianity which was then held in higher esteem than the active life. The secular clergy performed the ceremonies of the Church, administered its business, and guarded its property, while the regular clergy illustrated the necessity of personal piety and self-denial. Monasticism at its best was a monitor standing beside the Church and constantly warning it against permitting the Christian life to sink into mere mechanical and passive acceptance of its ceremonies as all-sufficient for salvation. It supplied the element of personal responsibility and spiritual ambition upon which Protestantism has laid so much stress.

The monks as missionaries.

22. The first great service of the monks was their missionary labors. To these the later strength of the Roman Church is in no small degree due, for the monks made of the unconverted Germans not merely Christians, but also dutiful subjects of the pope. The first people to engage their attention were the heathen Germans who had conquered the once Christian Britain.

Early Britain.

The islands which are now known as the kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland were, at the opening of the Christian era, occupied by several Celtic peoples of whose customs and religion we know almost nothing. Julius Cæsar commenced the conquest of the islands (55 B.C.); but the Romans never succeeded in establishing their power beyond the wall which they built, from the Clyde to the Firth of Forth, to keep out the wild Celtic tribes of the North. Even south of the wall the country was not completely Romanized, and the Celtic tongue has actually survived down to the present day in Wales.

Saxons and Angles conquer Britain.

At the opening of the fifth century the barbarian invasions forced Rome to withdraw its legions from Britain in order to protect its frontiers on the continent. The island was thus left to be gradually conquered by the Germans, mainly Saxons and Angles, who came across the North Sea from the region south of Denmark. Almost all record of what went on during the two centuries following the departure of the Romans has disappeared. No one knows the fate of the original Celtic inhabitants of England. It is unlikely that they were, as was formerly supposed, all killed or driven to the mountain districts of Wales. More probably they were gradually lost among the dominating Germans with whom they merged into one people. The Saxon and Angle chieftains established petty kingdoms, of which there were seven or eight at the time when Gregory the Great became pope.