This chapter focuses on the period of most overt transition between heathenism and Christianity in early England, although the sense of binary opposition presented by these terms can be misleading and unhelpful in understanding what actually took place. In his classic overview of this process, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, Henry Mayr-Hating pointed out that conversion in England was not rapid. Whilst it took almost ninety years to convert the Anglo-Saxon kings and much of the nobility, missionary efforts in the countryside required not decades, but centuries. Rather than attempting to introduce the new faith by force, representatives of the Church amongst the Anglo-Saxon peoples sought to take advantage of an inculturative method, whereby points of incidence such as the Germanic spring festival and the Christian Paschal feast celebrating the death and resurrection of Christ allowed the Church to subsume aspects of the old faith into the new. Pope Gregory's advice in 601 to Mellitus, the first bishop of London, is well known, but no less significant because of this. Its importance in directing missionary activity in England is implicit in its reproduction by Bede in his Historia, where it emphasises the fact that elements of pre-Christian belief that were not at odds with the teaching of the Church might be more profitably assumed into its fabric. This was to be done, Gregory wrote, because (Historia Ecclesiastica I.30, pp. 108):

Thus, in accordance with Gregory's instructions, cattle sacrifices were to be realigned with the cults of saints, and temples and places of worship were to be purified and rededicated to the Christian God.

It is to be expected that such a process would produce artefacts, rituals, literary works and other expressions of religious culture whose hybrid forms had their origins in both insular and Christian traditions. The days of the week as they are known in modern English must be our most familiar and enduring example of this, alongside Easter and other pre-Christian festivals incorporated into the Christian calendar.