HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

The late sixth and seventh century witnessed the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity through a series of missionary enterprises, launched from Rome, Francia and Ireland. These spread the new religion across all of what is now England by the 680s (Campbell 1986, 49–84; Mayr-Harting 1991; Charles-Edwards 2003b; Blair 2005, 8–78; Yorke 2006; Pryce 2009).

St Gregory the Great (590–604) conceived the earliest Roman mission, which he dispatched in 595 under the leadership of St Augustine of Canterbury. Augustine and his fellow missionaries arrived in Kent in 597, and soon converted the powerful local king, Æthelberht (d. 616×618). Over the coming decades members of the Roman mission spearheaded the conversion of several other kingdoms, including Essex, East Anglia and Northumbria, though their success was still dependent on the support of local rulers. The death of Æthelberht of Kent was followed by a nearfatal pagan backlash against the fragile churches in south-east England, and the death of Edwin (616–33) brought a sudden end to the Roman mission's presence in Northumbria. Edwin's successor, Oswald (634–42), had already converted during a period of exile among the Irish-speaking Christians of western Scotland. He patronised monks and missionaries from the monastery of Iona, and allowed one of them, St Aidan, to establish the famous monastery of Lindisfarne on the Northumbrian coast. A blend of influences – British and Frankish as well as Italian and Irish – characterised the formative stages of England's conversion to Christianity. In all areas, initial conversion was followed by the slow process of Christianisation, which involved the establishment of an infrastructure providing religious teaching and pastoral care.

Christianisation meant the re-entry of England into the written, Latinate cultural mainstream of western Europe. As a result, the kings and kingdoms of the seventh century emerge into the historical spotlight much more clearly than their predecessors, above all in the pages of the venerable Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Colgrave and Mynors 1969; Lapidge 2008 –10), finished in 731, which tells the story of the conversion process in vivid detail.