ECCLESIASTICAL 

 HISTORY 



SAVE for the discovery of that early Christian emblem, the chirho, in 

 a Roman pavement excavated at Frampton ^ there is no evidence to 

 connect Dorset w^ith the early Roman-British church, or any proof 

 that Christianity existed here before the later Roman mission.'' 

 Nor can the ecclesiastical history of this county be said to commence in 

 the seventh century with the conversion of the West Saxons at the preaching 

 of Birinus their apostle and first bishop, who, on his landing in 635, found 

 the inhabitants of the district ' most pagan ' {pagannissimos) according to 

 Bede.^ Dorset, it should be remembered, formed no integral part of the 

 West Saxon kingdom in which it afterwards became absorbed and no men- 

 tion of it occurs under the earlier Wessex bishops whose seat was established 

 at Dorchester (Oxford). While discarding an ancient record which names 

 Cenwalch of Wessex, who died in 672, as one of the ' kings, founders of 

 the church of Sherborne,' * an early foundation at Wareham may indicate 

 previous fugitive attempts to draw Dorset into the channel of church organiza- 

 tion in Wessex as it then existed by establishing a mission centre to its 

 south-east, but it was not until the military subjugation of the county had 

 been completed that it was swept into the main stream of national ecclesiasti- 

 cal life by the establishment of a bishop-stool at Sherborne in 705 on the 

 death of Bishop Haeddi and the division of the West Saxon diocese.' 



What the precise limits of the new see were is not easy exactly to 

 define. The two sees formed out of the old Wessex diocese are described 

 roughly as ' east and west of Selwood,' the large forest of that name which 

 stretched between them constituting a convenient border line. The Anglo- 

 Saxon Chronicle^ recording the death of Bishop Aldhelm in 709, says, ' this 

 year died bishop Aldhelm : he was bishop of the west of Selwood.' * Henry 

 of Huntingdon again states : ' Ine in the twentieth year of his reign divided 

 the bishopric of Wessex which used to be one into two sees : that portion 

 east of the woods Daniel held, that which was west of the woods was held by 

 Aldhelm.' ^ According to William of Malmesbury the see ' west of Selwood,' 

 the bishop-stool of which was fixed at Sherborne, included the counties 



' Anh. Jout-n. xxviii (1872), 217-21. 



' Mr. Moule, in his description of Old Dorset (pp. 50-51), comments on the absence of reference to this 

 county in the Monumenta Historica Britannka, which focusses all classic authoritie? of the period. In refer- 

 ence to the ancient British church in Wessex, the fact that St. Chad, afterwards bishop of Lichfield, was 

 consecrated to the see of York by Wine, bishop of Wessex, assisted by two British bishops, seems to show that in 

 that district the bishops who owed their ordination directly to Rome after the Roman Kentish mission were 

 in communion with those of the earlier British school. Dioc. Hist, of Salisbury (S.P.C.K.), p. z8. 



' Eal. Hist. lib. iii, cap. vii. * Cott. MS. Faust. A. ii, fol. 23. 



' Wm. of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontif. (Rolls Ser.), 375. The division of the Wessex dioceses into two sees, 

 one e t.iblished at Sherborne and the other at Winchester, is usually attributed to King Ine, but has also been 

 ascribed to synodal authority. Wharton, Jtiglia Sacra, ii, 20. 



^ Anglo-Sax. Chron. (Rolls Ser.), 38. ' Hist. Angl. (Rolls Ser.), i, no. 



