ECCLESIASTICAL 

 HISTORY 



WHEN Christianity first took root in Britain, and under what cir- 

 cumstances it was brought to our progenitors, and over what 

 area its influence extended in Roman times, are subjects over 

 which it is almost idle now to conjecture in the lack of any 

 trustworthy information from written or monumental records. It is, how- 

 ever, probable that when the Romans withdrew their legions from Britain at 

 the beginning of the fifth century, Britain south of the Roman wall was a 

 Christian land with an organized church, whose bishops — except perhaps in 

 Wales — exercised their authority over certain territorial dioceses, whose clergy 

 were not seldom men of learning and trained in dialectics, a church, too, 

 which possessed a version of the Scripture differing from that Vulgate or 

 generally accepted Latin version current among the Christian churches of Gaul 

 with which it had relations on equal terms. Lastly, it was a church which 

 had its monasteries with some schools or educational machinery, and some of 

 these monasteries were supported by their own endowments such as they 



were.^ 



When in the latter half of the fifth century the Angles, from what is 

 now Schleswig and Holstein, left their old homes, swarmed across the North 

 Sea and settled down upon the coast of Norfolk, which became henceforth 

 their home, it may safely be assumed that they found among the old 

 occupiers some form of Christianity. They dispossessed those occupiers of 

 their houses and lands, using some of them as slaves to tend their flocks and 

 herds and to till the soil. The theory that a general obliteration of the old 

 civilization ensued, along with a general sweeping away of all that stood tor 

 religion and culture, though the prevalent theory at the beginning of the 

 nineteenth century, is now accepted by very few. Religions die hard, are not 

 easily stamped out, and often survive (even though few material ruins remain 

 to attest their former existence) in the superstitions which defy extinction 

 and live on. 



' For much of what is asserted in the text the student is referred to Hadden & Stubbs, Councils and 

 Ecclesiastical Documents, \, I, 120. Mommsen's edition of Gildas in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica cannot 

 be accepted as final. The researches of Mr. Anscomb, ' St. Gildas of Ruys,' 1893, have necessitated a new 

 edition, which I am told is preparing. Bp. Stubbs, writing to me in 1895, accepts Mr. Anscomb's date for 

 the death of Gildas (some time before A.n. 554) as 'provisionally settling that point.' As to the monasteries 

 and their existence as powerful institutions in the sixth century, they are taken for granted by Gildas, and — 

 not to mention Glastonbury (on which see Freeman, Norm. Conq. [1-435]) — '' '^ <^'"^^'' ''^^^ '" the west there 

 were still many of them at the end of the seventh century, which can only have been survivals from much 

 earlier times. See the ' Life and Letters of St. Boniface,' Monumenta Moguntina Jaffce. 



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