ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



that the saint actually settled for a time in Burgh Castle is not to be doubted, 

 though his sojourn there was but brief.' 



Meanwhile King Sigbert had not been idle. Profiting by what he had 

 seen and learnt in his Burgundian retreat he seems to have begun soon after 

 his return to his kingdom to found a monastery, which Bede says ' he had 

 made for himself,' and to which he eventually retired. It is a question of 

 some interest where that monastery — with its school — in which Felix 

 introduced his duly qualified teachers imported from Canterbury, was 

 situated.^ 



In the meantime — if we prefer to have a working hypothesis rather than 

 none — we may give St. Felix the benefit of the doubt which Mr. Mickle- 

 thwaite claims as a certainty. If this be conceded we may venture to claim 

 for this curious and ancient church some connexion with the group of 

 seven churches in this the southern portion of the early undivided East Anglian 

 diocese. 



But this is not all. At the northern extremity of the diocese,' that is, 

 on the coast of Norfolk, there is another group of seven churches in close 

 proximity to the great Roman fortress of Brancaster. These churches all 

 bear the common name of Burnham, though distinguished from one another 

 by the names of their respective patron saints, as in the case of the South 

 Elmham group.* They are crowded into a smaller area than the South Elmham 

 deanery occupies, inasmuch as the quadrilateral within which they lie is 

 scarcely four square miles in extent, and no one of them is distant so much as 

 a mile from the other.' 



The parallel may be a mere coincidence, but who can help thinking of 

 the groups of seven churches at Clonmacnoise, at Glendalough, at Clonenagh, 

 at Innes Cealtra, and elsewhere in Ireland ? In the absence of historic 

 record, or even of tradition, we fall back upon conjecture and ask whether 

 it may not be that the powerful Celtic influence exercised upon St. Felix by 

 his Irish teachers at Luxeuil suggested to him the founding of his schools in 

 East Anglia on the model of those Irish schools and colleges which were 

 renowned places of education all over Europe in the seventh century, and 

 which continued to be so almost down to the period of the Danish invasion.* 



The work of evangelizing his people and of organizing and consolidating 

 the church in his kingdom, went on with extraordinary enthusiasm while 



' There is a very good life of St. Fursa in the Dictionary of Christian Biography. His career and that of 

 his brethren after he left East Anglia and settled in France has been elaborately followed by Miss Stokes in her 

 Three Months in the Forests of France. Canon Venables, rector of Burgh, has set up a magnificent granite cross 

 in the churchyard of Burgh as a memorial of Fursa's sojourn in East Anglia. 



' Bede, iii, 1 8, 19. The Historia E/iensis asserts that the place was Berdericksworth, a statement which is 

 no more to be credited than the fable which planted it at Cambridge. 



^ The diocese, it must be remembered, was conterminous with the limits of the East Anglian kingdom ; 

 that is it extended from the Wash on the north to the Stour on the south ; it was bounded on the west by 

 that region of morasses and fens stretching from Lincolnshire to Cambridgeshire, where the Gyrwas, of whom 

 ■we know so little, seem to have roamed about as they pleased. Thomas, who succeeded Felix in his bishopric, 

 was one of these Gyrzvas. Bede, iii, c. 20. See, too, Historia E/iensis, i, 4-5. 



' Of course the names of all these saints are comparatively modern. 



' These churches are (or were, as some of them are in ruins) : — I, Burnham Norton, St. Margaret ; 

 2, Burnham Overy, St. Clement ; 3, Burnham, St. Andrew ; 4, Burnham Sutton, St. Ethelbert ; 5, Burnham 

 Ulph, All Saints ; 6, Burnham Westgate, B.V.M. ; 7, Burnham Thorpe, St. Peter (?). Burnham Deepdale, 

 situated some three miles to the north-west of this group of seven churches, had probably no connexion with 

 them, and was most likely a much later foundation. 



* See Prof. George Stokes, Ireland and the Celtic Church (Longmans), lect. x, xi. See Dr. Joyce's Short 

 Hist, of Ireland, pt. 2, c. v. 



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