ECCLESIASTICAL 

 HISTORY 



IT is an unfortunate fact, which complicates both the ecclesiastical and 

 the political geography of England, that the boundaries of the earliest 

 Anglo-Saxon kingdoms did not coincide to any notable extent with 

 the lines which determine the county divisions of the present day. In 

 the 7th century, for instance, it seems probable that the district comprised 

 within the modern shire of Nottingham included lands which severally formed 

 part of the kingdoms of Mercia, Northumbria and Lindsey. In any case it 

 was in connexion with the last of these that Christianity first reached the 

 district in question, for there can be little doubt that the ephemeral conversion 

 of Lindsey at the hands of Paulinus implied the reception of the faith by 

 some at least of the men whose dwellings lay on the western bank of the 

 Trent. More than this we cannot say, nor dare we attempt to fix the 

 position of the mysterious ' civitas ' of Tiovulfinga caestir, near which it was 

 reported to Bede that Paulinus had baptized a mighty host of converts in 

 the river. The recrudescence of paganism which followed the battle of 

 Hatfield in 633 marks a definite severance between the evangelizing work of 

 Paulinus and the historical Christianity of the north of England. 



The more successful labours of the saints of the reconversion are related 

 by Bede without specific reference to any events which can reasonably be 

 supposed to have happened within the modern Nottinghamshire. Before the 

 loth century, there is no definite evidence that a religious house was founded 

 within the boundary of the shire ; and this although the Mercian kings who 

 followed Penda were zealous in their profession of Christianity. Higher up the 

 Trent, however, a double community of monks and nuns had been established 

 at an early date at Repton, from which, towards the close of the 7th century, 

 Guthlac, the future saint, migrated to found for himself a hermitage at Crow- 

 land, in the fens of Holland. This primitive monastery is connected with 

 the history of Nottinghamshire by the fact that at the beginning of the i ith 

 century the body of Eadburh, the sainted abbess of Repton and the personal 

 friend of Saint Guthlac, was known to repose in the minster of Southwell.^ 



In the 7th century it seems to have been the rule that each kingdom 

 should possess its own bishop, the limits of whose diocese contracted or 

 expanded with the fortunes of the people of whom he had the spiritual 

 charge. In accordance with this practice it would seem that by the middle of 

 the 8th century Nottinghamshire as a whole formed part of the Mercian diocese 



' Liber Vitae (Hants Rec. Soc), Iviii, 83. 

 37 



