A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (22 page)

5

APOSTLES OF GERMANY

When Boniface wrote his critical letter to Æthelbald of Mercia he was no stranger to the middle kingdom and its people; about one third of his surviving collected correspondence comprises letters to or from Mercians or related to Mercian affairs. The archive was probably assembled under the aegis of Boniface’s helper St Lull, who would succeed him in the see of Mainz. Born about 710, Lull seems to have received his initiation into the religious life at the abbey of Malmesbury, with its ‘catchment area’, so to speak, across southwestern Mercia and northwestern Wessex. Lull met Boniface in Rome during the 730s and became one of his two chief assistant bishops (
chorepiscopi
) and a central figure in the English network in Germany. In the 770s a Northumbrian king naturally turned to him for help with a delegation to Charles the Great; a German bishop asked for his advice; he actively disseminated English learning on the Continent, such as the works of Aldhelm and Bede. Lull was the founder of the bishoprics of Hersfeld and Bleidenstadt. He was just one, if a distinguished example, of the numerous English churchmen active and influential in Europe during the eighth and early ninth centuries. How they came to be there and the role they played in the evolution of European culture is the theme of this chapter. They would have found the prevailing political conditions prevailing in the early 700s quite familiar.

The European background

Western Europe was a patchwork of rival power centres, Christian for the most part but with pagan outliers such as northern Frisia and, east of the Rhine, the remoter districts of Hessen, all struggling for control within their own fluid borders and for hegemony over their neighbours. North of the Alps the dominant power factor was the Merovingian dynasty, established in Gaul by Clovis about
AD
500, around the time the Anglo-Saxons were settling in Britain. The dynasty derived its name from Merovech, the legendary hero of the Salian Franks who had settled, probably as
foederati
, within the Roman province in the marshlands of the Scheldt and Meuse river basin during the fourth century. He had been conceived, so went the story, by the coupling of his mother with a sea monster who surprised her while sea bathing. When, in 498, his descendant Clovis I converted to Catholicism, the descendants of this monstrous nativity acquired additional Christian charisma.

The conversion was a delayed thank-you note from Clovis to his Christian wife’s god. Two years before, facing defeat by the Germanic Alemani tribe before the battle of Tolbiac, he had invoked the aid of Jesus and triumphed. The Merovingians’ lands were divided between rival factions into an eastern branch in Austrasia, ancestor to the Holy Roman Empire, and later a western grouping called Neustria. The kings, however, were challenged by their own chief ministers (‘mayors of the palace’) as well as by powerful dukes, as in Bavaria and Thuringia. In the early 660s the Austrasian minister deposed his king, a child called Dagobert II, had him tonsured as a monk and sent him into exile in Ireland. Fifteen years of court politicking later, fortune pointed in Dagobert’s direction. One of the factions looking for a puppet candidate contacted Northumbria’s prince bishop Wilfrid for help. The great man complied. He had the Irish contacts and his years in Lyon had introduced him to Merovingian politics. In due course he invited young Dagobert over
to Northumbria and then, having equipped him with a magnificent entourage, arranged for his return in style to the Austrasian throne in 676.

All this earned Wilfrid the enmity of the western Merovingian ‘palace’. Two years later, embarking for another journey to Rome, Wilfrid decided to avoid the crossing to Quentovic and took the more easterly route to Frisia. So, fortuitously, he initiated what was to become a major episode in the history of Europe – the Anglo-Saxon mission campaign among the Germanic peoples. Held up in the arrangements for his onward journey to Rome, he put the delay to good use by talking Christianity to the local king. He received a friendly reception thanks, it seems, to the coincidence of a bumper fishing season with his arrival. Thousands were converted, we are told by his admiring biographer. Unfortunately the pioneering mission was short lived. The fishing grounds reverted to normal, the new religion lost credibility and then the crown passed to a fiercely pagan ruler named Radbod.

The Frisian mission was to be at length successfully re-established under St Willibrord today the patron saint of Utrecht, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. There had been a Christian presence in Roman times and a short-lived attempt at conversion in the early 600s but the Frisians, the dominant seafarers of their time in the North Sea, were comfortable with their pagan religion. Elsewhere, east of the Rhine, there had been Christian missions of greater or lesser effectiveness led by Irish monks or
peregrini
and some by German churchmen.

But this scattered Christian presence was not flourishing nor, from the papacy’s point of view, duly subordinate to Rome. The new missionaries would encounter communities lapsing back into paganism and aristocratic prince bishops jealous of their independence and sovereignty within their ill-defined borders. They would find local clerics tolerating pagan practice within the context of supposedly Christian ritual, dubious marriage liaisons and numerous
near heresies. Among these allegiances, beliefs and cult practices, the Anglo-Saxon intervention would prove decisive. St Boniface of Crediton, better known in Germany as St Boniface of Fulda, is regarded as the founder of the German Roman Catholic Church, respected by all German Christians. He and the cohorts of Anglo-Saxon churchmen and women – West Saxons, Mercians and above all Northumbrians – who flooded into Continental Europe can with reason be called pioneers.

In the context of Rome’s dealings with the Anglo-Saxon world, the eighth century was payback time: Augustine’s mission to Canterbury inaugurated a papal policy of expansion; Archbishop Theodore consolidated Rome’s hold with his affirmation of Canterbury’s position in a reorganized English church; and Wilfrid of York, by his appeals to Rome, was expanding the papal curia’s jurisdiction in Western Christendom at large. Now some three generations of English monks, nuns and clergy were to make unquestioning allegiance to Rome the central assumption of the Western church, and so strengthen its position against the claims of the Byzantine emperors to suzerainty over the papal see. To quote Walter Ullmann a classic authority on the early papacy:

In concrete terms strong ties especially between Anglo-Saxon England and the papacy came to be forged at exactly the same time as that at which the imperial [i.e. Byzantine] government had begun to terrorize the papacy.
¹

Willibrord of Northumbria: apostle of the Netherlands

For the best part of a century churchmen and monks from England criss-crossed the Channel or the North Sea. Many expected to spend most of their lives on the Continent, working among the pagan or recently converted pagan tribes bordering on the territories of the
Merovingian Frankish kingdoms. Back in England there was a good deal of interest in the missionaries’ activities, particularly in the conversion of the German Saxons, the ‘Old Saxons’, whom the English considered their kinsfolk.

Wilfrid’s first Frisian venture had failed but then, in 689, Pippin of Heristal, warlord and chief minister of the royal household of the Merovingian king Dagobert III, defeated Radbod and married his son Grimoald to Theodelinda, the daughter of the Frisian chief. Radbod reluctantly came to terms. This was the situation facing Willibrord, son of a devoutly Christian member of the Northumbrian minor nobility, when in 690 he landed with eleven companions, among them Suidbert, Hewald ‘the Dark’ and Hewald ‘the Fair’, on the coast of Frisia. He headed for an old Roman fort at Utrecht, some twenty miles away on the Krom branch of the Rhine mouth. The Romans had known the place as Trajectum ad Rhenum (‘Ford across the Rhine’); in the 620s the Merovingian ruler of the day had conferred a chapel there on the Bishop of Cologne to be used as a missionary base. Nothing had come of that venture.

Now aged thirty-three, by the demographics of his day Willibrord was well into his prime. Sent by his father to Ripon, he had started his career under the influence of St Wilfrid and then, thanks to Wilfrid’s contacts there, it seems, spent twelve years in Ireland at the monastery of Rath Melsigi under Ecgberht, who apparently had once dreamed of himself missionizing the Continent. (The fact that Willibrord sailed to Frisia directly from Ireland seems to have prompted the mistaken idea that he was Irish). From Wilfrid, Willibrord learned his unswerving allegiance to Rome; as a noble, he naturally gravitated to the royal court. He found an aristocracy beyond royal control; a king subject to his chief minister; a church establishment largely autonomous and indifferent to Rome; and a chief minister single-mindedly devoted to the advance of his own power and dynasty.

For Pippin, religion was a natural tool of policy with which to reaffirm Frankish authority over pagan neighbours, and this Englishman with his devotion to Rome was the natural lever in court politics against churchmen attached to the traditional dynasty and their group interests. Rome, where the popes still acknowledged the overlordship of the emperors at Constantinople, was secondary. Indeed, according to Wilhelm Levison, at this time ‘the pope was of little importance to the Frankish church . . . [whereas] the English church was conscious of its Roman origin.’
²

This suited Pippin well. By championing the Rome-orientated Anglo-Saxon missions he positioned himself in the eyes of the head of the church in the West as a staunch son of the church, in contrast to the dynastic loyalties of the Frankish church establishment and the ambivalent status of the royal house itself, whose traditional charisma rivalled, for many of their subjects, the spiritual aura of the Roman popes. Pippin and his house, ancestors to the Carolings, would prove stalwart advocates of the new Christian missions and of the papal patrons of those missions. As to the Frisians in the 690s, many, perhaps most, took the new religion resentfully. Baptism was to them less a sacrament to the Divine Being than ‘a symbol of subjection to the Franks’. Radbod himself swore that he would rather spend eternity in the kingdom of Hades with his ancestors than in the Christian Heaven without them. For the moment, however, he bided his time.

With his mission established under Pippin’s aegis, Willibrord travelled to Rome for the approval and blessing of Pope Sergius I. What was a natural move for a disciple of Wilfrid was ‘a momentous decision’ in a Merovingian context, but, as indicated, Pippin approved. The Englishman’s visit strengthened his dynasty’s dealings with Rome, which could only be good. Sixty years later the last king of the Merovingian house was to be replaced with papal approval as king of the Franks by his descendant Pippin III.

When Willibrord returned from Rome with holy relics for the new churches that were to be erected in their honour in the newly
converted territories, it was to find that his companions had elected Suidbert as bishop. He was now in England being consecrated by Wilfrid. It was less a case of politicking within a divided team, more part of plans to extend the mission. The new bishop soon departed for work in pagan Westphalia, Germany. Driven out by Saxon raiders he retired to found a monastery under Pippin’s patronage; this was the origin of the settlement that became the town of Kaiserswerth. The two Hewalds were martyred while attempting to continue his work in Westphalia. Their shrine is still to be seen in Cologne Cathedral.

Willibrord now made his headquarters at Antwerp,
³
under Pippin’s aegis, on the southern border of Frisia. Thanks no doubt to the threatening Frankish presence across the border, by 695 Frisia was ripe to become a new church province. Pippin sent Willibrord on a second journey to Rome, this time for Pope Sergius to consecrate him as archbishop of the Frisians. He took with him gifts from Pippin for the Holy Father and was duly consecrated in the church of St Cecilia in Trastevere on 21 November. He returned to Frisia and the following year received the fortress of Utrecht as his bishop’s palace at the hands of Pippin. An old church within the walls of the former Roman fort became his cathedral. (In 1996 the modern city celebrated its 1,300th anniversary with its patron St Willibrord given due prominence.)

Pippin, theoretically the king’s chief minister, was acting in every way as a king himself, intervening at the highest level in the affairs of the Frankish church and dealing through his and not the king’s intermediary with the pope. If Willibrord was not just a pawn on the chessboard of palace politics, he was certainly a very useful bishop! The importance of his mission from Rome’s point of view was surely strengthened when Pope Sergius granted him the name in religion ‘Clemens’, after St Peter’s successor as pope. He and his colleagues pushed ahead with the extension of the Christian community in the territories owing allegiance to King Radbod. Back in England,
friends of Wilfrid praised Willibrord, whom they saw as the continuator of his work. On a last journey to Rome about 703 Wilfrid, accompanied by a young monk named Acca, spent time with Willibrord. The two Northumbrian veterans reminisced over the old days and the wonders worked by the relics of King St Oswald,
⁴
some of which Wilibrord had with him. Years later Acca, now bishop of Hexham, would tell Bede his memories of the meeting.

Willibrord had established a new base with a monastery at Echternach, in modern Luxembourg, on land given to him by Pippin about 700. He lies buried in the tenth-century crypt of the church that bears his name and the town still celebrates his feast day (7 November). This church also held relics of St Oswald and honoured Willibrord on the king’s feast day. His pastoral care for the community was not merely spiritual. On one visitation ‘the saintly man’ found that the cellar was down to a single half-empty tun of wine. He dipped his staff into the barrel with a blessing and went on his way. That evening the cask was found brim full, to the delight of the house steward. Willibrord swore him to silence. There is a delightful seventeenth-century engraving showing the bishop-saint with his wand of office, among the barrels of the wine cellar.