A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (24 page)

After one false start, when several days rowing upstream along the River Fulda produced no useful sighting, Sturm was told by Boniface to try again. This time he set out alone, we are told, on a single ass. By day he ambled through the trackless forest, checking out the terrain, soil quality and above all possible drinking water sources and access to the river. By night he cut saplings and brushwood to make a corral for the ass, using ‘a tool which he carried in
his hand’ – presumably some form of billhook . . . or an unclerical sword? We are told wild animals were a hazard. Then, on the bridge carrying the merchant road to Mainz over the River Fulda, he came upon a party of Slavs bathing in the river. They scared his beast and, ‘as all heathen do’, jeered at him. Fortunately, when they tried to do him harm, they were ‘held back by divine power’ – which rather tends to favour the sword theory.

Eventually, at a place called Eihloh, Sturm found a man with local knowledge who seems to have been invaluable in tracking down the ‘blessed spot foreordained by God’ – though Sturm, of course, attributed the discovery to the prayers of Boniface. Persuaded by Sturm’s report, the latter took over and went to Carloman, the Frankish chief minister, to get his consent to the appropriation of the land.

The English role in Europe’s Frankish Empire: I

Carloman was a member of the Carolingian dynasty that would soon dominate European affairs. It would come to owe a good deal to the Anglo-Saxon missions, as did the papacy. Boniface repeatedly sought papal decisions on the difficulties of canon law or to be informed on the rites of the Roman Church. As other churchmen followed his example, papal influence in the Frankish church inevitably increased. Above all, the English system of provincial church organization, originally approved by Pope Gregory the Great and brought to England by St Augustine, was now introduced into Frankish Europe as Boniface re-established councils as a relatively regular feature of Frankish church government.

By their own admission these [eastern] Franks had not held a council in eighty years and Carloman, Charles Martel’s successor in the region, begged Boniface to convene a synod, promising to ‘reform and re-establish ecclesiastical discipline’ there. The so-called ‘Germanic church council’ of April 742, convened by Boniface
under Carloman, proclaims by its very date the pervasive English influence. The chief minister did not at this time recognize any official Merovingian king and the proceedings of the council are dated by the Bedan
AD
method, the first official Frankish document to do so.
¹⁰
In this way the Anglo-Saxon missions pioneered the very era in German usage.

Growing papal success in Germany was counterbalanced by a deteriorating papal position in Italy itself. Once supervised by the Byzantine imperial governors at Ravenna, the popes were now in danger from the Lombard kings, with their capital at Pavia. It seemed they might become mere bishops of Rome, subjects not of the emperor but of a great Lombard monarchy. They looked for help from the Frankish kingdom across the Alps.

The title to power was still held by the Merovingians – later dubbed the
fainéants
(do-nothing) kings – at this point embodied by Childeric III, but action was the province of their Carolingian chief minister, now Pippin the Short. Even in its decadence the dynasty was held in awe among the people. With a charisma symbolized by the long uncut tresses of their hair, according to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill in
Early Germanic Kingship
, they retained privileged behaviour, notably open polygamy, from the pagan past. Straightforward assassination followed by a coup d’état might be possible for an ambitious member of the royal family; but the overthrow of that family itself was another matter. If the pope wanted help against the Lombards, he would have to offer help himself – to the ambitious ruler of the Franks.

Pippin aimed to oust King Childeric III; this required the authority, if not of God himself, then of as near as one could get on this earth. His family’s cultivation of the successors of St Peter was about to pay off. Pippin sent a two-man embassy to Rome: Fulrad, abbot of Saint Denis near Paris and Burchard, bishop of Würzburg, an Anglo-Saxon and a Mercian by birth. They were to pose Pope Zacharias a question: ‘Which of two should be king: the man who
had the title but no power or the man who, in these difficult times, exercised the power but had not the title?’ It was hardly a trick question and the pope, fortunately, knew the answer. He ordered that Pippin be made king, forthwith.

Yet the Merovingians were a hard act to follow and required special magic. In 750 the great minister’s henchmen arranged for his election as king of the Franks at Soissons. Next, in early autumn 751 ‘King’ Pippin, who had been baptized by Archbishop Willibrord, was, according to the
Royal Frankish Annals
, anointed by another Englishman, Boniface, by now archbishop of Mainz and ‘Legate for Germany for the Catholic and Apostolic Church of Rome’. So it appears that the dynasty of Charlemagne or Charles the Great, King of the Franks, the dynasty that established the medieval, later Holy Roman, empire was raised to royal status in consecration by an Englishman.

English contributions in the field

Boniface had long depended on support from the Frankish authorities. In a letter to Bishop Daniel he explained that without their help the suppression of pagan rites and idol worship would be quite impossible; the protection of the clergy within the community could be hazardous; even discipline within the church itself could be difficult. All depended upon directives from the palace and the fear of sanctions if they were broken. But in this world of rival loyalties and sanctions Boniface had telling arguments on his own side when dealing with pagans: first his own allegiance to St Peter, founder of God’s church on earth; second to that church itself, a monarchical hierarchy, and a fighting body, or church militant.

In a letter to Eadburga, abbess of Minster in the Isle of Thanet, he asks her to copy out for him in ‘letters of gold’ the Epistles of his lord, St Peter. There was a lot to commend the books to non-Christian lords and rulers. In the first place, Boniface’s oath had
been pledged on the earthly relics of their author, the first lord of the church militant – surely an important factor among men whose world was governed by oaths of allegiance. Secondly, the greatest of all the saints was no grey celibate but a married man who, like the many-partnered rulers the missionary was dealing with, had known all about the pleasures of sex. Thirdly, the books were ‘compact’, so to speak – just seven short chapters in total. But above all the glorious gilded lettering and luxurious quality of the illuminated manuscripts that Eadburga was to prepare for him would ‘impress a reverence and love of Holy Scripture on the minds of the heathens to whom I preach’. He also writes that he is sending the costly materials for the work by separate messenger.

Of all the gifts he received from his own correspondents, Boniface particularly welcomed the books ‘as lamps . . . [of the word of God] . . . to guide the feet of one working . . . in these gloomy lurking-places of the German people’. It is a telling glimpse of work in the great central forest of Dark Age Germany. Time and again we catch an echo of the workaday life of the mission field. The lack of a library to hand means that Boniface must check a basic date, like the year of Augustine’s arrival in England, with Canterbury; he settles technicalities about the validity of baptisms performed in ‘heathen tongues’ and urges his co-workers to always instruct in the Catholic traditions of the see of Rome; he petitions the English clergy to pray regularly for the missionaries and to remember the pagan Saxons, ‘. . . people of the same blood and bone’ and unable to honour the heavenly lord by death as members of his war band, so long as they are destined for hell.
¹¹

In Bavaria Boniface appointed three new bishops and with the support of Duke Odilo, who brought his nobles with him, divided the duchy into four dioceses and so laid out the basic ecclesiastical geography of the state for the next thousand years. Gregory rubberstamped the arrangements and vested Boniface with ‘apostolic authority’ to attend a council shortly to be held on the banks of the
Danube as his representative. Outside Bavaria, as he reported to Gregory’s successor Pope Zacharias (741–52), he had appointed three further bishoprics, Erfurt, Würzburg (then in Franconia) and Buraburg, near Fritzlar, the ancient meeting place of east Franks and Saxons. He begged the pope to give charter confirmation to the foundations ‘so that there may be in Germany three Episcopal sees founded and established by St Peter’s word and the apostolic see’s command’.
¹²
The pope agreed this request.

Reform in the German church was certainly needed. Many a diocese had come into the hands of laymen who, although they claimed ordination, continued to behave like the members of a warrior aristocracy, riding into battle not only against heathens but also shedding the blood of Christians in their local feuding. In fact, since Europe’s lay establishment pursued warfare as a way of life and since they often manned the upper reaches of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the church could do little but compromise.

The principal means of establishing discipline in the religious life itself was the Rule of St Benedict of Nursia (proclaimed the patron saint of all Europe by Paul VI in 1964), founder of the monastery of Monte Cassino. The spread of the rule of St Benedict in Frankish monasteries owed much to English foundations such as the abbey of Fulda, which accepted it from the outset. So impressed was he by the Benedictine advance, promoted by the Anglo-Saxons, that Charles the Great was to ask the abbot of Monte Cassino for an authentic copy of the Rule. Many English monks spent years at the great monastery, among them Willibald the kinsman and biographer of Boniface, who had lived there for a decade before Boniface appointed him bishop of Eichstätt (‘Oakstead’). But Willibald had led an action-packed life before retiring to the cloister and his biography, composed by a nun visiting his brother Wynnebald’s abbey of Heidenheim, opens a window onto the great rival world of Islam barely a century old at that time.

Contacts with the world of Islam

Willibald had left England for Rome in his early twenties. After a three-year stay in the great city he took ship from Naples for the Holy Land with Wynnebald and another companion. Their destination, which had been within the territory of the Christian Roman empire only eighty years before, was now under the Muslim caliphate of Damascus, which was administered by governorships and emirates. Christian–Muslim relationships were now peaceful, if wary; trading vessels plied once more and some took fare-paying passengers. Travel was feasible but some form of identification or letters of introduction was advisable. The three young monks reached Cyprus without trouble and found a passage to the Syrian port of Tartus, formerly the Byzantine Christian city of Antaradus. From here a day or two on the road took them to Emesa, in the Orontes Valley. Birthplace of two Roman emperors and then a seat of Christian bishoprics, since 636 it had been an Arab city under the name of Hims (Homs), although still with a sizeable Christian element and a number of churches. Without documents, Willibald and his party were immediately arrested as spies because ‘the pagan Saracens . . . [did not know] . . . to which nation they belonged.’ Luckily the local dignitary who first questioned them had encountered other men from remote parts of the world travelling in Palestine, ‘eager to fulfil their [own] law’, as he put it – presumably equating Christian pilgrimage with the Muslim’s obligation to the
hajj.
The party now applied to the governor for documents to cover their onward journey to Jerusalem. Instead, he put them in prison awaiting further instructions from the ‘king’ of the region, presumably the emir of Hims.

Their ‘imprisonment’ was not too arduous. Apparently impressed by their loyalty to their religion, a generous local merchant fitted them out in new clothes, sent them well-prepared meals from his own kitchen and twice a week had them escorted to the local bath
house. On Sundays he took them himself to the local Christian church. (Christians and Jews were at that time allowed to continue the practice of their faiths on payment of a tax.) For a time, it seems, these ‘young, handsome and beautifully dressed’ Englishmen caused quite a stir in the town. Eventually they were cleared of suspicion and sent on their way. Arrested as spies they had emerged almost as friends at court. All this the biographer attributes to the benign workings of God, though we might think that Muslim generosity was part of the story. Willibald and company certainly returned with a wallet of travellers’ tales: from the soured milk drink they shared with a company of shepherds (presumably a type of
kwass
) to a near-encounter with a mountain lion.
¹³
A century or so later the local inhabitants might well have been seen as dangerous. Upheavals in Islam brought in the less Christian-tolerant regimes; the local Christian community of Hims would be ‘cleansed’ and its churches demolished.

In fact, bands of Saracen raiders were harrying Europe soon after Willibald settled into his work in Germany. A letter of the 740s from Boniface bewails them as the punishment of God on a sinful people; more practically the saint warns an abbess friend planning to visit Rome that even here travel could be hazardous, given the prevailing incursions – the contemporary equivalent of an Islamist terrorist threat.

The tribulations of an old man

Such ‘Saracen’ attacks presented a physical danger but no threat to the Faith as such. Here the danger was the enduring resistance to the missions. The ‘conversion’ of the Saxon heartlands, for example, was to be achieved only after decades of warfare by the armies of Charles the Great that killed tens of thousands of Saxons. Meanwhile, Boniface had to contest against the corruption and debasement of his beloved religion’s image by the conduct of the Christians themselves. His strictures against Æthelbald for his
immoral life owed much to the scandal they caused in pagan territories across the frontier where sexual fidelity was fiercely enforced: