A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons Read Online Free PDF

place. In early eighth-century Wessex, the ceorl who accepted a cottage from his lord was no longer free to leave his land holding and might find himself facing a heavy fine if he tried to flee. On the other hand, under Alfred a ceorl with a wergild of 200 shillings seems more like a prosperous yeoman farmer. He attended the local meeting of freemen as of right; fought whencalled for in the royal army and might well be better off than the young landless nobleman, feasting and sleeping at the king’s expense in the king’s hall. Such a man might be a royal companion or gesith , to use the old-fashioned term, but was still awaiting the essential land grant that would enable him to set up his own family establishment.
    Canterbury and the organization of the church in England
     
    As Christianity gradually extended across England, the ecclesiastical power centres, the bishoprics, came to exert ever more influence. By 604 there were three bishops in England: Augustine at Canterbury, the archbishop; Justus at Rochester (also in Kent); and Mellitus at London, in the kingdom of the East Saxons, whose cathedral of St Paul’s was already being built under the protection of Æthelberht of Kent. But the archbishop was so uneasy about the future that he consecrated his own successor, Laurentius. This was strictly against church law, but it was a good decision. When Æthelbehrt died in 616 and his son Eadbald followed the pagan practice of marrying his father’s widow, some thought it meant the end of the Roman mission. Both Justus and Mellitus retreated back to Gaul. Laurentius stood his ground and persuaded Eadbald to convert; his two timorous colleagues returned to their duties in England. The archbishop died in 619 but less than a decade later the king agreed the marriage of his sister to the pagan King Edwin of Deira. Rome had reason to be grateful to Laurentius, for with this marriage its presence was to be established north of the Humber (see chapter 3 ). For five years Canterbury was in the hands of Mellitus, of whom the best Bede could say was that he was sound of mind; after him the ageing Justus headed the province, dying in 627. With the twenty-year archiepiscopate of Honorius (c. 630–53), who had come over with the second wave of theRoman mission, the Christian presence in England was consolidated, though not always at the initiative of Canterbury.
    In the 630s a monk named Birinus, of whom almost nothing is known, although he may have been of Italian origin, converted the equally shadowy King Cynegils of Wessex. King Oswald of Northumbria, the sixth in Bede’s list to wield the imperium , stood as his sponsor at his baptism and presided over his donation of the old Roman fort of Dorchester-upon-Thames to Birinus as his see. (The Wessex see was later moved to Winchester.) In the other major zone of paganism in the south, the kingdom of the East Angles, Archbishop Honorius played a major role in the establishment of Christianity.
    Around the year 630 there was a stand-off between the old and new religions. Rædwald’s successor adopted Christianity on the persuasion of Edwin of Deira, but he was murdered by his subjects. His brother Sigeberht, who had been baptized while an exile on the Continent, now returned. He was evidently intent on restoring Christianity, but without promoting what one might anachronistically call the ‘religious colonialism’ of the Northumbrian ruler. In fact, he had probably found his man during his exile. Bede tells us that ‘Bishop Felix’, a man born in Burgundy and apparently already consecrated there, ‘came to Archbishop Honorius and expressed his desire’ for missionary work. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that he and King Sigeberht had already discussed the project. At any rate, Honorius gave him the job and Sigeberht gave him a place, called Dommoc, for the seat of his diocese. This was probably the then coastal town of Dunwich.
    Employing scholars and teachers whom he