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

recruited at Canterbury, Felix built up a cathedral school on the Continental model, with the help of the king. But there is a mystery about Sigeberht. His devotion to his new religion seems obvious – he abdicated the throne in favour of a kinsman to enter a monastery – but among the people at large, it seems equally obvious, he retainedsomething of the aura of a pagan war leader. A few years into his retirement the kingdom came under attack from Penda, the great pagan king of Mercia. Courtiers begged Sigeberht to take command of the battle and, when he refused, dragged him from the monastery to the front line. Even then he refused to fight and, carrying only a staff ( virga ) in his hand, died on the battlefield if not in battle. 14 Such is the legend and it will find echoes over two centuries later in the legends of King St Edmund. When Peada, son of Penda and his father’s sub-king in the east Midlands, married a Christian princess and converted to her religion as part of the deal, the days of paganism seemed numbered.
    Honorius died in 653. The Roman church’s position in southern England seemed at last well established. In addition, Honorius had consecrated the first native Anglo-Saxon bishop and was succeeded by the first native Anglo-Saxon on the throne of Canterbury, Deusdedit, a West Saxon. In 664, the year of his death, developments of immense importance for the whole church establishment in England were unfolding at the Synod of Whitby, in the kingdom of Deira (see chapter 3 ). Here we round off the story of seventh-century Canterbury with an improbable appointment and its astonishing consequences.
    Theodore of Canterbury: a Greek in charge of the English Church 668–690
     
    Like Pope John Paul II, Theodore of Tarsus was about sixty when appointed to his high office and, also like the late pope, he lived well into his eighties. He was born about 602 in south-eastern Turkey and was appointed to Canterbury almost by chance, dying in office in 690. By bringing the English churches under a single authority, he laid the groundwork for the church in England (for centuries the country’s premier organ of state as well as of religion). He shared a third characteristic with John Paul: Theodore was a considerablescholar. The cathedral school he founded at Canterbury became a major factor in the development of Anglo-Saxon learning, including in its curriculum studies in law and astronomy as well as the composition of Latin metrical verse. In one department, that of hagiography, it was indebted to its founder’s Greek background. A basic text for English hagiographers (saints’ biographers) was the Life of St Antony (d. 356) by the Greek writer Athanasius, a young contemporary of his subject, in a Latin translation of the 380s that Theodore introduced into the school at Canterbury. Among the many books modelled on this was the first life of the northern saint Cuthbert.
    Theodore himself had long studied in the libraries and at the university of the imperial city Constantinople, where, in addition to biblical studies, he would have attended lectures on philosophy, medicine and astronomy. Then in 648 we find him working at Rome with others to refute the doctrine of ‘monotheletism’, that Christ had only one (divine) will, proposed by Emperor Heraclius years before and a fiercely contentious issue between empire and papacy.
    That same year the eighteen-year-old Emperor Constans II had forbidden debate on the topic with an imperial typos , or edict. He was surely influenced by the advance of Islam. Five years before, in the second year of his reign, the teenage emperor and defender of the Faith had seen the Muslim armies conquer Christian Egypt and threaten Constantinople, capital of the Christian world. Islam’s unswerving monotheism was a direct challenge to the Christian idea of a Three-in-One deity – it would seem even more of a challenge to the concept of a Trinity not united by a single Divine Will. Islam was