Augustine’s Mission to Kent
In 597 a party of about forty monks landed in Kent, and within a generation the English kingdoms had begun to acquire writing, law codes and a connection to the Mediterranean. Gregory the Great sent them. The mission had a political opening as well as a religious one: Aethelberht of Kent was the strongest king in southern England, and his queen Bertha was a Frankish Christian who had been permitted a bishop and a chapel at Canterbury as a condition of the marriage. Augustine landed on Thanet and was received in the open air, because the king was cautious about meeting foreign magic under a roof. Aethelberht did not convert immediately and did not compel anyone else to. Bede records that he told the monks he could not abandon what his people had long observed, but that they might preach freely - which is a more interesting position than either enthusiasm or hostility. What followed was administrative as much as spiritual. Canterbury became an archbishopric and the seat of the English church, which it remains. Aethelberht issued the first law code written in English, and the first in any Germanic language, listing compensations for injury in a written form that presupposes the alphabet the missionaries brought. Gregory's instruction to Augustine about pagan temples has been much quoted since: that the buildings should not be destroyed but the idols in them should, so that the people would come to a familiar place. It is the earliest surviving statement of a policy of accommodation, and it is why English Christianity absorbed rather than erased the calendar and the sites it found.
- Year: 597 CE
- Category: Religious
