A Short History of the Middle Ages Fourth Edition

landowners, with slaves and dependent peasants working for them; others were

independent peasants of modest means. While some Jews lived in cities—the few

that remained—most, like their Christian neighbors, lived on the land.

The British Isles

Celtic groups from the north and west had often attacked Roman Britain. When the

last of the Roman garrisons left Britain c.410, new immigrants—Saxon and other

Germanic groups—arrived piecemeal. They came as families, in small boats made of

animal skins, to settle and farm along Britain’s east coast. Irish immigrants gradually

settled in the west. Elsewhere—in what is today the north and west of England,

Scotland, and Ireland—Celtic kingdoms survived.

Where the Germanic tribes settled, their tastes, expectations, styles, and religious

practices affected the indigenous British population, and vice versa. In the eighth

century the monk-historian Bede portrayed this amalgamated culture as utterly pagan:

Anglo-Saxon England was, in his words, “a barbarous, fierce, and unbelieving

nation.”^14 But the story that archaeology tells is more nuanced: holy sites of the

saints remained magnets for pilgrimage, burial and settlement. Most, perhaps all, of

the British Isles remained Christian. Wales was already Christian when, in the course

of the fifth century, missionaries converted Ireland and Scotland. (Saint Patrick,

apostle to the Irish, is only the most famous of these.) However, in contrast to Bede’s

vision of a highly organized church led by the pope, post-Roman Britain’s

Christianity was decentralized and local. The same was true in the Celtic kingdoms—

Wales, Ireland, and Scotland—which supported relatively non-hierarchical church

organizations. Rural monasteries often served as the seats of bishoprics as well as

centers of population and settlement. Abbots and abbesses, often members of

powerful families, enjoyed considerable power and prestige.

At the end of the sixth century the Roman form of Christianity arrived to

compete with the diverse forms already flourishing in the British Isles. In 597

missionaries sent by Pope Gregory the Great, led by Augustine (not the fifth-century

bishop of Hippo!), arrived at the court of King Ethelbert of Kent (d.616). According

to Bede, Ethelbert was a pagan. Yet he was married to a Christian Frankish princess,

and he welcomed the missionaries kindly: “At the king’s command they sat down and

preached the word of life to himself and all his officials and companions there

present.” While he refused to convert because “[I cannot] forsake those beliefs which

I and the whole people of the Angles have held so long,” the king did give the

missionaries housing and material support.^15