Above all, the king let them preach. This was key: Augustine had in mind more
than the conversion of a king: he wanted to set up an English church on the Roman
model, with ties to the pope and a clear hierarchy. Successful in his work of
evangelization, he divided England into territorial units (dioceses) headed by an
archbishop and bishops. Augustine himself became the first archbishop of
Canterbury. There he set up the model English ecclesiastical complex: a cathedral, a
monastery, and a school to train young clerics.
There was nothing easy or quick about the conversion of England to the Roman
brand of Christianity. Christian traditions there clashed over matters as large as the
organization of the church and as seemingly small as the date of Easter. Everyone
agreed that they could not be saved unless they observed the day of Christ’s
Resurrection properly and on the right date. But what was the right date? Each side
was wedded to its own view. A turning point came at the Synod of Whitby, organized
in 664 by the Northumbrian King Oswy to decide between the Roman and Irish
dates. When Oswy became convinced that Rome spoke with the very voice of Saint
Peter, the heavenly doorkeeper, he opted for the Roman calculation of the date and
embraced the Roman church as a whole.
The pull of Rome—the symbol, in the new view, of the Christian religion itself—
was almost physical. In the wake of Whitby, Benedict Biscop, a Northumbrian
aristocrat-turned-abbot and founder of two important English monasteries,
Wearmouth and Jarrow, made numerous arduous trips to Rome. He brought back
books, saints’ relics, liturgical vestments, and even a cantor to teach his monks the
proper melodies in a time before written musical notation existed. A century later, the
Anglo-Saxon monk Wynfrith changed his name to the more Roman-sounding
Boniface (672/675–754) after he went to Rome to get a commission from Pope
Gregory II (715–731) to preach the Word to people living east of the Rhine. Though
they were already Christian, their brand of Christianity was not Roman enough for
Saint Boniface.
As Roman culture confronted Anglo-Saxon, the results were particularly eclectic.
This is best seen in the visual arts. The Anglo-Saxons, like other barbarian (and,
indeed, Celtic) tribes, had artistic traditions particularly well suited to adorning flat
surfaces. Belt buckles, helmet nose-pieces, brooches, and other sorts of jewelry of
the rich were embellished with semi-precious stones and enlivened with decorative
patterns, often made up of intertwining snake-like animals. A particularly fine
example is a buckle from Sutton Hoo (see Plate 2.4), perhaps the greatest
archaeological find from the Anglo-Saxon period.
