The coming of the cross (at the point of a sword)

The story of how the Anglo-Saxons came to be converted to Christianity begins in Rome, at some point towards the end of the sixth century. A monk named Gregory (who in 590 became Pope Gregory I) was walking through the market when he noticed some unusual-looking boys being sold as slaves. Struck by their beauty, he asked where they were from and was told they were Angles, prompting a famous pun. “Good”, he reportedly replied. “They have the face of angels, and such men should be the fellow heirs of angels in heaven.”

Such at least was the tale told by the Venerable Bede, writing around 150 years after these events, who indicated he didn’t set very much store in its credibility. But, like all good legends, it was grounded in reality. Six years into his pontificate, Gregory dispatched a mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons, headed by a monk named Augustine. Arriving in 597, Augustine was greeted by the king of Kent, Æthelberht, who was extremely hospitable. The king soon converted, along with his people, and in the decades that followed, the rulers and peoples of the various other kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England followed suit. By 686, well within a century of Augustine’s arrival, all the former pagan polities had become Christian.

As you might expect, the process of bringing heathens to the light of heaven is presented to us in our earliest sources are holy men, such as St Augustine or the Northumbrian St Cuthbert, and the good kings like Æthelberht who listened attentively and facilitated Christianity’s spread. Æthelberht, said Bede, “compelled no one to accept Christianity”, and this point was seized upon by later historians as clear evidence that the whole conversion process was voluntary. “We nowhere read of any of those persecutions at the point of sword,” said the Victorian scholar Edward Freeman, “which disgraced the proselytising zeal of the Frankish and Scandinavian apostles of the faith.”