Ecclesia Britannica: Prelude or Dead End?

Abstract

When Augustine and his monks landed at Thanet in 597, they were confronted with a situation rare even in the Völkerivanderung. What was to become the church of the English people had to be built up from scratch. In his despatches to Pope Gregory during the first years of his mission, Augustine gives no hint of an existing native Christian population, survivors of Roman Britain under Jutish rule, who might form the nucleus of a Church. There was Ethelbert's Frankish Queen Bertha and her retainers for whose use a church dedicated to St Martin outside the royal city of Canterbury, had been restored, and Bede mentions that this had been ‘built of old while the Romans yet inhabited Britain’. But despite Canterbury providing evidence for Christianity in the late fourth century and being relatively near sites such as Lullingstone, Richborough and Faversham, where there had been Christian worship in Roman times, Augustine's problems were concerned entirely with how to deal with Germanic paganism. What had happened? How was it that the ecclesia Britannorum failed to provide foundations for the ecclesia Anglicana even in Kent?