John Richard Humpidge Moorman (1905–1989) was an English clergyman and author, who served as the Bishop of Ripon from 1959 to 1975. His books include A History of the Church in England, The Curate of Souls, A History of the Franciscan Order, and The Anglican Spiritual Tradition.

A HISTORY OF THE CHURCH IN ENGLAND

Church Publishing Incorporated

Contents

CHAPTER 1

THE CHURCH IN BRITAIN BEFORE 597

i. The Coming of the Faith

The exact date when the Christian message first came to England isunknown. At the time when the Christian Church was graduallyextending its influence in the countries on both sides of the Mediterranean,England was in process of being colonized by Rome. Romanlegionaries were marching along their own well-made roads, Romanofficers were bringing the old British tribes to heel, Roman law wasbeing administered, and one more province was in process of beingabsorbed into the great Roman Empire which now dominated theknown world.

Among those who came from Rome, whether soldiers, administrators,traders or camp-followers, there may well have been somewho had heard and accepted the message of the Christian Churchand who secretly prayed to the Christians' God while their fellowsdid homage to the old gods of the State, or to Mithras or Isis or oneof the gods of the mystery religions. But of this we have no certainknowledge. If there were such, they have left no record behind them.But where history is silent, legend and tradition have producedstrange and wonderful stories of journeys to this island made byS. Paul or S. Philip or S. Joseph of Arimathea and of the foundingof a Christian church at Glastonbury.

The first mention of any Christians in Britain is in Tertullian'stract against the Jews, written about 200, in which he spekks of partsof Britain, inaccessible to the Romans, which had yet been conqueredby Christ; while Origen, writing about forty years later, includesBritain among the places where Christians are to be found. It seemsclear, then, that about the year 200 the Christian world was becomingaware of the fact that there were believers in Britain, andit has been suggested that, when the savage persecutions broke outin Gaul in 177, a number of Christians fled northwards and thatsome may have found their way to these shores.

For the next century or so little is known of these Christiansin Britain. The third century was, on the whole, a time of greatadvance for the Church for, apart from the persecutions of Deciusand Valerian (249–60), it was an age of comparative peace andsecurity when books were written, churches built and schoolsfounded. In Britain some organization was being set up, for, by theyear 314, there were several bishops in the country, three of whom—Eborius of York, Restitutio of London and Adelphius probably ofColchester—attended the Council of Aries. This shows a considerableadvance in the establishment of the Church on a diocesan basis,and implies that the scattered Christians of the third century had bynow organized themselves into a definite Church. No British bishopsare known to have answered the Emperor's summons to Nicaea in325, but Athanasius expressly states that the British Church acceptedthe decisions of that Council.

The first Christian in Britain whose name is recorded was Albanwho, according to Bede, was a layman of the Roman city of Verulamiumwho gave shelter to a Christian priest fleeing from his persecutors.While the priest lay hid, Alban learnt of the Christian faithand was converted; and when the soldiers came to arrest the fugitive,Alban, dressed in the priest's cloak, gave himself up, was condemnedto death, and martyred on the hill where the abbey church of S.Alban's now stands. The date is generally assumed to have been 304,during the persecutions of Diocletian.

With the passing of the Edict of Milan in 312 the Christian Churchentered upon a new phase of its history. For three centuries the Christianfaith had been classed among the 'illicit religions'; it had alwaysbeen to some extent unpopular; and the shadow of persecution hadlain over it. By this decree Constantine removed the ban, and for thefirst time in history the Christian was free to declare his faith openlywithout fear of a cruel death. From this time onwards a great andrapid advance was made.

Such an advance must have been made in Britain, but still our evidenceis very scant. In 359 some British bishops again attended oneof the great councils of the Church, the Council of Rimini; but theywere so poor that three of them were driven to accept the imperialoffer of money to pay their expenses, though all the other bishopspresent had refused to do so in order to preserve their independence.This would suggest that the Church in Britain, though becomingmore organized, was as yet poor, and no doubt many of its memberswere drawn from among the semi-Romanized natives who were farfrom being the most prosperous members of the community. Yetthat there were Christians among the richer Romans is proved bythe appearance of Christian symbols, such as the Chi-Rho sign,among the mosaic pavements which adorned their villas.

Apart from such decorations the Christians of the period of theRoman occupation have left little trace of their handiwork. The chiefexceptions are the little Christian chapel at Lullingstone in Kent,built about 360 and decorated with mural paintings, and the chapelsat Silchester and Hinton St. Mary of about the same period. Thechapel at Silchester was a small building, only about 42 feet inlength, with an apse at the western end of the nave, aisles, transeptsand narthex. The altar appears to have been of wood and the priestcelebrated facing west with his back to the congregation. Outsidethe church was a stone trough where the faithful washed beforeentering the church. No doubt there were other churches indifferent parts of the country, but few traces of them have so farbeen found.

ii. Pelagius, Germanus, Ninian

Although the Christian Church by the end of the fourth centuryhad existed in Britain for close on two hundred years, our knowledgeof any individual Christians (with the exception of S. Alban) isextremely limited. From this point onwards Church History takeson a new aspect. We leave the mists of conjecture and anonymityand enter into the clearer light in which real personalities can bedistinguished.

The first of these was a heretic—Pelagius—the man who rousedthe fiercest passions of S. Augustine and who has given us the heresywhich to this day holds so strong an attraction for the British people.Pelagius was a Romanized Briton and a monk, well-educated,urbane, highly civilized. About the year 380, when he was quite ayoung man, he left Britain never to return. For the rest of his lifehe travelled about the Mediterranean world, 'an elusive and graciousfigure, beloved and respected wherever he goes ... silent, smiling,reserved', and he appears to have ended his days in Syria. Pelagius,like some other Christians, had been shocked by the hard and rigiddoctrines of S. Augustine, which seemed to him to deny the moralcourage and dignity of man. He found it difficult to believe inOriginal Sin, and so great was his faith in man that he believed itpossible for man to reach perfection without the intervention ofsupernatural grace. It was this which aroused the indignant fervourof Augustine and led to his condemnation.

Pelagius never taught in Britain, but his doctrines found a footinghere through the teaching of one Agricola early in the fifth century.To counteract this the bishops in Gaul invited two bishops to cometo Britain—Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre (418–48) and Lupus,Bishop of Troyes (427–79). These two arrived in Britain in 429 andimmediately made their presence felt. Germanus had been a soldierand man of action before becoming a bishop, and was obviously aman of great force of character. Finding the British timid and lackingin self-confidence he organized them as a fighting force and, withwild yells of 'Alleluia', led them to victory against a maraudingarmy of Picts, probably near Mold in Flintshire. WhereverGermanus went, he encouraged and strengthened the British againsttheir opponents, whether pagan Picts or Pelagian heretics. Stridingthrough the country with a bag of relics round his neck Germanus,by his preaching and by his miracles, convinced all gainsayers andput new life and courage into the British Christians.

Meanwhile, further north, a more gentle apostle of Christ was atwork in the valleys of Cumberland and southern Scotland. This wasNinian who, after studying the monasticism of S. Martin at Marmoutier,came to Britain, apparently as a solitary missionary, perhapsas early as the year 397. At Whithorn in Galloway he founded amonastery built of stone and whitewashed so that it might be themost conspicuous object in the district. This came to be known as theWhite House, or Candida Casa, and became the base from whichNinian and his monks set out on their evangelistic journeys. Theseseem to have taken them not only among the savage Pictish tribesin the neighbourhood of the Roman Wall but also up the east coastof Scotland. Whithorn continued to act as a centre of evangelisticenterprise for some time, one of its most famous members beingS. Kentigern who worked in Scotland, northern England and Walesearly in the sixth century.

iii. S. Patrick

While Ninian was at work in Galloway there was growing up inthe west of England a small boy who was soon to make his markon the history of the expansion of the Church. This was Patrick, theson of a British 'decurion' or local administrator called Calporniuswho was a deacon and the son of a priest. The family, who livedsomewhere near the sea, were one day attacked by a gang of piratesyoung men into slavery, among them Patrick now about fifteenyears of age. He was taken to Ireland, where he was kept in captivityas a swineherd; but after six years he escaped, and perhaps spent sometime in Gaul where he may have come into contact with the monasticmovement under the leadership of S. Martin of Tours. While he wasundergoing his training he conceived a desire to return to the scenesof his captivity in order that he might preach the Gospel to the menamong whom he had lived and suffered. After visiting his old homein Britain he was, in the year 432, consecrated as bishop for work inIreland and immediately returned there as the apostle of Christ.

For the next thirty years Patrick fought a hard battle against thepaganism of the Irish tribes, and his life was often in danger. Hetravelled widely in Ireland and made many converts, baptizing themby the thousand and ordaining clergy everywhere. He attempted tointroduce the diocesan system which he had studied in Gaul, but itfailed chiefly through lack of any cities which could form the centresof government. The only diocese which had any kind of permanencewas that of Armagh where Patrick himself ruled. But if the diocesansystem failed, the monasteries which Patrick founded became thechief feature of the Irish Church. The Irish monasteries were quiteunlike those of the rest of Europe, as was also the relationship betweena bishop and an abbot. Whereas in the usual system the bishop hadgeneral oversight of the monasteries in his diocese, in the Celtic planthe abbot ruled supreme and often had a number of bishops amonghis choir-monks. The monastery, in fact, was little more than 'anecclesiastical replica of the tribe'. The bishop generally had no territorialjurisdiction: he was raised to the episcopate because of thesanctity of his life and was invested with the powers of ordination,confirmation and consecration; but he had no administrative function.That belonged to the abbot.

As Patrick travelled about, monasteries sprang up everywhere, someof them so large as to include several thousand monks. There was noone rule which all obeyed, for each monastery had its own. Manyof them were very harsh, for the Christianity of some of the monkshad not yet gone very deep and nothing less than a rigorous andstrict discipline could control the large numbers of recently convertedpagans. But the monasteries were much the most important elementin the early life of the Irish Church, and it was from them that themissionaries went out with the message of Christ.

iv. The Anglo-Saxon Invasions

While in Ireland Christianity was advancing, in England it hadbeen forced to retreat. Early in the fifth century the Romans abandonedtheir hold on England and the country was rapidly overrunby the invading armies of the Jutes, Angles and Saxons. The Britishwere either conquered and absorbed into the new society or they fledwestwards and settled in the mountains of Wales or among theCornish tors. The invaders largely destroyed the Christian Churchin the parts which they conquered, and for 150 years the faith waspractically extinct in England. Its place was taken by a form of Teutonicheathenism which the conquerors brought with them.

In the strongholds of the West, however, the Church continuedto exist. Our knowledge of it comes chiefly from Gildas who wrotein Wales about 535. He is severely critical of the British clergy whomhe describes as 'unworthy wretches, wallowing, after the fashion ofswine, in their old and unhappy puddle of intolerable wickedness'.But though Gildas has little that is good to say of the British Church,and though it may well have deteriorated in its isolation, his pictureis not one of chaos. There is organization. There are bishops holdingsynods to which their clergy are summoned. There are monasterieswhere some kind of rule is kept.

The British Church also had its saints, among whom the mostfamous was S. David, the only one of the four patron saints of theseislands who was a native of the country which he represents. David(c. 520–88) was a typical Celtic abbot-bishop, an evangelist andfounder of monasteries, and he was ably supported by other saints—S. Illtyd his teacher, S. Deiniol and others.

Thus while, in England, Wodin and Thor had usurped the placeof Christ, in Wales the Christian Church kept the light of the faithburning. Cut off though it*tended to be from the rest of Christendomit still managed to hold out against the pressure of paganism bothfrom within and from without. But it paid the penalty of isolation. Ittended to become insular and self-absorbed; and, as Bede complained,it made no attempt to convert the Saxons. For missionary zeal in thesixth century we must look mainly not to Wales but to Ireland.

v. S. Columba

After the death of S. Patrick about 461 church life continued todevelop in Ireland, the monastery being still the centre of organizationand activity. It is in the school attached to one of these monasteries,Moville, that we first meet Columba, son of Phelim, of theroyal house of Niall of the Nine Hostages. The boy, who had beenborn in 521, was known as Colum the dove, but his character hadmore of the eagle than the dove about it. Tall, broad, vigorous, tempestuous,with a voice of thunder, he could strike terror into theheart of any who opposed him. He has been described as 'a typicalIrishman, vehement, irresistible: hear him curse a niggardly rich manor bless the heifers of a poor peasant; see him follow a robber whohad plundered a friend, cursing the wretch to his destruction, followinghim to the water's edge, wading up to the knees in the clear,green sea-water, with both hands raised to heaven'.

So violent a nature, especially in one of royal blood, was almostbound to be implicated sooner or later in Irish tribal politics andfeuds. About the year 560 a petty dispute over the ownership of amanuscript developed into a quarrel in which whole tribes were involvedand led to the battle of Culdreihmne in which Columba ledhis forces to an overwhelming victory, leaving three thousand of theenemy dead upon the field. But Columba had gone too far. TheChurch turned against him, and he was obliged to leave the country.

In 563 Columba left Ireland with twelve companions in an openboat and sailed northwards, landing finally at Hy or Ioua, now calledIona, a small island off the west coast of Scotland. Having discoveredthat they were out of sight of Ireland, and therefore less likely to betempted to return, they buried their boat and decided to make thisisland their home. On the eastern shore of the island, immediatelyopposite Mull, they built a monastery of the usual Celtic pattern—achurch and refectory of wood, a group of bee-hive huts, and anencircling wall protecting the whole enclosure. The life which theylived was that to which they had been accustomed in Ireland. It washard, simple and austere. Much time was spent in tilling the soil ofthe island, fishing in its waters, copying manuscripts and in performingthe daily round of prayer and praise. Nor was their work confinedto the cloister. Iona soon became a centre from which missionaryjourneys were undertaken both to the mainland of Scotland and tothe islands of the Hebrides.
(Continues...)Excerpted from A HISTORY OF THE CHURCH IN ENGLAND by JOHN R. H. MOORMAN. Copyright © 1980 John Richard Humpidge Moorman. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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