How Britain began to unite into one nation, under God.

Last week, Clifford Denton reminded us that God blessed Britain very early on with the arrival of the Gospel to our shores perhaps not a century after Jesus walked the earth.

Thanks particularly to Roman Christians who travelled here as part of Rome’s settlement of the island (AD 43-410),¹ the Gospel began its work of conversion amongst the pagan Celtic tribes. But Britain remained a patchwork of warring tribes and religions, with no central government. Then, c.410, the Romans abandoned the island.

This week, we fast-forward through faithful persons in our island’s history who, overseen by divine grace, together established Britain as one nation, united under the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Early Missions

After the Romans abandoned ‘Britannia’, British Christianity did not die out, but spread independently and developed its own distinctive flavour. But the soon arrival of Anglo-Saxon invaders pushed the fledgling Church to the western fringes of the island complex – to Cornwall, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

A depiction of Augustine of Canterbury preaching to Æthelberht of Kent. JWE Doyle, 1864.

While the Gospel continued to spread here thanks to the efforts of devoted missionaries like Patrick (who was converted at 16 through dreams and visions from the Lord), Columba and Aidan, England was subsumed under Germanic pagan rule until the late 6^th Century. But God did not forget England nor its history of faith.

In 597, at the direction of Pope Gregory I,² a troop of 40 intrepid monks led by a prior called Augustine arrived on the shores of Kent. These missionaries reportedly almost bottled out on their way from Italy, halting in Germany and nearly turning back but for further encouragement from Rome. Mercifully, they found the courage to continue to Britain, where they were received favourably by Anglo-Saxon King Æthelberht, himself a pagan, but influenced by his Frankish Christian wife Bertha. This oft-forgotten duo, moved by the Father’s hand, opened the gate for the Gospel to be brought back to England, permitting preaching and funding the building of churches.

Anglo-Saxon King Æthelberht and his Christian wife Bertha, moved by the Father’s hand, opened the gate for the Gospel to be brought back to England.

What followed was the remarkable conversion of almost the entirety of Anglo-Saxon England – still then split into warring tribes – within the space of a generation. Britain saw pagan kings as well as thousands upon thousands of ordinary people converted and baptised, with no force or bloodshed. The genuineness of these conversions may have varied, but certainly biblical living and thinking came to define the tribal monarchies of Britain in extraordinary ways.

This was particularly the case for the kings of Wessex, such as Ine and Alfred, who started to integrate inspiration from Scripture into codes of laws from the late 7^th Century onwards. Alfred the Great’s legal code was prefixed with the Ten Commandments and it was Alfred who really laid the foundation for state laws grounded in Christian ethics, applied evenly to rich and poor and even to relationships with enemies (he famously baptised the invading Vikings rather than slaughtering them).

By the Lord’s direction, it was the house of Wessex which eventually prevailed across the land and united England from regional tribal kingdoms into one nation, under God.³

The ‘Dark Ages’

It is from these centuries that we derive our historic close relationship between Church and state, which can be dated right back to the early discipleships established between the Gregorian missionaries and the Anglo-Saxon kings. But for God’s unfathomable grace, those missionaries might have stopped in Germany, or the kings may not have welcomed them, or the Viking invaders may have triumphed, and things would have turned out very differently.

Yet, it is easy to romanticise and smooth out this period of Britain’s history. Paganism still persisted, arguments erupted between the Roman missionaries and the ‘native’ Church, and undoubtedly clergy became embroiled in royal power play. Nevertheless, the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ were actually marked by an extraordinary spread of the Gospel by missionaries who were as concerned for the fate of ordinary souls as for those of kings.

In the process, the Christian faith became inseparably intertwined with the development of a new nation. Biblical beliefs and ethics clearly influenced nascent codes of law, integrating into Britain’s early political culture Judeo-Christian principles of justice and mercy. Surely Almighty God was overseeing all of this.

The so-called ‘Dark Ages’ were actually marked by an extraordinary spread of the Gospel.

Speaking Truth to Power

After 1066, when the Anglo-Saxon elites were deposed by the Norman conquest, God made sure that England’s budding legal and administrative system was not tossed aside, but kept and gradually institutionalised by royal charters.⁴ Many of our major cathedrals were built, as well as Oxford and later Cambridge (both as religious schools). But these centuries were also flavoured by a corruption of both Church and state, civil unrest at home, power struggles abroad and tension with the papacy in Rome, which by then had become supremely dominant in Europe.

Under Norman rule, the Church became sought after for its wealth and political influence. However, God did not give Britain over to corruption, but chose this time to raise up reform movements calling for justice, greater autonomy for the Church from royal influence and greater independence for England from Rome.

John Wycliffe, Washington National Cathedral. The text is a variant of 2 Timothy 2:4: "No one serving as a soldier gets entangled in civilian affairs, but rather tries to please his commanding officer." See Photo Credits.It was against this backdrop that Bishop Stephen Langton led a protest movement of local landowners to pressure King John to sign the Magna Carta, which he did in 1215. In doing so, Langton raised the ire of both King and Pope, since Magna Carta checked the powers of the monarchy and represented a rebellion against Rome. However, crucially, it established protections and liberties for the Church and for ordinary citizens, laying a firm and just foundation for English statute law and later inspiring the US Constitution. Thanks to Stephen Langton, Magna Carta not only applied biblical ethics, but also gave glory to God, proving to be a foundational document in the establishment of Britain as a truly Christian nation.

Nevertheless, while Magna Carta guaranteed important freedoms, it did not prevent the continued corruption of the Church from power and wealth. Less than a century after Magna Carta was inscribed into English statute law by Edward I (who was also, less wonderfully, responsible for expelling Britain’s Jewish population in 1290), the Lord raised up a powerful prophetic figure in the form of Yorkshire scholar and dissident John Wycliffe.

Wycliffe’s writings vociferously attacked the pomp and corruption of the clergy. His criticisms of Roman Catholicism – he has been dubbed the ‘morning star’ of the English Reformation⁵ - brought him into constant conflict with the established Church.⁶ However, Wycliffe had the support of many priests and itinerant preachers who ministered outside of the institutional Church in a sort of non-conformist exile, suffering poverty in order to preach the Gospel to ordinary people. In Wycliffe, the faithful remnant around the nation found a spokesperson raised up by God to protest the ways in which British Christianity departed from the truths of Scripture.

In Wycliffe, the faithful remnant around the nation found a spokesperson raised up by God to protest the ways in which British Christianity departed from the truths of Scripture.

In fact, convinced of the centrality of the Bible as God’s revealed truth to all men, Wycliffe set about translating it from Latin into English, completing the project in the 1380s. And so, God chose this time and this man to make his word available to the masses, who before had been beholden to priests and unable to study Scripture for themselves.

Though the death penalty was eventually levied against those found in possession of an English Bible, Wycliffe jump-started the nation’s journey towards Protestantism which, according to Professor Linda Colley, “was the foundation that made the invention of Great Britain possible”.⁷

Faithful Servants

Æthelberht, Bertha, Augustine, Patrick, Columba, Aidan, Ine, Alfred, Stephen Langton, John Wycliffe…Britain’s Christian heritage is a wonderful and complex fabric made up of the faithful service of individuals guided by the Lord’s hand. These servants of the Lord Jesus Christ, many now forgotten or side-lined in historical accounts, were used powerfully of God to bear the truths of the Gospel to this land, into its laws and culture, and into the hearts and minds of its people.

As we look over the broad expanse of our history, whether we understand it fully or not, we witness the hand of God at work and the Spirit brooding over our nation. Surely it was not on account of our own righteousness, but on account of the Lord’s grace, that Britain was established over the centuries under the stabilising influence of the Bible, with freedom given to the sharing of the Gospel, and with faithful men and women being raised up to hold our institutions to account.

Next week: The establishing of biblical laws.

Notes

1 As well as archaeological remains of church buildings, Roman villa chapels have been uncovered, suggesting that house churches were alive and well in Roman Britain. See John Bradley’s The Mansion House of Liberty: The untold story of Christian Britain (2015, Roperpenberthy).

2 According to the Venerable Bede, Gregory had been moved by the sight of Anglo-Saxon boys being sold as slaves in the Roman marketplace, and resolved to send a mission to their place of origin. If this is true, how much we have to thank the Lord for arranging this encounter and moving the heart of the future pope.

3 This is generally attributed to Alfred’s grandson, Æthelstan, who also outlawed paganism in 927 and arranged for the Bible to be translated into Anglo-Saxon (Old English).

4 E.g. William II (1093), Henry I (1100).

5 Michael, E, 2003. John Wyclif on body and mind. Journal of the History of Ideas, p343.

6 Wycliffe distinguished between the visible, institutional Church and the true, redeemed Body of Christ, just as we would today.

7 Britons: Forging the Nation: 1707-1837. 1992, revised 2009, Yale University Press.