304 - The Pre-Conquest Church In Eengland

The Pre-Conquest Church In England
By Margaret Deanesly
373 pp. New York, Oxford University Press, 1961. $6.00.

Margaret Deanesly's exceptional qualifications as a church historian were first exhibited in The Lollard Bible, 1920, and have since been exemplified in a fairly extensive series of books and articles. The present volume may well become the most highly prized of all her writings. She treats here with fascinating intimacy the Christian history of England from the second to the eleventh century. The stress is on personalities rather than institutional matters, and the impression made upon one seasoned inquirer in the field is that of having made many new acquaintances and revived many old ones. The book is lovingly written, and it is a book about good men and women. She herself fears that she may have given "to roseate a picture," since the "anti-clericals," whoever they were, left no writings. At one point, at least, I must assent to this criticism. Some suggestion of the anguish of Gildas over the sins of the British clergy, rulers, and people in his De excidio et conquestu Britanniae would, for his day, have dimmed the "roseate" tint; but this work is used only for data of another sort.

Miss Deanesly's treatment of the relation of geographical facts to church foundations is often illuminating. Glastonbury is the more likely to have had a Christian community very early (as William of Malmesbury states, though Bede is unaware of it) for the reason that ever since Julius Caesar's time and before there was a London, small trading ships from Gaul went up the Severn to well-sheltered Glastonbury, "the Bristol of that day." Though our author is not unaware of the limitations of Bede's information, she has a high appreciation of his conscientious use of documents. Some of the more revealing of Gregory's I's letters to Augustine of Canterbury and the abbot Mellitus reported by Bede are well utilized. Bede's account of the Synod of the Oak is clearly interpreted, and in his view of the subsequent massacre of the Celtic monks of Bangor it is recognized that Bede's "prejudice got the better of his judgment." Bede's prejudice, we may be sure, was more ecclesiastical

305 - The Pre-Conquest Church In Eengland

than racial, and perhaps in this passage he was mainly exalting the prophetic gifts of "that man of God Augustine," whose "threatening" prediction had to come true. In any case, the passage may be viewed today in a light more unfavorable to Augustine than to Bede himself.

One of the most informing parts of the book consists of the chapters (vi and vii) on the Theodorean Age, in which Theodore of Tarsus, the able Archbishop of Canterbury, becomes a living personality. The appointment of this Greek churchman in Rome by Pope Vitalian in 668 is called "a remarkably bold and well-justified choice." After his hair had grown so that he could receive the Roman tonsure, he journeyed to Canterbury in May, 669. Theodore efficiently ruled the English Church until his death in 690 at the age of 87, often making horseback trips to install good bishops and where necessary to remove unsatisfactory ones. Patristic learning came to the English through Theodore and his companion, the abbot Hadrian, and the monastery of SS. Peter and Paul at Canterbury became a vitalizing center for study and writing. With Theodore, too, came back to England the well-travelled saint, Benedict Biscop, to head the Canterbury house till Hadrian could learn English, and later to found monasteries at Wearmouth and Jarrow. In Jarrow he collected "a library finer, apparently, than any outside Italy." The learning of these schools rivalled, and sometimes mingled with, that of the Irish monks. Aldhelm of Malmesbury, a student of both Irish Mailduf and Roman Hadrian, combined extraordinary learning with a deplorable artificiality of style.

Many readers will be no less grateful for the treatment of "the northern renaissance" of Bede's time and after, with descriptions of the crosses, illuminated manuscripts, and liturgical texts of that era. We are led down the centuries of Danish invasion and recovery with suitable attention to Boniface and the continental missions, the travels of Willibald, the reinvigoration of the Church under Alfred, and the tenth century reforms of Aethelwold and Dunstan to which foreign monastic movements contributed. The concluding chapter (xv) is on the lay people's religion before the Norman Conquest, featuring the practice of the ordeal, veneration of relics and invocation of saints, the dutiful attendance of villagers at Church. The conflicting dates given for Patrick's birth, mission, and death on pages 8, 32, 37, and 38 are startling in a book that bears the general character of close accuracy and attention to sources. A good map would have been very helpful.

John T. McNeill
Chicago Theological Seminary
Chicago, Illinois