We are looking at the origins and history of the Church of England and the Anglican Communion, to understand better where we have come from so as to understand better where it is that God wants us to be. As part of this process we will look at eight dates, four movements and four significant inheritances from the 1600+ year history of the CofE: the dates may not always be the most obvious, but each date, perversely chosen by me, has some lasting significance for the way the CofE/AC might be today.¹

Date 1 AD 664 : Synod of Whitby

Part of the myth of the Church of England, the story we tell ourselves, is that we invented all this for ourselves, that there is something peculiarly, uniquely English about the way we do Christianity in these islands, and the reason for that is that we have been untainted by foreign understandings of Christianity from the very beginning. This is the attraction of William Blake’s “Jerusalem” and the myths of Glastonbury. Jesus, if not an Englishman, was certainly an impressed visitor to our shores.

We see something of the same insularity here in Canterbury, with a vengeance. How many times have you heard the story of St Augustine and King Aethelbert and Queen Bertha and then heard added: “of course, she was already a Christian and already had a church…” with the unspoken addition that Augustine’s mission was just the Romans muscling in once more (and what did the Romans ever do for us?).

Perhaps some of you have read Melvyn Bragg’s Credo (1996), the history of Christianity in the northern Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, in which, very clearly, the Celts are the goodies and the Roman Christians are the baddies (with a particularly unsympathetic depiction of Wilfrid of Ripon– who, to be honest, lends himself to unsympathetic depictions).

Conflict between the Roman and Celtic Churches in Britain was inevitable. During its long period of isolation the Celtic Church had developed in complete independence and had diverged considerably from the paths followed by Rome, not merely in the matters of form and ritual, but more fundamentally in its whole organization. Rome could not readily brook the continued existence of what it regarded as schismatic ways and still less could it contemplate so large a Christian community which showed remarkable missionary zeal should not recognize the pope as its spiritual head. But on the other side, the Celtic Church, as some of its members realized, could not afford to ignore the benefits which Rome, representing by far the greater part of Christendom, had to offer.²

The “presenting issue” for the conflict (as G.P.s call it) was the problem of Easter: which, as the date of Easter this year has shown us, has always been a problem. The problem comes from trying to map a festival whose origins are in the Jewish, lunar, calendar, onto the Roman, solar, calendar. It is possible to fix the date by astronomical observation, as is done today for the Islamic festivals of Ramadan and Eid, or it is possible to fix the date by mathematical calculations, based on tables of astronomical observations. These tables, depending on their accuracy, could throw up repeating cycles of 8, 11, 19 and 84 years. It was the later which was used in the native, so-called, Celtic Church of these isles, brought back to Britain by Bishops who had attended the Council of Arles in ad 314. Britain, being Britain even then, was content with this system of calculating Easter, even when new, more accurate tables, based on a 19 year cycle had been produced. The new system was adopted by the Roman church, and Pope Leo the Great (440– 461) sent out an edict to that effect– which didn’t reach Britain.

You might not think this was a problem; couldn’t the various different churches live and let live. Communication was that much slower and more difficult in those days, and if Christianity can cope with Western Easter falling on 23 March 2008 and Orthodox Easter falling on 27 April 2008, couldn’t the ancient church cope with two different dates? Probably the Churches could’ve— until it affected the smooth running of the household of a King.

King Oswiu of Northumbria, as a good Celtic Christian, kept Easter according to the Celtic 84 year cycles. His wife, Eanflæd, was the daughter of the King of Kent, and so followed the Kentish (Roman) cycle of 19 years. As Bede put it:

It is said that the confusion in those days was such that Easter was sometimes kept twice in one year, so that when the King had finished Lent and was keeping Easter,, the Queen and her attendants were still fasting and keeping Palm Sunday.³

If it interfered with the smooth running of the court, it clearly wasn’t good enough. Something had to be done. The Church reacted in the way the Church always reacts to matters of conflict and disagreement: it called a Synod.

This synod was to be held in the double monastery of Streanoeshalch, the Bay of the Beacon. A double monastery was one in which men and women lived and prayed together. The leader of the monastery was Abbess Hilda (“a woman devoted to God”), and Streanoeshalch is better know today as Whitby.

King Oswiu presided at the Synod, and Colman, bishop of Northumbria was to speak for the Celtic tradition. On the Roman side, Queen Eanflæd sent her chaplain Romanus, but the main speaker was to be Agilbert, second Bishop of Dorchester (the West Saxons). But Agilbert was a Frank (later to be Bishop of Paris) and he couldn’t make himself understood in English, so he asked Wilfrid, the abbot of Ripon, to speak in his place.
Wilfrid had been born to a prominent Northumbrian family, and, while a boy at Oswy’s court, had caught the Queen’s eye, and she became his patron. She sent him to Canterbury, to the Kentish court, and he eventually travelled to Rome. When he returned to England, Enflæd’s son, Alchfrith expelled the Scottish monks from their monastery at Ripon and presented it to Wilfrid. He was, in short, a young man in a hurry.
The details of the debate needn’t detain us. The clinching argument for Oswiu, according to Bede, came when Wilfrid asserted the following:

although your Fathers were holy men, do you imagine that they, a few men in a corner of a remote island, are to be preferred before the universal Church of Christ throughout the world?

When, Wilfrid asked, did Jesus say to Columba, as He had said to Peter:

… I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven⁴

Is this true? Oswiu asked Bishop Colman. Did Jesus never say similar words to Columba? Colman admitted that was so.

Then, I tell you [Oswiu decided], Peter is the guardian of the gates of heaven, and I shall not contradict him. I shall obey his commands in everything to the best of my knowledge and ability; otherwise, when I come to the gates of heaven, there may be no one to open them, because he who holds the keys has turned away.⁵

The Northumbrian kingdom adopted the Roman tonsure and the Roman calculations for Easter, but more importantly, the Church in Northumbria acknowledged the primacy of the wider Church. Christianity was not to be treated as “something invented here”, but as something whose fullest truth and expression was to be found in the widest, universal Church. The Church in England was no longer to limit itself to the English way of doing things.

1. If you need some historical context for these dates, then look at Ed Friedlander’s Anglican Timeline, published by the Anglican Society of St Justus, which is useful, eccentric and has an unacknowledged debt to David Edwards’s Christian England (London : Fount, 1989; combined ed. with new prefaces; originally published in 3 vols 1981, 1983, 1984). [↩]
2. Peter Hunter Blair, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England (1977), p. 129. [↩]
3. Bede, A History of the English Church and People, III.25 [↩]
4. Matthew 16:18-19 [↩]
5. Bede, A History of the English Church and People, III.25 [↩]