The Mission on Foot

Bede’s Aidan converts Northumbria by walking it. He travelled on foot rather than on horseback so that he could meet ordinary people on the road and stop to speak with each one; he taught as he went; he gave away to the poor whatever the king and the rich gave him, and used money to ransom those who had been unjustly enslaved, some of whom he then educated for the priesthood; and he formed a school of English boys to provide the new church with a native clergy. This file sets out Aidan’s missionary method as Bede describes it — the deliberate poverty and itinerancy, the ransoming of captives, and the founding of a native English ministry.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; apostle of Northumbria)

Going on Foot

The single most characteristic detail of Bede’s Aidan is that he went about on foot. Bede states it as a matter of principle: Aidan “was accustomed to travel everywhere, whether in town or country, not on horseback but on foot, unless compelled by urgent necessity to do otherwise, so that, as he walked along, whenever he saw people whether rich or poor, he might at once approach them and, if they were unbelievers, invite them to embrace the mystery of the faith, or, if they were believers, strengthen them in the faith and stir them up by words and deeds to giving of alms and the performance of good works” (HE III.5; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

This is not incidental colour; it is the heart of the method. Walking kept the bishop at the level of the people. A man on horseback passes; a man on foot can be met, can stop, can fall into conversation with anyone he encounters, rich or poor. The mode of travel embodied the apostolic principle Bede had already credited to Aidan in the III.5 anecdote — the patient, person-by-person feeding of “the milk of gentler doctrine” (see The Sending from Iona). Conversion, on this model, happened not through mass baptisms decreed from the throne but through innumerable small encounters on the road, each adapted to the person met. Bede, who plainly admired this, makes the bishop’s feet a kind of sermon (Ward 1990; Mayr-Harting 1991).

Bede sharpens the point with a later, pointed contrast. In recounting how Aidan once gave away a fine horse that the king had presented to him — handing it, saddle and all, to a beggar who asked alms — he records the king’s mild remonstrance and Aidan’s reply, that the “son of a mare” was not dearer to him than a son of God; the anecdote is set in the reign of Oswine of Deira, but it crystallizes the whole disposition (HE III.14; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The horse Aidan would not ride for his own ease he would give away to relieve a poor man. The going-on-foot and the giving-away-of-the-horse are the same virtue seen twice.

Austerity and the Use of Wealth

Aidan’s personal poverty was the engine of his charity. Bede insists that the bishop kept nothing for himself: “He neither sought nor cared for any worldly possessions, but he rejoiced to hand over at once to the poor whom he met whatever he received from kings or rich men of the world” (HE III.5; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Whatever flowed to him from royal and noble patronage flowed out again immediately to the needy. He kept the discipline of fasting and prayer, and Bede notes that he and his clergy were occupied with reading the Scriptures and learning the psalms wherever they went, so that the journeys themselves were a kind of moving monastery (HE III.5, III.26; Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

Among the uses to which Aidan put the money given him, Bede singles out one that has rightly drawn attention: the ransoming of captives. The bishop, Bede writes, used the gifts he received from the rich “either … for the relief of the poor … or else to redeem such as had been unjustly sold as slaves” (HE III.5; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Some of those he thus redeemed from slavery he afterwards took as his own disciples, educated and instructed them, and in time advanced them to the priesthood (HE III.5; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The ransoming of the enslaved was an established work of mercy in the early Church, rooted in the gospel and the patristic tradition of redeeming captives; in Aidan it became also a recruiting ground for the native ministry, the freed slave becoming the future priest. This is one of the most concrete and humane details in the whole account, and Bede gives it without embellishment, as a settled practice of the bishop.

The School of English Boys

The redeemed captives were part of a larger project: the formation of a native English clergy. The Ionan mission could not depend forever on Irish monks; for the church to take root it had to raise up English priests, men of the people they were to serve. Bede records that Aidan gathered boys and young men to be taught — a school attached to the Lindisfarne community — and formed them for the ministry, and that this native clergy was one of the lasting fruits of his episcopate (HE III.3, III.5, III.26; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Twelve English boys, in particular, are associated by Bede with the early teaching of the Northumbrian church, among whom was the future bishop Eata, later abbot of Melrose and a figure in the next generation of the Lindisfarne line (HE III.26; on the line, see The Line of Bishops).

The significance of this can hardly be overstated. By forming English clergy from English boys — some of them former slaves — Aidan ensured that the conversion would not remain a foreign imposition but would become the work of the Northumbrians themselves. The school at Lindisfarne, continued under his successors, became the seedbed of the men who would carry the mission outward: Chad, Cedd, and the milieu that shaped Cuthbert all stand downstream of it (see The School and the Saints). The going-on-foot converted individuals; the school converted the future.

A Method, Not a Programme

It is worth being clear about the character of the evidence. Everything in this file comes from Bede, chiefly from the obituary-like assessment of Aidan in HE III.5 and the retrospective praise of the Irish community in III.26, supplemented by the horse anecdote in III.14. Bede is presenting Aidan as a model — holding him up, with deliberate reproach, against the worldlier clergy of his own eighth-century day, whose love of comfort and possessions he laments by contrast (HE III.5, III.26; Mayr-Harting 1991; Ward 1990). The portrait is therefore idealized in the precise sense that Bede selects and frames it to teach. But the method it describes — itinerant, ascetic, charitable, and bent on raising a native clergy — is coherent, fits everything else known of the Ionan mission, and is recognizably the practice that actually converted Northumbria. The reach of that mission across the kingdom was real, though its precise geographical extent is not documented [Disputed: Bede presents Aidan's preaching as kingdom-wide but gives few specific locations; the detailed extent of Aidan's personal itineration, as opposed to that of his clergy and successors, cannot be mapped from the sources and is reconstructed in general terms (Mayr-Harting 1991)]. What can be said with confidence is what Bede says: that the apostle of Northumbria was a man who walked.

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People III.3, III.5, III.14, III.26. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Travelling on foot and teaching all he met, giving away what he received, ransoming slaves and educating them for the priesthood, III.5; the gift-horse given to a beggar, III.14; the school and the English clergy, including Eata, III.26.)
Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Judith McClure and Roger Collins. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (Aidan’s method; the formation of a native clergy; Bede’s contrast with his own day.)
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990. (Bede’s idealized portrait of Aidan as a model for the clergy.)