Christianity in Roman Britain

How the faith reached the island at the edge of the Roman world: unknown in its beginnings, glimpsed rhetorically in Tertullian (c. 200) and Origen (c. 240), institutionally visible when three British bishops subscribed at the Council of Arles in 314, and materially attested by the fourth century in the Water Newton silver, the Lullingstone house-church, and the Hinton St Mary mosaic. Alban’s martyrdom — whenever it occurred — presupposes this church: organized enough to have clergy worth hunting, small enough to leave almost no other trace.

Tradition: Western (pre-Schism, Roman Britain)

An Arrival Without a Record

No source records how Christianity first came to Britain. The province was conquered from AD 43; its garrison, administrators, and traders moved constantly along the roads and sea-lanes that bound it to Gaul and the Rhineland, and the reasonable modern consensus is that the faith arrived the same way most eastern cults did — anonymously, with soldiers, merchants, and migrants, at some point in the second century (Thomas, Christianity in Roman Britain to AD 500, London: Batsford, 1981, chs. 2–3; Petts, Christianity in Roman Britain, Stroud: Tempus, 2003). The later legends that gave the island an apostolic or royal conversion are exactly that — later legends, and this collection flags them at the outset:

  • Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury is a high medieval development: the association of Joseph with Glastonbury first appears in interpolations to William of Malmesbury’s De antiquitate Glastonie ecclesie and in thirteenth-century Grail romance, a millennium and more after the event it claims [Apocryphal: no ancient source connects Joseph, or any apostolic figure, with Britain; the Glastonbury link is a 12th–13th-century accretion — see Thomas 1981, ch. 2, on the “legendary dossier”].
  • King Lucius, the British king said to have written to Pope Eleutherius (c. 175–189) asking to be made a Christian, reaches Bede (Historia ecclesiastica I.4) from the Liber Pontificalis. Adolf von Harnack proposed in 1904 that the notice originated as a scribal confusion with Lucius Aelius Abgar of Edessa, whose citadel was called Birtha — “Britio” misread as “Britannio” — and, whatever the merits of that specific solution, the story is universally treated as unhistorical for Britain [Apocryphal: the Lucius conversion is a literary migration into British history via the Liber Pontificalis and Bede, first attached to Britain centuries after the alleged fact; Harnack, “Der Brief des britischen Königs Lucius an den Papst Eleutherus,” Sitzungsberichte der königlich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1904); cf. Thomas 1981, ch. 2].

What remains, once legend is set aside, is a small dossier of genuine notices — and it begins around the year 200.

Tertullian and Origen

The earliest surviving literary references to British Christianity are rhetorical flourishes in two Fathers, valuable precisely because they are incidental. Tertullian, writing at Carthage around 197–208, lists among the peoples reached by Christ “the haunts of the Britons, inaccessible to the Romans but subject to Christ” — Britannorum inaccessa Romanis loca, Christo vero subdita (Tertullian, Adversus Iudaeos 7.4). The passage is apologetic hyperbole in form — Tertullian is piling up nations to prove the universality of the Gospel — but it would have no force at all if Christians in Britain were unheard of; it is generally taken as evidence that by about 200 the faith was known to exist in the island, plausibly even beyond the frontier (Thomas 1981, ch. 3; Frend, “The Christianization of Roman Britain,” in M. W. Barley and R. P. C. Hanson, eds., Christianity in Britain, 300–700, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1968).

A generation later Origen, in a homily on Ezekiel delivered in the late 230s or early 240s, asks: “For when, before the coming of Christ, did the land of Britain agree in the worship of one God?” (Origen, Homiliae in Ezechielem 4.1). Again the form is rhetorical — Britain stands for the ends of the earth — and again the assumption behind the rhetoric is the datum: an eastern Christian teacher could take it for granted, by c. 240, that Britain had Christians (Thomas 1981, ch. 3). Neither author names a British church, bishop, or martyr; both attest a presence. If Alban died under Septimius Severus c. 209, as one strand of modern scholarship argues (see The Scholarly Positions), his church would be precisely the church Tertullian had just heard of.

Arles, 314: The Institutional Proof

The decisive documentary evidence comes early in the fourth century. In 314 Constantine summoned a council of Western bishops to Arles to settle the Donatist dispute, and the surviving subscription lists include a British delegation: Eborius, bishop of the city of York (civitas Eboracensis), Restitutus, bishop of the city of London, and Adelphius, whose see is given in the corrupt form civitas Colonia Londensium — variously emended by scholars to Lincoln (Lindum) or Colchester (Camulodunum) — together with a priest, Sacerdos, and a deacon, Arminius (Concilium Arelatense, subscription list, ed. C. Munier, Concilia Galliae a. 314 – a. 506, CCSL 148, Turnhout: Brepols, 1963; discussion in Thomas 1981, ch. 8) [Disputed: the third British see is unrecoverable from the manuscripts — Lincoln and Colchester are the usual candidates, and no emendation commands consensus].

The importance of this list can hardly be overstated. One year after the Edict of Milan, Britain possessed a territorial episcopate organized on the standard civic pattern — bishops seated in the provincial capitals — which cannot have been created overnight. An episcopally ordered British church must reach back well into the third century, the very period in which the persecutions of Decius and Valerian, and then of Diocletian, fell on the empire’s Christians (Frend 1968; Thomas 1981, ch. 8). British bishops appear again at the councils of Serdica (343) and Ariminum (359), where Sulpicius Severus notes that three British bishops were poor enough to accept the emperor’s travel allowance (Sulpicius Severus, Chronica II.41; Thomas 1981, ch. 8) — a church established, but not rich.

The Archaeology: Water Newton, Lullingstone, Hinton St Mary

The material record catches up with the texts in the fourth century, and three finds dominate it.

The Water Newton hoard. In February 1975 a ploughed field within the small Roman town of Durobrivae (Water Newton, Cambridgeshire) yielded twenty-seven silver objects and a gold disc: cups, bowls, flagons, strainers, and votive plaques, many marked with the chi-rho and several inscribed. One cup carries the dedication sanctum altare tuum Domine subnixus honoro — “I, [Publianus], prostrate, honour your holy altar, O Lord” (K. S. Painter, The Water Newton Early Christian Silver, London: British Museum, 1977). Dated on style and epigraphy to the fourth century, and possibly earlier within it, the hoard is generally described as the earliest group of Christian liturgical silver to survive from anywhere in the Roman Empire — eucharistic plate from a market town in the Nene valley (Painter 1977; Thomas 1981, ch. 5). Its votive leaf-plaques, a form otherwise pagan, show a Christianity assimilating provincial habits of devotion.

Lullingstone. At the Lullingstone villa in Kent, excavated by G. W. Meates, a suite of rooms was converted in the later fourth century into what is interpreted as a Christian house-church: the collapsed wall-plaster, painstakingly reconstructed, carried large chi-rho monograms within wreaths and a frieze of six standing figures with arms outstretched in the ancient posture of prayer (orantes) (G. W. Meates, The Roman Villa at Lullingstone, Kent, vol. 1, Maidstone: Kent Archaeological Society, 1979; the paintings are in the British Museum). It is the clearest physical evidence of Christian worship in a Romano-British domestic setting.

Hinton St Mary. A fourth-century mosaic floor from Hinton St Mary, Dorset, now in the British Museum, sets a clean-shaven male bust in front of a chi-rho — widely, though not unanimously, read as the earliest surviving portrait of Christ from Britain, and among the earliest anywhere (Thomas 1981, ch. 5; Petts 2003) [Disputed: the identification of the bust as Christ is the majority reading but has been questioned; the chi-rho, at minimum, marks the household’s Christianity].

To these may be added church-like buildings (the small apsidal structure at Silchester is the most discussed candidate), Christian objects and intaglios, cemeteries with oriented, unfurnished burials, and lead tanks marked with the chi-rho, possibly baptismal (Thomas 1981, chs. 5, 9; Petts 2003). None of it is earlier than the fourth century with certainty; all of it shows that when the persecutions ended, Britain’s Christianity surfaced as an established, propertied, provincially rooted church.

A Church Capable of a Martyr

For this collection the point of the dossier is cumulative. Behind the Arles bishops of 314 stands a third-century church; behind Origen’s rhetoric of c. 240 and Tertullian’s of c. 200 stands a second-century arrival. At any point from the Severan period onward, Britain could contain what the Alban narrative requires: a hunted cleric, a sympathetic pagan householder, a magistrate enforcing an imperial order against Christians (see The Priest and the Cloak). And Britain’s martyr-list, as the sixth-century Gildas already knew it, was short and specific: “St Alban of Verulamium, Aaron and Julius, citizens of the City of the Legions, and the others of both sexes” (Gildas, De excidio Britanniae 10, trans. Winterbottom). A small church, thinly documented, with a small and precious roll of martyrs — that is the historical soil of everything that follows.

Victricius, bishop of Rouen, visited Britain about 396 on church business and shortly afterwards preached De laude sanctorum, his sermon on the glory of relics; he names no British martyr, but his journey shows the British church of the late fourth century in living communion with a Gaul then ablaze with the cult of the saints (Victricius of Rouen, De laude sanctorum; Thomas 1981, ch. 4). Within a generation, that Gallic cult of the martyrs would come to Alban’s own grave, in the person of Germanus of Auxerre (see The Visit of Germanus).

See Also

References

  • Tertullian. Adversus Iudaeos 7.4. (Britannorum inaccessa Romanis loca, Christo vero subdita; written at Carthage c. 197–208.)
  • Origen. Homiliae in Ezechielem 4.1. (The rhetorical question about Britain’s turn to the one God, late 230s–240s.)
  • Bede. Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum I.4, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). (The King Lucius notice, from the Liber Pontificalis.)
  • Harnack, Adolf von. “Der Brief des britischen Königs Lucius an den Papst Eleutherus.” Sitzungsberichte der königlich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1904). (The Britio/Britannio thesis on the Lucius legend.)
  • Munier, C. (ed.). Concilia Galliae a. 314 – a. 506. CCSL 148. Turnhout: Brepols, 1963. (The Arles 314 subscriptions: Eborius, Restitutus, Adelphius, Sacerdos, Arminius.)
  • Sulpicius Severus. Chronica II.41. (The poor British bishops at Ariminum, 359.)
  • Gildas. De excidio Britanniae 10, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom, Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Works (Chichester: Phillimore, 1978).
  • Painter, K. S. The Water Newton Early Christian Silver. London: British Museum Publications, 1977.
  • Meates, G. W. The Roman Villa at Lullingstone, Kent, vol. 1. Maidstone: Kent Archaeological Society, 1979.
  • Thomas, Charles. Christianity in Roman Britain to AD 500. London: Batsford, 1981.
  • Petts, David. Christianity in Roman Britain. Stroud: Tempus, 2003.
  • Frend, W. H. C. “The Christianization of Roman Britain.” In M. W. Barley and R. P. C. Hanson (eds.), Christianity in Britain, 300–700. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1968.
  • Victricius of Rouen. De laude sanctorum (c. 396).