Wessex and the Anglo-Saxon Church

Boniface was born Wynfrith in Wessex around 675, in a church that was itself barely two generations old yet already turning its energy outward. This file establishes the world that produced him: an Anglo-Saxon Christianity formed by the meeting of the Roman and Irish missions and settled at the Synod of Whitby (664), made learned under Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus, and possessed of a distinctive conviction — that the English, recently converted themselves, owed the still-pagan Germanic peoples of the Continent the gift of the faith. The mission of Boniface is unintelligible apart from this church and its outward-facing impulse.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Apostle of the Germans; martyr)

A Church Two Generations Old

When Wynfrith — the boy who would become Boniface — was born in the kingdom of Wessex around the year 675, the Christianity of the Anglo-Saxons was a young thing. The Gregorian mission of Augustine had landed in Kent only in 597, less than eighty years before; the conversion of the several English kingdoms had proceeded unevenly across the seventh century, with relapses into paganism, and Wessex itself had received its first bishop, Birinus, only in the 630s (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 3.7; trans. Sherley-Price 1990). Within living memory of Wynfrith’s elders, the West Saxons had been pagans. This is the first thing to grasp about the church that produced the Apostle of the Germans: it was not an ancient establishment exporting a settled tradition but a recent convert, close enough to its own pagan past to feel the missionary task as something owed.

Willibald, Boniface’s near-contemporary biographer, places his birth and upbringing in this Wessex world without giving a precise date or, securely, a place; the later tradition associated him with Crediton in Devon, but the Vita itself does not name it, and the identification is a later and uncertain one (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 1; trans. Talbot 1954; on the thinness of the biographical data, Clay 2010). His birth-year is itself an estimate: [Disputed: Willibald gives no date; the conventional c. 675 is reconstructed backward from the chronology of his career, and scholars variously propose dates between c. 672 and c. 680 (see Wood 2001; Clay 2010)]. What the Vita does report is that the child, against the wishes of his father, was drawn from an early age to the monastic life, and that after an illness convinced his father to relent he was given over to a monastery to be raised (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 1; Talbot 1954).

The Roman and Irish Inheritance

The church into which Wynfrith was given for formation had been shaped by the convergence — and the collision — of two distinct missionary streams. From the south came the Roman mission of Augustine and his successors, planted at Canterbury and looking to the see of Rome for its usages, its calendar, and its authority. From the north came the Irish mission, carried from Iona to Lindisfarne by Aidan and his successors, ascetic, monastic, and following the distinctive Irish reckoning of Easter and form of the tonsure (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 3.3–5, 3.25; Sherley-Price 1990). For a generation the two coexisted and competed, and in Northumbria the divergence over the date of Pascha became acute enough that king and court might keep the feast on different Sundays.

The matter was settled at the Synod of Whitby in 664, where King Oswiu of Northumbria, hearing the cases for the Roman and the Irish reckonings, decided for Rome — on the famous ground, as Bede reports it, that he would not set himself against the keeper of the keys (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 3.25; Sherley-Price 1990; on Whitby and its long reach, see St. Hilda of Whitby, in whose monastery the synod was held). Whitby did not abolish the Irish inheritance — the ascetic and monastic temper of the northern church endured — but it aligned the Anglo-Saxon church decisively with Roman order and Roman communion. That alignment is the deep background to Boniface’s own instinctive turn to Rome: he was a son of a church that had, within memory, chosen Rome.

Theodore and a Learned Church

The other decisive factor was the archiepiscopate of Theodore of Tarsus, a Greek-speaking monk from Cilicia in Asia Minor, sent to Canterbury by the pope in 668 and serving until 690. Theodore, together with the African abbot Hadrian, established at Canterbury a school of remarkable learning, teaching not only Scripture and the computus but Greek, Latin metrics, law, and the liberal arts, and he reorganized the English church into a coherent provincial structure under metropolitan authority (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 4.1–2; Sherley-Price 1990; Levison 1946). The result, by the time Wynfrith was a young monk, was that the Anglo-Saxon church had become one of the most learned in the Latin West — a place where a gifted student could acquire a command of grammar, computus, and Scripture that few on the Continent could match (Levison 1946; Wood 2001). Boniface’s own later work as a grammarian, and the high Latinity of his correspondence, are fruits of this Theodoran school-culture transmitted to Wessex.

The Outward Impulse

What made this young, learned, Roman-aligned church distinctive was its decision to look outward. By the late seventh century English churchmen had begun to conceive a special responsibility for the conversion of the continental Germanic peoples — the Frisians, the Old Saxons, the Hessians, the Thuringians — peoples to whom the Anglo-Saxons felt themselves ethnically and linguistically kin. Bede records the conviction, attributed to the missionary Ecgberht and others, that the English ought to evangelize “those peoples from whom they themselves had taken their origin” (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 5.9; Sherley-Price 1990). This was not an abstract piety but a programme: the first to act on it on a large scale was Willibrord, a Northumbrian monk who crossed to Frisia in 690, was consecrated archbishop of the Frisians by the pope, and established the see of Utrecht (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 5.10–11; Wood 2001).

Willibrord matters for Boniface in three ways. He proved the English mission to the Continent was possible; he established the Roman-authorized pattern — go to Frisia, seek papal consecration — that Boniface would follow and extend; and he became, briefly, Boniface’s own superior in the field, before their paths diverged (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 5; Talbot 1954; on which see The First Frisian Attempt). When Wynfrith first crossed to Frisia in 716, he was joining a missionary enterprise already a generation old, with its own martyrs, its own setbacks, and its own settled conviction that the English church owed the continental Saxons the faith.

The Political Frame

The conversion of the continental Germans could not be separated from Frankish power. Frisia in particular was a contested frontier between the expanding Frankish realm — governed in this period not by the fading Merovingian kings but by the Carolingian mayors of the palace, Pippin II and then Charles Martel — and the independent pagan Frisians under their duke Radbod (Wood 2001; Palmer 2009). Christian mission advanced where Frankish arms advanced and retreated where they retreated; Willibrord’s work in Frisia prospered under Pippin II’s protection and was thrown back when Radbod regained the upper hand. Boniface would inherit this entanglement of cross and sword: his own mission would depend throughout on the protection of Charles Martel and his sons, a dependence that the letters record with unusual frankness (Boniface to Bishop Daniel of Winchester, on the impossibility of governing the church without the prince’s protection; Tangl 63 / Emerton, Letter 63; trans. Emerton 1940). The Anglo-Saxon church gave Boniface his faith, his learning, and his vocation; the Frankish state would give him — at a price — his field.

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Leo Sherley-Price, rev. R. E. Latham. London: Penguin, 1990. (Birinus and Wessex at 3.7; Whitby at 3.25; Theodore and Hadrian at 4.1–2; the outward impulse at 5.9; Willibrord at 5.10–11.)
Willibald. The Life of Saint Boniface (Vita Bonifatii). Trans. C. H. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954. (Wynfrith’s childhood and entry into monastic life at ch. 1; Willibrord at ch. 5.)
The Letters of Saint Boniface. Trans. Ephraim Emerton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940. (Boniface on the necessity of Frankish protection, Letter 63.)
Levison, Wilhelm. England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946. (The Theodoran school; the English mission to the Continent.)
Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (Willibrord, the Frisian frontier, the Frankish frame.)
Clay, John-Henry. In the Shadow of Death: Saint Boniface and the Conversion of Hessia, 721–54. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. (The thinness of the biographical data; the birth-date estimate.)
Palmer, James T. Anglo-Saxons in a Frankish World, 690–900. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. (The political frame of the Frisian mission.)