The British Church Before Augustine

Long before the monk Augustine landed in Kent in 597, the Britons of the west — among them the church of which David of Wales was an ornament — possessed an organised, episcopal Christianity continuous with that of Roman Britain. This church kept the catholic faith of the wider Church but reckoned Easter by an older cycle, wore a distinctive tonsure, and observed a handful of regional usages; when Augustine summoned its bishops to conform and to join in evangelising the English, they refused. This file sets out what the British church was, what its peculiarities actually amounted to, why modern scholarship is wary of the label “Celtic Christianity,” and how the clash with Canterbury came about — insisting throughout that the differences were customs and usages, not a doctrinal schism.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; patron of Wales)

A Church Inherited from Roman Britain

The Christianity of the Britons did not begin with the saints of David’s generation; it was inherited. Roman Britain had been a Christian province before the legions withdrew: three British bishops — of London, York, and a third see usually read as Lincoln or Colchester — attended the Council of Arles in 314, and British bishops are recorded as present, however thinly, at the councils of the fourth century (Charles-Edwards 2013; Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica I.4 records the tradition of an early conversion). When Roman administration collapsed in the early fifth century and the Anglo-Saxon settlements pushed the British polities westward into what became Wales, Cornwall, and the kingdoms of the north, the church of the Britons was carried with them. It survived not as a fresh foundation but as the continuation, under new political conditions, of the provincial church of late Roman Britain (Wendy Davies, Wales in the Early Middle Ages, 1982; Charles-Edwards 2013).

The most vivid early-fifth-century glimpse of this church is the visit of Germanus of Auxerre. Bede devotes several chapters to Germanus’s mission to Britain — traditionally dated 429 — to combat the Pelagian heresy, which had taken root among the Britons; he recounts the public disputation in which the Gaulish bishops bested the Pelagians, and the so-called “Alleluia victory,” a battle won by baptised Britons raising the Easter cry against a Pictish and Saxon force (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica I.17–21; trans. Colgrave & Mynors, Oxford 1969). Whatever the embroidery in the telling, the episode shows a British church already enmeshed in the controversies of the wider Latin West, receiving bishops from Gaul, and capable of being recalled to orthodoxy from within the common life of the Church — not an isolated sect but a province of the one body. (The Pelagian question and its long afterlife in the David tradition are treated in The Synod of Victory and the Pelagian Question.)

It is into this inherited church that the Welsh saints of the late fifth and sixth centuries — Dewi (David), Teilo, Padarn, Illtud, and the rest — are to be placed. They were not founders of a new Christianity but reformers and monastic organisers within an old one (see The Age of the Welsh Saints). The “age of the saints” is the period in which this Romano-British church became thoroughly monastic in its leadership, its great houses — Mynyw (St Davids), Llanilltud, Llancarfan — functioning as centres of learning, discipline, and pastoral authority.

The Distinctive Usages

When later writers, and especially Bede, speak of the differences between the British church and the Roman mission, three matters recur: the dating of Easter, the form of the tonsure, and the manner of administering baptism. It is essential to weigh exactly what each amounted to, because the rhetoric of the seventh-century sources can make a quarrel over usages sound like a quarrel over the faith.

The Easter Computation

The largest and most consequential difference concerned the computus — the calculation of the date of Easter. All parties agreed on the principles laid down at Nicaea: Easter is the Sunday following the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, and it must not coincide with the Jewish Passover. The disagreement was technical, a matter of which lunar cycle and which tables were used to translate those principles into a calendar (Charles-Edwards 2013; on the underlying question see The Church Calendar).

The Britons and the Irish used an 84-year cycle (the latercus), an older reckoning that had once been current in the West and that they had preserved from late-antique Britain. By the seventh century the rest of the Latin West had moved to the Alexandrian 19-year cycle as transmitted through Dionysius Exiguus and championed at Rome. Because the two systems used different lunar limits and a different equinox date, they could place Easter on different Sundays in the same year — sometimes a week apart, occasionally more — so that, as Bede complains, the king of Northumbria might be keeping Easter while the queen was still observing Lent (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica III.25; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). This is the dispute that came to a head among the English at the Synod of Whitby in 664, where Northumbria abandoned the older cycle for the Roman one (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica III.25). The point to be held firmly is that this was a calendrical and disciplinary difference, not a difference of doctrine about the Resurrection it celebrated; both sides kept the same feast, by the same Nicene rule, computed differently (Kathleen Hughes, The Church in Early Irish Society, 1966; Charles-Edwards 2013).

The Tonsure

The second difference was the shape of the clerical tonsure. The Roman tonsure shaved the crown of the head, leaving a ring of hair — the “tonsure of St Peter,” as its defenders called it. The British and Irish tonsure shaved the front of the head from ear to ear, leaving the hair to grow behind; polemicists hostile to it dubbed it the “tonsure of Simon Magus” to discredit it (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica V.21, in the letter of Abbot Ceolfrith; Charles-Edwards 2013). The tonsure was a visible badge of allegiance, which is why it loomed large in the disputes out of all proportion to its substance; it carried no doctrinal content whatever, being purely a matter of clerical custom.

Baptism

Bede also alludes, more obscurely, to a difference in the British manner of administering baptism, naming it among the points on which Augustine wished the Britons to conform (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica II.2). He does not specify what the difference was, and scholars have not been able to recover it with confidence: [Disputed: the nature of the British baptismal divergence is unrecoverable from the sources — some scholars conjecture a difference in the rite of confirmation or chrismation, or a single rather than triple immersion, while others suspect Bede repeats a complaint he did not himself understand (Charles-Edwards 2013; Wendy Davies 1982); Bede, *Historia Ecclesiastica* II.2, gives no detail]. Whatever it was, it belonged, like the tonsure and the computus, to the order of usage rather than of dogma.

“Celtic Christianity”: A Category to Handle With Care

It is natural, and very common, to gather these usages under the label “the Celtic Church” and to imagine a separate, romantically independent Christianity of the western fringe, set over against Rome. Modern scholarship has dismantled this picture, and the present account follows it. There was no organised body called “the Celtic Church”; there was no shared “Celtic” rite, no Celtic confession, no inter-Celtic synodal structure binding the Britons, the Irish, the Picts, the Cornish, and the Bretons into one institution distinct from the catholic Church (Kathleen Hughes, “The Celtic Church: Is This a Valid Concept?”, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 1, 1981; Wendy Davies, “The Myth of the Celtic Church,” in The Early Church in Wales and the West, ed. Edwards & Lane, 1992; Charles-Edwards 2013).

What existed was the one pre-Schism Church, present in Celtic-speaking lands, holding the catholic faith and in communion with the wider Church, but observing certain regional customs — exactly as Roman Africa, Spain, and Gaul each had their own usages within the same communion (see The Pre-Schism Church). The “Celtic” features that genuinely cluster in these lands — an intensely monastic organisation of the church, with abbots often outranking bishops in practical authority; a vigorous ascetic and penitential discipline; the peregrinatio, the ascetic exile “for the love of God”; and a distinctive religious art — are matters of emphasis and culture, not of separate doctrine or broken communion (Hughes 1966; Charles-Edwards 2013; on the monastic character see Monasticism, and within this collection The Monastery at Mynyw). To speak, then, of the British church “before Augustine” is to speak of a province of the catholic Church distinguished by its customs, in line with the principle that regional usage is not schism (per the methodology’s treatment of usages within the one pre-Schism Church, METHODOLOGY §4).

This sober view does not deny the differences; it refuses to inflate them. The Britons were orthodox in faith and irregular only in calendar and custom — which is precisely why the seventh-century clash, when it came, could be so bitter without ever becoming a dispute about the creed.

Augustine and the British Bishops, c. 602–604

The collision is narrated by Bede in one of the most famous chapters of his history (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica II.2; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Augustine, the monk whom Pope Gregory the Great had sent from Rome to the English in 597, had established his see at Canterbury and converted King Æthelberht of Kent (the mission and its sender are the subject of the collection on Gregory the Dialogist). Wishing to bring the long-resident British church into conformity, Augustine sought a meeting with its bishops and teachers at a place Bede calls “Augustine’s Oak,” on the border of the Hwicce and the West Saxons.

By Bede’s account Augustine pressed the Britons on three things: to keep Easter at the correct (Roman) time, to administer baptism according to the Roman rite, and to join him in preaching the gospel to the English (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica II.2). The Britons resisted. A second, larger conference was called, to which seven British bishops and many learned men came, having first taken counsel with a wise hermit; he advised them to follow Augustine if he were a man of God, and to test this by whether he rose to greet them humbly when they arrived. Augustine, Bede reports, remained seated, and the Britons took offence; they refused his demands, declaring that they would not abandon their ancient customs nor acknowledge him as archbishop (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica II.2). Augustine is then said to have warned them, prophetically in Bede’s telling, that if they would not have peace with their brethren they would suffer war from their enemies — a warning Bede connects, with evident relish, to the later slaughter of the monks of Bangor by the pagan king Æthelfrith at the battle of Chester (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica II.2).

Two cautions are required in reading this. First, Bede is not a neutral witness: he is a Northumbrian writing a century and a quarter later, deeply committed to the Roman Easter and to the Roman ordering of the church, and openly disapproving of the Britons — whom he faults above all for their refusal to evangelise the pagan English (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica I.22, II.2; Charles-Edwards 2013). His narrative of Augustine’s humility and the Britons’ obstinacy is shaped by that commitment, and the British side of the encounter is lost to us. Second, the refusal itself is intelligible without recourse to mere obstinacy: the British church was an ancient, self-governing body with no reason to accept the jurisdiction of a newly arrived archbishop sent to the very Anglo-Saxons who had dispossessed them, and the demand to evangelise their enemies was, in that light, no small thing to ask (Wendy Davies 1982; Charles-Edwards 2013). The customs at issue, once again, were Easter, baptism, and tonsure — usages, not the faith.

The Slow Conformity

The dispute outlasted Augustine and David alike. The British and Irish churches conformed to the Roman Easter only gradually and at different times: the southern Irish in the 630s, Northumbria at Whitby in 664, Iona not until 716, and the Welsh — the heirs of David’s church — latest of all, by tradition not until 768, under the persuasion of one Elfodd (Elbodugus), bishop of Bangor (Charles-Edwards 2013; the Annales Cambriae note Elfodd’s correction of the Easter reckoning among the Britons). That the conformity took so long, and was achieved peacefully and from within, is itself the strongest evidence for the thesis of this file: what separated the British church from Canterbury was never communion or creed but a tenacious loyalty to inherited custom, surrendered in the end without schism when the case for the common reckoning was finally accepted.

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum). Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Germanus and the Pelagians, the “Alleluia victory,” I.17–21; the British bishops and “Augustine’s Oak,” II.2; Bede’s reproach of the Britons, I.22; the Easter question and Whitby, III.25; the tonsure dispute, V.21.)
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Leo Sherley-Price, rev. R. E. Latham. London: Penguin, 1990. (Accessible translation consulted alongside Colgrave & Mynors.)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. Wales and the Britons, 350–1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (The British church’s Roman inheritance; the computus and the 84-year cycle; the tonsure; the long road to conformity; the Elfodd tradition; critique of “the Celtic Church.”)
Davies, Wendy. Wales in the Early Middle Ages. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982. (The British church as continuation of Romano-British Christianity; the customs and the encounter with Canterbury.)
Davies, Wendy. “The Myth of the Celtic Church.” In The Early Church in Wales and the West, ed. Nancy Edwards and Alan Lane. Oxford: Oxbow, 1992. (The case against a separate “Celtic Church.”)
Hughes, Kathleen. The Church in Early Irish Society. London: Methuen, 1966. (The Easter cycles and tonsure as usages within the one Church.)
Hughes, Kathleen. “The Celtic Church: Is This a Valid Concept?” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 1 (1981): 1–20. (The foundational critique of the category.)
Annales Cambriae and the Welsh annalistic tradition. (The notice of Elfodd/Elbodugus and the Welsh adoption of the Roman Easter, traditionally 768.)